This is a Photograph of Us
Kennesaw Mountain. Image via Creative Commons.
(This is an ekphrastic piece in response to Margaret Atwood’s poem, “This Is a Photograph of Me.”)
It’s 1987, and we are at a Braves game at Fulton County Stadium on July 4th. In the foreground, Dad squints through large-paned tinted eyeglasses. A pack of Merit 100s and a folded up program stick out of his shirt pocket that rests over the corroded arteries of his heart. I sit beside him wearing a matching cap shoved over my pigtails and sitting strangely on top of my head.
We are looking at my mother, our mouths all grimaces, perhaps from the heat or some unremembered annoyance or maybe it’s the bright specter of her living breathing body that is too much for us. She was always tan and beautiful back then.
In the background, Uncle Tom and Aunt Marsha squint, too, her still young, the only one of us smiling, a Cardinals visor protecting that fair delicate skin of hers. And Tom, a younger thinner version of Dad, with more money.
This photograph was taken the day before we fell off a cliff, the four of us. Standing on top of Kennesaw Mountain, named after the Cherokee word for cemetery, we stared out at the Civil War battlefield red-faced after a five mile hike. When my father slipped, Uncle Tom, Aunt Marsha, and I followed. We held hands and plunged toward the earth where thousands had died before us. If you look closely at the photo, you can see it in our faces, this hint of a terrible and freeing danger, our fear. The thing is, sitting there, our legs sweaty, slick against the hot metal chairs, we had no idea what the wind would feel like, our bodies speeding through it, heavy and light, arms and legs spread, the loose fabric of our clothes flapping—these, our feeble attempts to fly.
Look at the creases in the corners as the ends curl up toward our grim faces, still glossy thirty years later. Look at the thumbtack piercing the arm of a woman sitting behind us, revealing that this is a photograph of a photograph of us. Look at the people all around us gaping towards the field, unaware of their fates. And here we are, staring you down, as a bat makes contact and the players search the skies for an object falling to earth.
Amber Wheeler Bacon is a writer and teacher whose work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Ecotone, Epiphany, Prairie Schooner and Witness. You can also find her writing online at Ploughshares and CRAFT. She's the recipient of the 2018 Breakout Writers Prize sponsored by The Author’s Guild and a 2021 scholarship from Bread Loaf Environmental. She received the 2022 Lit/South Award for flash fiction and a 2023 Prairie Schooner Award. Amber has an MFA from Bennington College and lives by the beach in South Carolina.