In Her House

• Finley Hook, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2022

In her house she keeps one-hundred-and-twenty-seven photo albums captive. She keeps history books with glossy photo pages. She keeps children's picture books. She keeps paintings on her wall. She likes to write on her pictures.

She’s seventy-three. The state of her eyesight, dim and conular, is conducive only to studying photographs. This suits her well. At day she sits on the sofa and flits through her collection, writing captions on the back of each photo when the necessary information comes to her. She keeps the albums that she’s working on stacked on a table next to her, and replaces them when she’s done.

Some of them are old like her, and haven’t moved for years. The tops of their spines are frayed, and some of them are stained with a diseased yellow. In these albums the pages make little creaks when you turn them, like they’re shrieking at the sunlight.

On the back of each photo she writes:

Name, date, place.
Event, significance.
S.T.

Her handwriting is small and guilty.

When she removes the palm-sized photographs from their plastic sleeving her hands tremble. She is careful so as not to wake their inhabitants. She writes softly on their backs, lovingly. You worked for the council. You had a horse. You are dead, and at my mercy. Hush, hush.

She finishes an album. Each image is now classified, recorded, and stored. When she opens the drawers to get another they groan like old photos, and like her knees do when they bend. Books of photographs lay stacked side-by-side, and she can smell their morbid musk. After a while she begins to feel dizzy. She sits back down.

This photo album is unspecific. It has photos of cats and dogs, houses and gumtrees, communal gatherings and shadow-smothered lakes. She’s not sure where she got it, but it reminds her of smells and sunburns and lost words.

In this album there is an old portrait photo, an oval of person. At its edges, the card bearing the photo of the man decays and his face bleeds into oblivion. He’s looking thoughtfully at something out of the frame. She thinks that he’s thinking of his photographer, and of his dog rotting gently in its grave.

When she turns the photo over she does not write:

Edward Kelly, 10.11.1880, Wintle’s Hotel.
Kelly’s capture; his penultimate day.
S.T.

She does not know these details.

She writes:

Samuel Thorne, 19.11.1902, Benham Park.
His thirtieth year; the day the dog died.
S.T.

She knows these.

When she turns the pages of her photo albums and hears their crying crinkle she feels the information rush to her fingers. Sometimes she hears words in these sounds, but she can never really be sure.

There’s an album with pictures of her somewhere in the tower on the table. As a baby; with her dead and buried dog; by the lake.

She probably won’t get to it – the pile only grows, and her breath is but a shallow, creaking uptake of air – but she often finds herself scattered across other photos like ashes.