I was eighteen when my grandfather gave me the vintage 1974 Leica M4 he bought the year I
was born. I hardly took shots with it; I was still afraid of everything then, of breaking that
precious hardware my grandfather spent so much money on. Afraid of losing it to the St.
Bernard-faced thief skulking around the apartments. So I hid it: a witch storing up Hansel. That
afternoon, I slogged home from the beach after the hardest breakup of my life, believing—as I
heated the oven for pizza—that this separation was the most savage of all losses. I wanted to
eat and scream. Seven minutes of heat baked my fattened Hansel: the M4’s innards, a livened
roux. Muscles, tendons splayed open like a sloughed heart. I plucked the M4 from its catacomb
and became violently ill. I was sick for weeks, stomach lurching when I would near the kitchen,
throat clogged with all the things you feel when your life is ravaged, when the only thing you
treasured, the only thing you staked your life on, that one thing, was gone. I lost 25 pounds. I
lost an internship at The Institute for Marine Mammal Studies. I could no longer tell which of the
ruined things I was: the witch, the thief, the fattened sacrifice, the heart, or its petrified inner
workings.