As Featured in Under the Wing
A Short Story by O.G. Rose
The white back of a facedown photograph glowed amber under the safelight hanging from the ceiling. A wood chair lay flipped over, and next to it, on his back, Jim lifted his black hand to rub his shaved head. Jim sat up on the creaking floor, straightened his glasses back onto his nose, and looked up at the clothesline where prints hung to dry. His father tipped a white fedora towards him, both of them smiling in bespoke linen suits; Jim’s wife with chocolate skin wore a white dress and swung in a hammock reading a poem about a swelling of the ground. The pictures reflected boring summer-noons when time was meant to be killed, proof that Jim’s family achieved not just middle-class life but upper-middle-class life. The picture of Jim’s daughter wasn’t on display.
Jim pushed himself to his feet, turned on the desk lamp next to his opera CDs, and flicked off the safelight; his khakis and tucked-in white shirt brightened. He eyed the back of the overturned photograph on the floor. Maybe the lighting tricked him? It had only been them on the beach. Jim bent over, picked up the image, and held it to his face. It must have been manipulated. But he developed it himself.
Jim brushed a funnel and printing tongs off his desk and laid the image down flat. Jim worked as a black-and-white photographer and started under his hero, his father, the famous black reporter who always followed his fire, his love. Inspired, Jim pursued photography and took portraits of his daughter on the dunes of the nearby beach. She asked him to spend time with her. She had her mother’s skin, and her smiling face topped with black hair and a white bow, against a background of sand and ocean, filled the image flat on the table. Four eyes looked back.
“It’s overexposure,” Jim said. Behind his daughter, emerging from her head like a cobra out of a dirt-buried egg, stood a white man. Jim lifted his hand off the image and cracked his knuckles to stop the shaking. The figure looked at the camera. Smooth skin. No clothes. Alien. Jim couldn’t make out the face, just a white blankness, all over, like an erase board. It was too tall, too thin. A trick of the light? Jim was overreacting. People would think he was crazy, but Jim followed his passion. His daughter was smiling; the white man, staring. Waiting?
Jim dropped the image into the empty trash can by his desk. The photograph wasn’t for work: he could toss it. But Jim’s father never ran from the truth; he always shared it with the world. What would his Dad think? Jim reached down into the black bin and lifted the image back into the light. What if his Dad thought he was crazy? Jim didn’t want to let his Dad down. Jim held the image closer, and after Jim’s eyes adjusted, the figure didn’t vanish. His daughter never mentioned the white man. Was it a man? Jim dropped the image back into the trash can. People would call him a ghost-monger, a UFO-fanatic — a mad man. He couldn’t share this: he had a family. Jim left his desk and reached for his lamp and flicked off the switch. Everything would be better in the morning. Jim flicked the switch back on and stared into the trash can. The white man looked back.
“I’m going for a walk,” Jim told his wife as he hurried through the kitchen and pulled his cream topcoat from off the back of a chair. She lifted a cooking pan out of the oven.
“Seeing your father?”
Jim smiled.
“Oysters tonight,” she added, “thanks to that biotech.”
“The small-caps follow patterns.” Jim slipped his arms into his coat. “You just have to look.”
Jim’s wife searched the fridge for a paper bag of seafood. “Dinner in an hour. Maybe you’ll find a pearl?”
Jim winked at his wife. “I’ve already got that.” His smile vanished when the front door closed behind him. Jim felt the heaviness in his eyes and the tightness in his calves from another day hustling at the office, but now he would only lie in bed. Thinking. He slipped his hands into his pockets and walked down the driveway to the road. It was a dead-end, and at the cul de sac was the start of a wooden boardwalk that creaked under Jim’s feet. He veered left, ignored a sign that told him to stay on the path, and climbed a dune overtaken by beachgrass that hissed in the wind. Jim stopped when he found the sandy chewing gum he told his daughter to spit out before the picture. He rubbed his arms through his coat, looking around. The waves hit the shore more forcefully during high tide; the silhouettes of silent seagulls encircled a blue trash can. The white man was still in the image…
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For the rest of the story, please see Under the Wing by O.G. Rose, available on Amazon in both Paperback and Kindle.
