Arnold turns around after Old Faithful erupts for the cheer behind him. There’s a man down on one knee proposing to a woman in front of a small crowd who are taking pictures. Arnold thinks that maybe he’s in the picture with the geyser and couple.
In six months, they will be married, and cancer will have taken Arnold. He imagines a
wedding album of the future, this same couple surrounded by grandkids. He imagines inside jokes about how lucky it is to have an old white-haired man photobomb your proposal. He imagines they’ll say his ghost haunts them still.
John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He is a New York State Council on the Arts Grant Recipient for 2024, and he was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.
