Fragments from "Vacancies"

The reflections have influenced my writing (as do the photos)...here's a fragment from my novel Vacancies:

 
There was a photo I could not stop dreaming about. It was a fleeting image of my parents, a reflection of them in an unidentifiable window. Momma and Daddy were standing next to one another and Momma has the camera in her hands, held up to her face, as she is the one taking the photograph. The metal body of the camera obscured the top half of her face, but her mouth was open in a laughing smile. Daddy pulled her tight into his grip, his right arm around her waist so that she was slightly off balance. He was turned to face her and in the second she snapped the shutter, Daddy must have kissed her cheek.

I can see his smile too, half his face turned away. I cannot resist this image. It is not a photo of my parents, but a photo of an image of them. Who they might have been, the perfect them. The essential moment of spontaneous sweetness and light. Here it was; the closest one could come to a perfect moment. A slice of white glare surrounds them. There is sun, their images are pale and they are happy. I wonder about the image of an image; how as soon as the shutter opened and closed, they walked on. How that image of a split second of their lives together moved on too. The photo brought me joy when I looked at it, and then in the same breathing out of that instant, I felt deep sadness for what might have been.

This was a picture I would not put back in to Daddy’s hidden stash. I slid it in to the wooden box Gabriel had given me for Christmas one year, beneath old greeting cards and ribbons from flowers long since dead.  Downstairs I heard the door slam and my father’s heavy footsteps echoed in the front hall. He never took his boots off when he first came in and I knew I’d hear about it later from Vi. I laid down on my comforter and fell asleep, exhausted suddenly, wanting to stay wrapped in the image of my parents holding one another.