Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in Sallow Terrace ·
The Album Began to Correct Itself
On Sallow Terrace a family album whose captions were written by a dead woman starts printing corrections under the photographs overnight. It has never once said how anyone felt.
Abel Duarte's mother captioned every photograph in the house in the same grey fountain hand, small, level, unhurried, the hand of a woman who ruled her lines by eye and got them level. She had been dead four years when the corrections started. The album lived on the sideboard at Sallow Terrace under the standard lamp, and apart from the dusting the family did not touch the thing. The captions were her. Correcting them would have been close to speaking in her voice, and nobody in that family had the nerve.
The corrections came at night.
He can date the first one to the spring, because the page it sat on was the Ostmark holidays, and because it was that April that his sister, who never notices anything inside the house, stopped in the hall on her way out and read twice over the caption under the print of the three of them posed on the sea wall, and did not go out, and stood there until the kettle reminded the house it was alive.
Under the photograph, in Duarte's mother's hand, small and level, a line had been struck cleanly through — not scratched, struck, the way an examiner strikes — and beneath it, in the same hand, slightly wetter at the letter-ends, the correction read:
"The sea wall at Kessin Reach. The child holding the spade is not Duarte."
Nothing else on the page was altered. The dates stayed. The weather stayed. Only the one sentence, and only the one detail in it.
Abel Duarte is a man who works nights at the cannery and has an orderly mind to the point of illness about it, and what he did first was what the forms say to do: he checked the source sheet. Under the flap at the back of the album the grandmother kept the floats and stubs, and there it all was: the receipt from the photographer's kiosk in Ostmark, the year, the three children, the spade — *the little one in yellow with the spade*. His mother had it right. And now, below it, in the same believed hand, the album was saying otherwise.
By the end of that week there were nine corrections. Never more than one a page. Never a whole sentence where a clause served. The style of them was what frightened the family most, he says; more than the appearances, more even than the wetness of the ink. It was the tone. Dry. Precise. Courteous, almost. "None of the people at this table is related to us." "This is not the garden of consequence." Each correction came in like a filing clerk's note, and each one, checked afterward against anything that could be checked — the parish months, the yeartag on a coat, a date worked in pencil on the back of a print — checked out. Nine corrections, nine checks, nine confirmations. His sister keeps the checking papers now, in a box file marked with a number from a form the family no longer fully understands.
One thing only, he says, and he says it with the flat smile of a man who has had a bad night's sleep for years: the album never once said how anyone felt. It amended dates, weather, names, places, the fact of a person being in a frame at all. It never wrote lonely, or happy, or afraid, or grieving — — not even for the photograph of his mother in the year his father cleared off, the one where her face is doing something the family has never been able to name and cannot look at for long. Beside that photograph, on the last page it touches, in the margin, where nothing that night had been written before, one single word had been added, the only word the album ever placed in a margin rather than under a print.
The word was: *unverified*.
So there was one thing left, on the very last page of the album, that even the thing in the house would not vouch for. What it is, exactly, that could not be verified — the face, or the feeling, or the four years of her life that none of the photographs in the house cover — Duarte does not know. It is the question, he says, that wakes him at four when the cannery hooter does not, the question the family now cannot put to the album because you cannot ask a question of a page, and a page that answers will not be asked whether it understood you.
What he has not told his sister, and will not, is that he has gone into the hall twice since the spring, twice, at two and three in the morning, with the stair light on, and stood over the album open on the sideboard, and watched, both times, the caption under his mother's photograph while nothing happened to it at all: and that the second time, after nine minutes of nothing, the ink at the struck-out line under the sea wall print was dry, and the line under it was wet again, as it had been that April — as if the hand had never finished the sentence, and was coming back to it when it had something further to add; and that he had not the nerve to wait and see.