His lens turns on me as the sweet juice bursts out, dripping down my chin. My eyes are bright with laughter, my fingers reaching to wipe my mouth clean, like I could keep my decorum by cupping a bare hand around the splashes of life bursting forth from both the fruit and myself.
He was stepping back to get even the hem of my eyelet sundress into the frame when he slipped.
I developed the two-year-old roll of film at the local 1 hour place. Sitting in the dim bedroom, I quietly stick each photo, one by one, into a small album. My fingers linger on the last one, the one that caught my face at the edge of the frame as it transformed from a smile to a gasp, stuck somewhere in the middle of blank confusion, the scene in front of me, behind the camera slowly registering.
I close the album and write, in plain letters, 'HOME' on the cover before reaching up to place it at the end of the quite heavily laden bookshelf. I turn to watch him sleep, not a muscle budged nor a hair moved, since the moment his eyes closed as his head silently hit the pavement and my gasp pulled the last breath from my life.
