I was in the alley behind the Seymour St. Stop & Save. There was a van. I don’t have any insights, even in the position I’m in now, but there’s always a van, right?

After I disappeared, I bloomed. First, into a photograph on my mother’s wall: me at ten years old holding a fish I caught that was nearly half the size of my body, so doughty a fighter that my grandfather had to take over my rig to reel it in. I managed to hold it up just long enough for the photo to be taken. And I hold it now, always just able to do so, perpetually only just strong enough. I look out of my ten-year-old eyes to an empty wall. Wallpaper patterned with some kind of pink fruit. My mother in profile, coming and going, stopping more and more as the days drag on, her face now staring into my face then, my fixed smile seeming to mock her shattered affect, her eyes always dry as if her devastation is so complete as to resist expression through so cheap and common a language as tears.

I open onto a dozen telephone poles and shop windows, me and me and me at thirteen in a Steven Universe shirt and an ironic smile for the school photographer, this town where I was raised feeling so much like mine now, my many iterations so thoroughly surveilling it. I feel I’m everywhere. I watch pedestrian traffic on sidewalks and vehicle traffic flying by on streets, noting how many vans there actually are here, and wondering if it’s that many everywhere. At night I see knots of teenagers loitering under street lamps, the down-and-outers skulking in parts of town I didn’t used to know well. There’s a man with a pillow case who sometimes stalks the alleys, trapping and kidnapping cats—one time three cats in a single night!—and going off with them to where I can’t see for purposes I don’t want to know. I once see a woman assaulted and escape after minutes of torturous fighting. I can only watch, forced to smile ironically.     

In time, another awareness opens. The same school photo, but bigger and cleaner. I’m face to face with well-dressed versions of what might be everyone I’ve ever known in my life, sitting forlorn and crying. I can smell the arrangement of flowers that wreaths the photo, but I can only see as much of it as blocks the corners of my frame. I watch curiously but unemotionally through speeches and sermons, some by voices I recognize, many by voices I don’t. In the end, they all slide past where I can see to direct their goodbyes at a point in the room that I do not inhabit. Strange, this. Or so it seems to me.

Occasionally now, an awareness blinks out. A photo blows off a pole or is covered or pulled from a shop window and crumpled and thrown away. I no longer have the sense that I’m everywhere. But, I’m here. More or less at different moments. Somewhere someone leafs through a photo album and I have the pins-and-needles sensation of advancing and retreating, darting whack-a-mole around my life’s moments. A day will come, I think, when I’ll blink out entirely. I don’t know what will happen then, but I don’t mind the thought either. It will come to that sooner or later, I’m sure. But it hasn’t, so far. So far, I’m still here.

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M.C. Schmidt holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University. His recent work has appeared in Abstract, The Book Smuggler’s Den, Litro Online and Every Day Fiction.

Photo: Ozan Safak