by Jamie Holland
Summer blue sky. Bright sun. All around us: lilac bushes, apple trees, quaking aspens. The cutting garden.
I’d just walked up from the beach ahead of you and had stopped at the raspberry bushes to taste the new crop. As the sweetness exploded on my tongue, I thought about my sixtieth birthday, which we’d celebrated the night before. I felt young, but the number bothered me.
Another decade gone. I picked more raspberries, looked up and there you were in my old green bikini and yellow towel slung over your shoulder, photographing a flower from the garden. Leaning back, bare feet spread wide, worn baseball cap fallen to the back of your head, you stood before a purple foxglove, camera at your face, tilting it this way and that, backing up an inch, leaning forward a tad. There was no setting down your beach bag or going inside to change your lens. The flower grabbed you and that was it.
I’ve always been curious about your photos—Why that flower? Why that angle? Why black and white and not color? And all along, your answers have remained along the lines of, “I just liked it” or “It seemed like the best angle.” I want to know what makes you stop and think, That. I must photograph that. That low tide. That wrinkle in the curtain. That teen-ager. But watching you in the garden tells me more than any tired question could. I pull out my camera (iPhone) and take a shot of you—head tipped back, body bathed in light.
In a month you’ll move out of our house and into a New York apartment with your boyfriend. No more watering each other’s plants when one of us is out of town. No more coming upstairs for paprika or coffee or a nice long chat on the couch.
Months later, it snows. The garden is bare. I get a stress fracture in my foot. You send me photos of the view from your new kitchen, the two of you smiling from your new sofa. You send other shots as well: an orange leaf on a trampled Queens sidewalk, a menagerie of green from a plant store, a narrow staircase at night.
Scrolling through my photos one day, I find the summer one of you. Your radiant skin, the never-ending sky. But there’s something that I hadn’t noticed before: a tall shadow off to the left. Taller than you. It takes a second for me to realize it’s my shadow (of course!) as I photographed you that day. How mesmerized I was. And now that I see both of us in the frame, I love the photo even more. Two women, years apart. Me: Newly sixty, watching, enamored. And you: Green, purple, vibrant.
Jamie Holland‘s work has appeared in Antietam Review, Baltimore Review, Brain Child, Electric Grace: Still More Fiction by Washington Area Women, Flash Fiction Magazine, Gargoyle, Literary Mama, The Palisades Review, Pithead Chapel, Potomac Review, Under the Gum Tree, WestWord and others. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2023 and Best Small Fictions in 2026. She lives with her husband in D.C.
Emerge Literary Journal 