In That Frozen Image

The meadow lay like a vast, exhumed lung, its tall dry grasses brittle and brown as old letters scorched at the edges, whispering of summer's suicide. We lay there, my husband and I, newly minted in our white vows, our bodies pressed into the cracked earth as if the ground itself might swallow our heat before the frost could claim it. Autumn had bled the green from everything; even our skin took on the sallow tint of dying leaves, and I wondered if marriage was only this—two warm corpses arranged for the season's indifferent eye.

The tintype photographer hunched over his black box like a crow dissecting a stillborn thing, his coat flapping in the thin light. He poured the collodion, that slick venom, onto the metal plate, and I felt the cold gaze of the lens burrow into us, fixing our joined limbs in silver and shadow. Click went the shutter, a small guillotine, severing the moment from time. My husband's breath stirred the hair at my temple, sweet with the promise of nights yet unbruised, but beneath it I sensed the rot already threading our veins—the slow honey of domesticity turning to ash.

In that frozen image we would live forever young and whole, a ghost couple embalmed in chemicals and light, yet already I felt the crack widening between us, the meadow's brown tide pulling us under. Love, in its first raw dress, tasted of rust and crushed stems. The photographer packed his poisons away, and we rose, shedding seeds from our hair like dandruff from the skull of the year itself. Behind us, the grasses sighed shut, erasing our imprint, and I knew the portrait would show only what the light allowed: two bright moths pinned to the inevitable dark.

Amelia and Tom - Newlyweds in the meadow