Ash and Photographs

The dreams always ended with rain.

Not water—water was a blessing.

Not hail—hail left nothing but bruises.

This rain was ash.

Ash signaled burns. Ash stained skin. Ash left a permanent mark, no matter its source.

Ash was her name.

It hadn’t always been that way. The ash had left its mark on that part of her life, too.

Shadows hid the room around her. She had been here many times, more times than she could count. The musty smell, the dust in the air, the fine grey powder coating her fingers. It felt like home.

A single spotlight cut through the air overhead, casting light on the laminated cover of a photo album in her lap. The glare hurt her eyes, but she did not blink. She traced the spine of the album with her finger.

She had been here many times, too. Inside this photo album. Outside this photo album, tracing her finger along the edge and absorbing the weight of its contents. Hurt. Joy. The numbness in between.

Carefully, so that the ash on her fingertips would not stain the cover, she flipped to the first page.

A black-and-white photo with perfect clarity and edges sharp enough to split skin. A woman stood with a hand on her pregnant belly. It was not round, but pregnant.

Looking up from the photo album, into the darkness, she rested a hand on her own belly. An empty womb. Overflowing with anticipation, with dread, but empty of what should have been there. Empty of life.

She turned the page.

Another black-and-white photo, with less color than the rest. Monotone grey where there should have been clear contrast between black and white. The edges, of the physical photograph and the people within, were fuzzy. Miniscule tears crossed the surface. She was never sure what held this photo together, but it was always in the album.

There was the woman again, the one who looked like her, the one who she used to know—Anna was her name. Both hands gripped an empty stroller where a baby should have been. The baby had never even seen the light of day. The woman clung to the empty stroller like she clung to her lost future.

Anna wept, and her tears distorted the photo.

Making sure no tears resided in her own eyes, she blinked. She had known this woman, this grief-stricken image of herself, once, but no longer.

The grey on her fingers smudged the photo as her thumb brushed it, turning the page.

A smiling baby girl gazed up with wide brown eyes. She looked nothing like Anna—skin too tan, hair too dark, eyes too blue. But she was hers.

Anna held the child, her cheeks tinted rose—a color that appeared in the photos for the first time here and a color that eluded her now. The colors of the photo were muted, distant hope that belonged to a time long gone.

The child did not yet belong to the woman in the picture, but she would. Her lawyer had told her so.

She turned the page.

No trace of black-and-white. Anna balanced the girl, now a toddler, on her hip. Posters and streamers and excited words she couldn’t bear to think about bubbled around them. A maelstrom of color, with the girl and the other Ash in the center of it all.

The girl smiled.

Anna smiled.

She did not.

She smeared the ash across the photo intentionally this time. The grey drained the color from the photo, absorbing it from the paper itself, until she could no longer make out the details.

This action, this erasing of the memory—this, she had done many times, as well.

She turned the page.

The sight of the woman crying, no toddler in sight, was familiar to her, but not because she saw it on this page in the photo album. Ash had burned the picture years ago. The remains of that picture coated her fingers now, dyed her hair grey, coated the empty photo page when Ash tore it out of the album and thrust it, crumpled, into the black abyss around her chair.

Ash took a deep breath.

Without seeing the picture, she knew.

The weeping woman, once again without a child on her hip. The adoption had fallen through, the child gone back to the birthparents, her child ripped away from her.

That memory, that picture, would forever be branded on her mind. Into her heart—what was left of it, after the child—her child, no longer her child—stole it.

She stood from the chair, sending the scrapbook to the floor in her haste. The motion raised a cloud of dust, sticky dust, grey dust. It swirled around her, clung to her skin, to her clothes, thickened until it obscured her vision like a storm. Ash.

Somewhere in the haze, a phone rang.

She stumbled forward. The ash cloud swarmed around her, assaulted her, disoriented her and kept her from finding the source of the sound.

The phone rang again before sending the caller to voicemail. The words came clear through the whirlwind whipping her hair.

“Hello, Anna, this is Natalie. I know we’ve discussed adoption before, and I know what happened last time, but I have another adoption opportunity for you…”

Her eyes widened. A second chance.

The ash cloud drowned out the rest of the woman’s message.

“Give…call back…5-483…”

“No!” She fought her way to the phone, saw it within her reach, swiped at it and it was gone. Her momentum carried her forward and she landed sprawled on the floor. She scrambled onto her hands and knees and gritted her teeth against the ash. She had to answer the phone—she had to talk to the woman. She had to take this opportunity.

Where was that phone?

Then the ash was gone. The phone, she knew with sudden certainty, was gone. The storm was gone and nothing remained but grey flakes, raining from the sky, leaving their mark.

She sank to the floor.

The dreams always ended with rain.

Not water—water was a blessing.

Not hail—hail left nothing but bruises.

The rain was ash.

And Ash was her name.