The Photograph That Aged
歳をとる写真
By the third morning, I had begun to photograph the house, hoping to prove myself still sane.
On the shelf stood an old family in which, , I myself seemed to appear.
The woman wearing my face had been standing among strangers for what looked like several decades.
Each day since my arrival, that photographed version of me has been quietly growing steadily older.
Her hair, dark on the first morning, has been greying visibly before my tired waking eyes.
She looks far older now than the anxious face I still meet in the bathroom mirror.
The house, it seems, has been ageing me inside the frame while curiously sparing my body.
I have been comparing the two of us each dawn, measuring how much time I have left.
Yesterday her hands were smooth; today they are far more than my own could ever be.
She has been watching me from the glass with an expression I am slowly learning to .
It is the look of someone who knows exactly how this slow, quiet story is going to end.
I tried hiding the inside a drawer, face down, beneath a folded woollen winter blanket.
By evening it had returned to the shelf, the woman inside older still, and patiently waiting.
Photographs elsewhere in the house have been changing too, though far more slowly than mine.
My grandmother, in her wedding picture, has grown younger, as if trading her years across to me.
The two portraits now seem to meet , our ages sliding silently past one another.
I have been sleeping less each night, afraid the ageing quickens whenever I close my eyes.
This morning the photographed woman had lifted one hand, pressing it flat against the inner glass.
Her lips had parted, as though she had been trying, for days, to warn me of something.
I leaned close and, for the very first time, heard the faint voice behind the frame.
"Stop counting the mornings," she whispered; "the counting is precisely how the house keeps you."
Far older than any warning, though, was the cold fear already settling deep into my chest.
For I had been counting, , every single day since the iron key first found my hand.
And the more mornings I have been counting, the fewer, somehow, always seem to remain.
Tonight I will not sleep, yet I know the woman in the glass will age .