Girl Imagined by Chance

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EXAMINE THE PHOTOGRAPH as closely as you like, only you will not be able to locate the child in it.

You will not be able to locate anything that will become important.

The couple’s move from the northeast to the northwest, say.

The log cabin and fifteen acres of lodgepole pine just outside the viewfinder that brought them here with the perhaps not completely unpredictable promise of a wired-down life.

A slightly more wired-down life.

Your parents’ long brawl with cancer that wrecked your father’s lungs sixteen years ago, your mother’s breasts five.

How, after her mother’s funeral (also cancer, also breast), the woman in the photograph simply turned and walked down the driveway toward the waiting car, slid in beside you, and drove out of her father’s abusive language.

Forever.

A butter-yellow Subaru.

Or, say, the iridescent mountain bluebird.

The frisky dry breeze.

The iridescent mountain bluebird immobilized in mid-flight in the frisky dry breeze behind the photographer, a thin-necked cattle rancher in a straw cowboy hat and sharp-toed boots from half a mile down the road who dropped by that morning to welcome you to this new place.

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