She wakes thinking of him. Rolling over to the unused half of the bed, she remembers how fast it came, the surreal shock of it, and she lets herself wonder what he must have experienced, drawing closer to the hugeness.

In that last year he suddenly took more photographs of her than ever before. It was like he had some deep sense of a big thing coming. She sees that now, now that she’s able to bear looking back, and she wonders. Their third year of marriage and the film of his life was already thinning from its spindle. Time had already started rolling him up, its compact canister of stored past growing heavy with him. Did he sense it happening, feel it in some way he couldn’t comprehend?

“Don’t move!” he’d say to her suddenly while she sat reading, her legs stretched out on the sofa. He’d vanish and return with the camera. “Stay there! Just like that.” Then the clean mechanical flapping of the shutter, like the slow wing of a bird.

She thought the attention a phase, a streak of flattery, short-lived romantic whimsy. It was not that he was inattentive. But his art absorbed him, and she couldn’t reach him when he entered it. She kept her eyes at her book without reading. “I wish you could paint me,” she said, coquettish, playfully disparaging his art, that medium which never opened a view to his love. Which was so incessantly objective, incessantly pure.

One morning he woke her with those same words. “I wish I could paint you.” As though the desire had become completely his own and he’d forgotten that it sprung from her craving. He stood beside her, with the soft window light close behind him, and held the camera to his eye, snapping pictures by the bedside. “Christ! I look awful!” she said, but she lay there for him and kept from crinkling her face with the words. She saw the shutter twitch like a phosphorescent muscle behind the lens—lapping the light in tiny swallows, drinking her quickly. She went outward and upward, pressed to the dark lacquered strip of film, her silver shape etched from silver nitrate.

It’s been two years. In all this time, she thought the grief was stretching her, drawing at her limbs, distorting her. She believed it was prolonging her days. Every evening was like a mountain summit where she stood and looked down upon the morning far below and could hardly believe, for all the mournful climbing she’d done, that only a single day had passed. But now, this morning, it is two years already and she is startled so much time has stretched between her and her life before. Already: strange that this word should occur to her. Two years. Without him.

Last night she found three little unlabelled canisters at the back of a shoebox full of landscape prints. She’d known of their existence, but had forgotten. In her first months of grief she’d found them in a drawer while sorting out his things. She’d placed them in the box and stored the box on the closet shelf with lots of others. Last night after dinner, a sudden urge sent her back to the boxes. One year, three hundred sixty-four days since the afternoon he didn’t wake up, lying on his back, white in white hospital sheets, imbibing his food through a tube and failing to open his eyes when she arrived in the room after work and pressed his hand with her usual waking gentleness. That moment of quiet reality—reality flooding the moment, reality such as she’d never known in her twenty-seven years. Except in good moments with him. It sharpened the edges of everything in the room: his lean cheekbones, his knuckles in the sheets, the clipboard at the foot of the bed, her breath, his stillness. A day short of two years since that moment, and a feeling of his dying again, and a sad wish to commemorate—and then she was flipping through the prints in the boxes, sitting on the living room floor with her legs spread out, the boxes stacked between her thighs.

They’d traveled up and down the west together and most of that was there in the prints. The coast near Big Sur—sylvan pastureland cancelled abruptly by huge joints of yellow rock, then cliffs pitching sheer and jagged into blue sea and red kelp and foam. The giant Redwood forests near Humboldt. The flat Nevada desert with its fleece of gray sage and blown-open sky, its nimbus clouds, sheets of rain. The Teton cathedral range, pyramidal and blue, shawled in snow. The lodgepole forests of Yellowstone, big plumes of mustard-color pollen steaming up the skyline above the trees.

He had a way of vanishing into his pictures. They captured the subject with a seamless power, without any embellishment. There was not a trace of him to be found—only the subject. The landscape. The person. The thing. He often talked of this as the role of the artist: to vanish into his work, so there was only the work. Negative Capability, he said. This was what people valued in his art, this was how he’d earned the money he earned—and she was glad for his success, but she had always ached vaguely when she looked at shots he’d snapped of her. Where had he gone while he captured her? There was never the slightest hint of his presence. He gave her back to herself completely in those photos. This was his art, the sign of his mastery, but she was always troubled. How did he see her? What face did his love give her?

She came to the back of the box and found the three canisters. Her heart contracted and her palms went cool. She picked them up and held them, all three, side by side in one open hand. They were light and quiet things.

This morning, sitting half-clothed at the edge of the twisted sheets, she calls the office where she works—the property management firm whose ranks she joined after he left her. She speaks to Rita, her fellow speed-walker and daily confidante. “I won’t be in today. I just don’t think I can bear coming in.” And Rita says, “Okay, sweetheart. Whatever you need. Take care of yourself today, will you?”

She thinks of getting out his enlarger, pouring his fixer into trays and sealing off their bathroom the way he used to—but working alone in that tiny space, washed by the somber red light, seems impossible to her. So after breakfast she drives across town to the one-hour photo lab, listening to his music in the car. This song he loved. Leonard Cohen crooning in his drab and effortless way, a voice like something melting. She sings softly to herself, riding the melody. In the tune’s rises and hollows, she feels she’s changing sizes again and again.

Behind the counter stands a young, deeply-freckled boy in a blue apron. As she gives him the film she thinks of how long it’s been. She lets her thumb brush his hand and grins darkly, scoring him with her obsidian eyes. The boy’s cheeks flame scarlet and he lowers his glance, penning something onto an order form. She sees she has put a tremble into his fingers. This thrills her softly, as though a matchstick has been kindled in her breast. But the feeling burns out in a matter of seconds and her thoughts return to those three rolls coiled silently in the canisters. What do they contain? Does film spoil? She thinks to ask, but the boy is still blushing and she’s embarrassed now. “Eleven o’clock,” he murmurs.

She goes next door to the department store and wanders the aisles. There are mothers and retired couples among the knits and blouses. The women run their hands down the fabrics and tilt their heads left, then right. Their husbands linger in the aisles like castaways, staring into the shop-lit distance. Children play beneath the big circular racks, squealing and shuddering the plastic hangers.

A clerk meanders the sales floor—a young woman in a narrow skirt. She has electrocuted, heavily gelled hair and a vast grin. “Can I help you?” she asks in a jubilant voice.

“No thanks. Just looking.”

“Okay, well don’t hesitate to give me a holler.” The girl walks away.

She stands beside a clearance rack. She grips the cool metal bar. In the store’s fluorescent lights, her hand looks sullen and yellow. She tremors, breathes deeply, begins to fall out of herself. Dizziness. She grabs a blouse that is neither her taste nor her size and hurries to the fitting room. She sits in the air-conditioned booth with the chintzy blouse rumpled in her lap and listens through the partition to the loud chatter of the other women, deep discussions of indecision—fabric quality and size and possible shrinkage and the store’s return policy. She cries quietly.

At home again, the living room is filled with afternoon light. It presses into corners and the room seems to expand to a disproportionate width. She lowers the shades, is relieved to feel the space around her contracting again. She lights a candle and sits on the floor with the three packets of photos. It is a kind of ceremony.

Opening the first packet, she immediately remembers.

Nearer the end, before he started living in the hospital, he narrowed his focus to her limbs, her various numberless plains of muscle, her sections and parts—as though exploring the diverse topography of her body.

Her wrists. Just the wrists, flexed against the wooden surface of the table, gripping something out of frame—a cup perhaps. Slim tendons press at the skin like tiny tent poles.

Her mouth and chin, lips gently parted like something torn, chin angling down to one side, washed in yellow light—a fragment of her sleeping face.

Her bare shoulder, ridge of collarbone rising in soft descant, the skin coated in a light sweat or steam. Of course: he had knelt at the bath as she lay in the water. “Be still,” he had whispered, and lifted the hungering camera.

Her abdomen, rounded and tapering like fruit, small pocket of shadow at her belly like the dark divot for a stem.

She opens the next packet and finds more of herself, neatly captured parcels of her body, items from his catalogue of devotion contained in those miniature urns for two sleeping years and a number of weeks, those canisters filled with light—light in the shape of her, waiting to glow. She spills the prints from their packets and spreads them on the floor. They surround her.

She watched him lying there before she called the nurse. She sat with the body that the cancer had left—thin form like an empty sleeve.

Two years already since she put that body to the fire. Form vanishing in flame. Lump of white ash handed to her in a jar. She herself hugging the jar to her breast like a strange friend. Feeling that she too had lost hold of herself, her form eaten by grief, her previous body transmuting, surrendered to incredible heat and cooling as a different substance, like ash.

She cannot know how he might have grouped these pieces of her. But there is unity in them, she can see that. Her hands spread through them. She watches herself changing shape again.

§ § §

M. Allen Cunningham's fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Epoch, Boulevard, Alaska Quarterly Review, Wind, and other journals. He has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. He lives in Northern California's Diablo Valley, and has set his first novel there and can be reached at makeshiftwisdom@yahoo.com

This piece was first published in INK POT #3 - 2004, a literary journal.