by Jodi Cressman
We are Looking at Photographs of Todd Domboski, Centralia, Pennsylvania, Valentine’s Day, 1981
We see Todd in his grandmother’s backyard, awkward, upright, like the column of steam that he was viewing up close when the ground gaped and he slid into the shaft where a mine fire was smoldering miles beneath his sneakers, cycling in air, his hands clinging to a root of a tree, maybe Hickory or birch. By the measure of a watch, it was one minute of danger, that boy dangling in a hole before his cousin wrapped two hands around his forearm and uprooted him to safety.
We first see this photograph of Todd behind the newscaster’s left shoulder, a close-up. We slide our eyes down the granite of Todd’s face, his home-cut bangs, his eyes narrowed and serious, looking not over his shoulder to the sinkhole, but into the dark tube of the camera lens, as if, as a matter of fact more than fear, he was falling into something else now, something new.
We see the picture again, for longer, in the Coal Mountain News or the L.A. Times, depending, and when we hold the paper up close, we think we detect, just past the smell of ink, the stench of sulfur on Todd’s jeans, we think we can see, reflected in the glass of his eye, the future of our own falling.
We scroll to this picture, of Todd Domboski, now on the websites, the ones that tell us how to find Centralia, unincorporated by 2020, largely vanished, now that we have the time to see nothing, now that we want to seek this nothing out, to stand where Todd had stood, to be anywhere else but where we are, the neighbors standing in their lawns at six and banging pans, thanking first responders, who live and work elsewhere, remembering the sound of noise.
We see Todd, awkward and upright, this same photograph in the Altoona Mirror, February 9, 2022, now printed in the obituaries. At Todd’s request, there will be no viewing.
Author Jodi Cressman is Professor of English at Dominican University, just outside of Chicago, where she teaches literature and writing. Her creative work can be found on Terrain.org and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.
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