Kodak Moment, April 1964

My parents gaze up from a faded Instamatic photo. Seated on the garish green and yellow-striped couch in our living room, my father’s arms span its back, right leg crossed over left knee. He looks directly into the camera, relaxed, smiling, as if there is nowhere he’d rather be. I smile back. My mother, leaning into him, appears shrunken, although in fact she is slightly taller than he. Her flower-print dress clashes with the sofa. Her smile is strained, lips colorless and tight, no hint of it in her tired eyes.

My friend picks up the framed photo and examines it closely. She declares, “It’s clear the rooster ruled the roost in this family.” When I ask what she means, she blathers about body language, about women giving away their power to placate men who expect no less, how we must eradicate the patriarchy.

I could tell her, No. You’ve got it all wrong. They both know what’s coming, though perhaps not how very soon. A month from that moment, he will be dead, plundered by cancer. And she will live on, twenty-five more years, every day wishing it had been her.

But I don’t say anything. My friend believes men conspire to steal her power. Who am I to say they don’t?

I only know that this is the last picture we have of my parents together. I only know what I see in my father’s smile, a quiet determination to ease the pain for us, no matter what lies ahead. And in my mother’s eyes, a grief that will inhabit her for all the years to come.

Donna Cameron’s work touches readers worldwide in many languages. She is author of the Nautilus gold medal winner, A Year of Living Kindly, and the popular blog by the same title. Her short prose appears in many literary journals, anthologies, and other publications in the US and abroad, including The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Eclectica, and Brevity.