invisible except for a yellow boomerang that clung to his pelvis. It swung loose and dropped to the concrete as a zephyr carried him over the rooftops. She only goes out now to collect the pebbles.
“I have some news,” Aaron says.
Since the accident Gale and Aaron are more direct.
Aaron tells Gale he is leaving town. A bluebonnet drops from her sleeve. She hides it and thinks about how their mother is still a bitch for saddling them with those names. Gale and Aaron—wind and air. Why decide someone’s future like that? Why make it so easy for circumstances to arrive? He wants her to come, but he’s going with his girlfriend, and this is complicated. The girlfriend is not from around here—a fleshy—she can never understand.
And Gale thought he had come to talk her down from the ledge. He didn’t even know she was standing on it.
But because he’s more sentimental and emotionally intuitive than he would have her believe, Aaron leaves Gale with an unprocessed roll of film. A gray canister with the oil-slick paper spooled inside. He doesn’t say where the photos are from—it’s still difficult for them to talk about some things.
Gale is elbow-deep in the film-processing machine. The metal arms that allow her to exhume the film from the canister always reminded her of an astronaut suit. When she was young, she would pretend the canisters were comets and carry them through zero gravity with her astronaut arms.
Pictures emerge inked and floppy via conveyor belt on the other side of the machine. Gale is thinking: Why do men have all the opportunities? Why is it okay for Aaron to leave and for me to disappear? Why does it feel as though my path is clear?
The photos come out with a turquoise-green background. In the foreground is a terrible white aperture in the shape of an eye. The blast. Everyone knew Gale’s mother had taken photos that day. She was the local photographer; it’s
12 | Psychopomp Magazine