GRAYSCALE by Brian Burmeister
A month after Mom passed, I went back to the house to pack up.
In the corner of her closet, buried under a pile of blankets, was a box within a box.
Inside were dozens of aged, black-and-white photos of my mother with a man I didn’t know. There were no letters, no notes on the backs of the photos, nothing to indicate who they were of or when they were from.
I wondered: Did my father know she was happy once?
Brian Burmeister is Program Chair of English and Communication at Ashford University, and his writing has appeared in such publications as Cleaver Magazine, The Furious Gazelle, and Yellow Chair Review. He can be followed @bdburmeister.
Thin Air 