Flash Non-Fiction Responses

Prompt: I am holding a photo…

From: Abigail Covington:

I am holding a photo of me and my father. For once, I don't look timid and nervous by his side. So many photos from when I was little feature an ecstatic father, dressed in a loose polo shirt the color of ruby red grapefruit, holding, hugging, or smiling at a very uncomfortable little girl. I was always a little afraid of my Dad. Not because he was abusive or violent. He wasn't a drunk nor was he mal-tempered. He was just ... loud. Escaping his influence was impossible. The force of his personality crowded everyone else out of the room. Except here we are in this photo, singing together side-by-side, staring at the karaoke machine he'd rented for my 13th birthday, jaws agape, howling out the words to some song we both loved -- probably Start. Me up by the Rolling Stones. Music made me feel like I was just as big as he was.   

From Alice Sparberg Alexiou:

My mother took this photo in Israel in 1972. There’s me, the dark-haired girl in the front, and my cousin Ayelet, and my father’s cousin Hasida, her mother Braha, my father, and Hasida’s brother, Israel. The photo marked the first time we cousins met. My mother, father and I were then spending a few months in Israel. Before we left the States, my 90-year-old grandfather had given my father a piece of paper. On it he’d scribbled: Saharov’s Book Store, Rehovot.  These people are our family, Joseph Sparberg told my father.  My grandfather came to America in 1898 to avoid conscription into the Czar’s army. Jews were then leaving Russia by the hundreds of thousands. A few years later, his cousins in Kishinev survived the pogroms and also fled, but to Palestine: This was the height of the Zionist movement. Over the years, Joseph stayed in touch with his family via occasional letters.

From Jade Hammond:

There’s the speck of a pale man with his head down and arms folded, a solitary figure standing shin-deep in the shallows. I’d spotted him as I walked around the coastal path and thought he looked so sad against the strength of Hydra’s eastern edges. I’m holding the photo now. It’s out of focus because I took it quickly, not wanting him to look up and feel conscious. I’d put the camera away and carried on walking downhill towards the quieter part of the island, sick of the boatfuls of day-trippers coming in from Athens. There was a specific taverna I’d wanted to try because it was tiny and family-run and I feel a deep, urgent need to find the most ‘authentic’ place to eat, even when traveling alone. 

That afternoon I sat on a plastic chair outside the specific taverna with a Fix and a bowl of olives. I hardly looked up from Joan Didion’s TheWhite Album. I ordered a whole mackerel and relished my inability to fillet it in a sophisticated way. Gently flaking flesh from bone isn’t my forte and this wasn’t the time for self-improvement. So I went in fingers first, zesting the lemon and grinding on more salt, pulling off the fried tail and savoring its crunch, dipping bread crusts in the oily residue as flies searched to land. I was in a mackerel stupor, tipsy from beer and freedom and sun. And then my phone pinged, and it was you.

From Adrian Larose:

My mother sits across the table from me, her son (though I’m not in the photo), in what looks like a quaint glass-panelled both in a restaurant. Pink seats and pink table. A chickadee frosted onto the glass behind her (complete with the word “Chickadee” etched in frilly font below).

Her frizz of curly black hair haloes her smiling face. A face of relaxation. We are well into a vacation West-ward from our homes in Eastern Ontario. Despite the red-haired waitress striding past a corner of the frame, this is not a typical restaurant. It is one train car wide and hurtling across Alberta tracks.

Our ongoing amazement at the servers’ ability to traverse the trundling train car while carrying hot coffee or soup has not diminished days into our trip. The landlocked cruise has already carried Mom and I across 3 whole provinces, some 3,000 kilometers.
We got to connect on that trip in a way I hadn’t imagined. I had just graduated from university and Via Rail, our version of Amtrak, gave new grads a big discount on the cross-country trip. Mom, despite her reliance on a walker and generally failing health, was up for the adventure. 

That was 13 years ago now. She’s been gone for 9. I still remember that smile and seek to live up to her spirit of doing things despite the challenges. They are what makes the trip worthwhile.

From Mina Miller:

I'm not on speaking terms with the dog today. She ran away from me during our state-sanctioned walk this morning by the riverbank, catapulting up the stairs and through the gate, careening over curbs and sidewalks, barking at everyone in sight, like she was drunk.

Without the boats and barges, the river’s more present, more insistent. It smells brackish, muddy and vegetal on a clear sunny morning. The undisturbed silt reveals abandoned shopping carts, cattle bones from a Victorian tannery, rusty boat parts. The dog nosed after plastic bottles bobbing in the waves and I fed the local crow who landed behind me with a soft flutter, fixing its gaze on me with an expectant, beady eye.

I still have a carefully-framed photo of an earless white cat with runny red-rimmed eyes, tucked into a blanket, looking reproachfully at the camera. When she couldn’t come with me to college the year I turned seventeen, I packed the photo instead. Two decades later the photo still conjures up her soft fur and odd cry, and floods me with a confusing grief. 

I often dream of animals, of chasing a kitten across a busy freeway, or cupping a bird in my hands. This morning I dreamt I was in a busy airport terminal. The dog was with me, safely secured in a carrier, ready for our journey, but when I went to grab my suitcase, I turned around to find that the cage door had swung open and she was gone.

From Jennifer Lynch:

I’m teetering on the back of my couch trying to straighten a family photo on the wall, when I notice across my living room a mythical creature covered in snow. The Hodag.  In this photo on a top shelf, I’m sitting in front of the eight-foot-tall green monster grinning, mirroring the monster. Its teeth pointy like a vampire, the Stegosaurus spikes down its back and the devil horns could be fearful. But it reaches out its front paw like a kitten batting a ball of string.

Loggers, in a town where snow is measured in feet and duration, made up the Hodag in the late 1800s. About 100 years later, I arrived in that town, Rhinelader, Wisconsin, population 6,000, straight from Paris.

Only five photos sit on that top shelf. When unpacking moving boxes years ago, I choose those few photos of life-before-family for that one shelf. The Hodag photo is in the middle. Photos of Machu Picchu, the Pyramids of Egypt, a lightning-and-hippo-filled-canoe trip down a river in China and an empty Angkor Wat are the others. Until that moment, I didn’t realize I had placed the Hodag photo in the middle. I walk by those shelves many, many, many times a day but there’s always a toy train to step over or someone to tickle or a Band-Aid to apply. But now that I’m up high and on eye level with my photos, I wonder at my placement choice. Aesthetic or importance.

From Sameera Khan:

I am five-years-old in this photograph, wearing a red-striped dress and sporting my mother’s oversized 1970s shades. I am smiling not at the camera but at the man seated on the chair next to me with a baby on his lap and a Cuban cigar sticking out of his mouth. That is my father holding my baby brother. Behind us on a desk sits his typewriter. 

I remember this house – a one-bedroom apartment, large balcony and a bathroom my father had converted into a photography dark room. Our building called ‘Cozy Home’ was situated on a hill in Bombay, as Mumbai was then called. 

This was the first house my father ever bought with his savings. A difficult thing to do in early 1970s Bombay, especially if you worked as a journalist. I recall my father never being at home but always returning full of stories. Like how he bought this apartment from one of Indian cinema’s leading actresses of the time, the beautiful and broody Meena Kumari. 

He met her only once while fixing the final deal. The real-estate broker introduced them and mentioned that the buyer wanted the price reduced. She asked my father, “What do you do?” My father said he was a journalist with the ‘Current’ weekly. “Oh, you write? Then, it’s alright,” she said, instructing the protesting broker to let my father pay whatever he could afford. “I respect those who write,” said the screen legend, ending all negotiations with a toss of her head. 

From Shirley Salemy Meyer:

I am holding a photo in my head that I cannot find among hundreds of photos stacked in boxes in my attic. There is not much complexity to be found in its composition: merely my boyfriend waiting for me on a bench by the river in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. What remains etched in my mind is the look of his eyes.

His eyes are hazel. His smile casts wrinkles up to the corners of his eyes, which makes them mellow and soft. He stares directly at my camera. Those eyes convey a sense of openness and generosity, a clarity I’ve seldom experience in others’ eyes.

He is visiting from the Northeast. I haven’t seen him for a month, and we decide to take a drive to look at Frank Lloyd Wright homes in the area. His eyes echo the purity of style in those buildings, the authenticity, the obvious sense of purpose. 

Decades later, that photo is lost. But I see those eyes in countless other photos easily found with a few taps on my cell phone, and when I look at our son, whose eyes are a bit darker but are infused with the same spirit. 

From Sarah Schembri:

I found it again. It was at the bottom of a box I kept on my desk. I don’t even know how it got there but there we were, raising a glass filled with coca-cola. The only day in the year she would let us have something other than water. 

I always forget how tiny everything was even if were tiny ourselves. The kitchen table lifted and carried to the living room so we could have one meal where we all had a chair at the table. We are still about to start our first course in the photo. Soup straight out of the packet on the pretty floral plates that would go back in the box until another Christmas lunch came around, served on a tablecloth struggling to cover all of the scratches on our table. 

Even at that age, I was already half gone. It’s like my mother knew because only half of my face is in the picture. I can still see a little of my smile, teeth out for everyone to see, fizzy hair sprouting on the side of my face. My brother and sister are all there and so is my father, lifting their glasses like proper nobility while donning their cotton undershirts. It’s funny, I have looked at this picture so many times and only today have I noticed that all three of them have the same haircut. Short puffy curly hair. My sister would never forgive my mother for this.