The morning of the fourth day I found my mother's photograph.Not lost exactly — I knew it was in my wallet, had always known, had put it there myself sometime in the first year after the accident when I was rebuilding the texture of my life from the outside in and had decided that having her face accessible was a form of anchor. But I hadn't looked at it properly in months, the way you stopped seeing things that were always present, and on the fourth morning when I was going through my wallet looking for the receipt from the small shop down the road I pulled it out and held it in both hands and looked at it for a long time.The fairground, she had told me once. Summer, when I was around ten. She had won something at one of the stalls, something small and plastic that I couldn't see in the photograph, and she was laughing with her whole face, the kind of laughing that closed your eyes and opened your mouth and made your shoulders shake, the kind that had nothing performed about it, ju
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