THROUGH THE KEYHOLE Strange, this obsession with doors. Captive doors. Execution-yard doors. The doors of schoolhouses. Homes. Bathhouse doors. I’ll return home with a full roll of pictures: green, red, blue sometimes black or brown. Never photos of people entering or leaving. Never faces, dark boots, pale hands. Just the solid reminder that something waits behind. (If you catch the right light, you can almost see it through the keyhole.) BLUE SALT At eleven, my mother swam in an outdoor pool in Arbroath. She had come for grieving, but instead found tight bands of blue held above her head, broom surrounding the water. They stayed in a caravan, avoiding the seaport where her mother had grown up, where her grandmother had died while they were hovering over the Atlantic. Landing, her mother cried, sagging against their broken suitcases, and my mother held her arm. Felt sorrow most in the soft skin there. They spent days in Broughty Ferry, listening to the cry of gulls, and peering in store windows; or Carnoustie where they ate at tiny fish shops where my mother learned the texture of gills. Her mother left with only a rose-gold wedding band, a few porcelain figurines: dogs, women in fancy dress, lambs. And my mother took with her the memory of water, smoked fish on her tongue. FIRA CATS The low slink of a cat beneath an outdoor table. They are drawn to our plates of fish, skeleton intact and the low light covering Fira. Torches blaze around the perimeter, as if feral cats might be turned feaful. Fear is only for the tame. Here, the spines of cats are more apparent than their coats. Mangy. Matted. They move between tables in hope, perhaps aware of the empathy in travellers who witness ancient shipwrecks. This morning we watched a man pretend to drown in an outdoor pool. Feigned distress, his gurgled English broken with Dutch, as he mocked those swallowed by the Aegean. Small felines sunk in boats heavy with cargo. Fear only reaching them as they first learned the taste of salt the thick cut of it through fur.