Seven refusals. Six are small and bureaucratic — cards, guest books, petitions. The seventh is a cast on a sleeping child's arm, refused out of deference and made permanent by the child falling asleep.
The last seven things I refused to sign 1. A birthday card from the office. I had not worked there long enough to have an opinion about the recipient. 2. The guest book at the funeral. I had arrived late and did not want the date stamp to record that. 3. A petition about a fence on a street I no longer lived on. 4. The receipt for a delivery that was not for me. The driver had already turned to leave. 5. A clipboard held out by someone whose clipboard it was not. 6. The back of a photograph someone wanted me to keep, in case I forgot who was in it. 7. A cast, the white kind, on an eight-year-old's arm, when she offered the black marker first to me and I said let the other kids go first and by the time they were done she had fallen asleep.
Read the seven items. The seventh does not behave like the first six.
Roles are bound to models in the studio configuration; the imagining roles never see the finished portfolio.