ALT STATIC NARRATIVE: LAKE MARION PHOTOGRAPH, LATE SUMMER. My mother lifts her body clear of its reflection, hoists herself into the damp air of early morning. The dock smells of wet leaves, driftwood, rotted fish. At the lawn’s edge my father balances me on the crook of his arm. She watches his steps blur across the grass as he walks toward her, watches her son sway under the spun light that falls from the pine needles. Beads of lake water graze her shoulder blades, trace the scar on her stomach, where my sister was lifted into the world. Three months after her death the child drifts in my mother’s silence as though still waiting to be born.

ALT Now my mother leans over the dock’s edge, searches her own reflection for a trace of her daughter. It is my uncle, stone drunk, who steadies the camera. Yet somehow he, too, is drawn into the scene, the way he focuses on the distance diminished neither by my father’s deliberate steps nor my mother’s glances toward her son. Pine branches sift the light into warm panes of color, and my father steps through them as he approaches the dock. But in the stilled moment of the photograph, my mother stands in the light-stricken center of his vision and, under the shadow their daughter’s absence has cast on the morning, remains distant, alone, unreachable forever. Morri Creech