Camera Lux
The photograph is scuffed. She is perfect and visible. There is a horse tangled in her hair. It will be two years yet before it escapes. She doesn’t know, though she is smiling out to you from within the picture’s pool, she doesn’t know yet whether next week she’ll have grown or shrunk by twenty feet, but she knows size is always shifting, and she knows light makes image possible. If the mind is a moonlit room. A wall, a door, a dresser. Your favorite shirt draped over her chair. One half of the room, cut away diagonally. The room’s other half weighed down by black corners, floor nearly tilting.
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Michael Dwayne Smith is a community college teacher. He’s not quite old enough to have been at Woodstock, despite what students say about his ponytail, and currently lives in a small California desert town with his wife and son and many animals.