The Extra Face

My grandmother's Polaroid came to me in a shoebox with her funeral pamphlet, a rosary with three missing beads, and a note in her handwriting: "Take pictures. Don't keep them." I was nineteen and annoyed. I took pictures anyway — my dorm room, my roommate's cat, the first snow that year. And every single photo had the same problem: an extra face. Not a blur. Not a double exposure. A face, standing just behind whoever I was photographing, looking straight into the camera. Young, pale, patient. In the snow photo there's nobody behind me but an empty quad — and there she is, over my shoulder, close enough that I can see the wet in her eyes. I showed my mother. She went white and said, "Your grandmother had a twin." She said it like a sentence she'd been holding for sixty years. The twin drowned in the pond behind their house the winter they were both seven. My grandmother never spoke of her. Never kept a photograph of her. "Take pictures. Don't keep them." I understand that now. I burned the camera last spring. I took it out to the quarry behind my uncle's place, smashed it with a rock, and watched the plastic curl in a fire I'd built for the purpose. I took a picture of the fire first — the extra face, so close that time, like she was leaning over the flames to watch herself burn. Then I went home and found a fresh print on my fridge. My kitchen, my back to the counter, and her face over my shoulder, clearer than ever before. She doesn't look angry. That's the worst part. She looks like she's waiting for me to finally notice her the way you notice someone who's been sitting quietly in the corner of every room of your life. I don't take pictures anymore. But tonight I walked past my hallway mirror, and for half a second, in the corner of it, I saw her — not behind me. Beside me. Smiling like a secret. Dig out your old family photos tonight. The group shots, the birthdays, the ones where everyone swears they remember who was there. Count the faces. Count them twice. Tell me what you find. This story is: FICTION.