MORE OR LESS

Art by _miiart_

“Ben?”

The fear in Liza’s voice made the hair at the back of my neck stand. I quickly put Gabe down in his crib and handed him his favorite rattle. After listening to him coo for a second or two, I walked out of the room, carefully making sure to lock the door before heading over to where I knew Liza would be standing: the wall facing the front door, where all our family pictures were hung.

Except they weren’t just family pictures anymore. They’d become something more, something…inexplicable.

For the last 3 weeks, the pictures had been changing. At first it was just the little things…a kid’s jacket added in the background of the picture my mom took of me during my first day in kindergarten. An old man’s fishing hat at the corner of the picture of my dad during his Tokyo trip. A pair of fashionable women’s sunglasses on top Liza’s head, apart from the ones she was wearing on the picture.

We would have put it down as details we never noticed before, except for the fact that those things suddenly started appearing in our house. The kid’s jacket, the one that no one in our house could use, since Gabe was just 6 months old and there were no other kids in our family. The old man’s fishing hat, the one that smelled of Tancho and tabako, that belonged to no one. And the pair of sunglasses that looked expensive as hell, and probably was, which Liza would never use, even if you paid her a month’s salary.

And then they began to appear. The defocused figure at the back of our anniversary dinner picture, the one that seemed to be photobombing us, except it seemed to be looming over us. And, in our family Christmas photo, the mysterious hand around Liza’s waist, the one we couldn’t account for, since everyone else’s hands were visible and properly posed.  There was even the shadow of a man that fell across Liza’s face, the one that wasn’t mine, since she was backlit but still, the shadow was there, the shadow that wasn’t there before.

“What is it, Liza?” I asked. “What’s there now? In which picture?”

“There isn’t anything new in the pictures” she whispered, her eyes transfixed on the wall in front of us.

I glanced over to her, while searching the pictures for anything new, anything unfamiliar. “But that’s good, right?”

She slowly turned her face towards me, with her eyes still riveted on the wall. “He’s missing” she breathed softly.

My eyes whipped back to the pictures. And there it was. In the picture from Gabe’s baptism, he was missing. The picture showed Liza still with her hands crossed at her chest, as if cradling something, but there was no Gabe.

Liza and I looked at each other in horror, as we realized there was neither cooing nor rattling coming from Gabe’s room. Suddenly, mysterious things appearing in their lives didn’t seem so bad anymore.