The Quarry
He hadn’t wanted to hear about her earliest memory, especially not again, but he didn’t tell her that…. As he half-tuned back in, he heard her saying… “I remember standing on the edge of this huge hole in the backyard, next to our duplex…that hole must have been 20 feet deep,” she’d claim. But then she’d always retract soon after, saying it must have just ‘seemed’ that way since she wasn’t that tall yet.
There was a lot he hadn’t wanted to hear. He ought to have taken that as a sign. What was it about that day as she stood in her backyard, transfixed? He imagined a bleak patch of prairie land, sparsely grassed, silhouetted with cows roaming in the background. And where were any people? Maybe that’s what bothered him the most. There she was, peering into the abyss of a construction site, no one around…
For some reason, he always imagined her in a pink sundress, barefoot, toes curling the edge… there she was, unattended, underfoot of god knows what, and not even knowing it ought to have been different, that anything was missing. He’d once made the mistake of asking to see her baby photos. There was exactly one. Still an infant, she was lying in her crib, clutching an empty pack of Pallmalls. This was her grandmother’s brand. She was bloated with the kind of obesity only a baby can get away with. Even though the photo was grainy, and black and white, you could tell that her face was beet red, all saucer-eyed and bewildered…
She had told him she was pretty sure there were some other rolls of film waiting to be developed, that they’d probably gotten boxed up during one of her family’s many moves… then she had trailed off, shifting her eyes to a faraway point, to that place where the film never fades, and it’s never too late to freeze precious childhood moments…
Tales from the Little Shed 