Snapshots by Bruce Johnson

At a certain point, I realized I wanted to have children but not to raise them. So I packed up and moved myself to a hotel room across town. My wife, Rosie, sent me pictures in the mail.  Our daughter Cynthia smiling against the wall, hair in a neat part down the side. Jacob in his crib, face soft and content with some happy dream. This is what you are missing, her notes said.

I wasn’t sure how she found me. I’d suspended my cell phone service and changed my email address. Nearest I could figure, she had called every hotel in the book, asking to be put through to my room and waiting for one that didn’t say it had no guest by that name. Two days before the first photo, the phone in my room let out a single sharp, angry ring and fell silent.

She didn’t call again, and she didn’t come to the hotel. She just sent these pictures, each one stranger than the last. I started to look forward to them, to seeing what she might see fit to send. Here was Jake in his high chair at the kitchen table, orange muck on his face and bib. Cynthia, the part in her hair now mussed, red-faced and screaming in the kitchen, waving a wooden spoon in the air. What a shot, I had to admire. I imagined my wife snapping the photo right then, mid-screaming-match, the nerve that took. This is what you are missing, the photos still said, red ink scrawled in block letters at the bottom.

Then came one of Rosie leaned back on a heap of pillows, spreading herself open wide, a look of tussled angry ecstasy on her face. Who’s holding the camera? she must have wanted me to wonder. In another she glared out at me, hands at her sides forming fists, nude but for a tampon string hanging out of her.

I eBayed an old camera and walked the hotel grounds with the strap around my neck, snapping pictures. I wanted something to send in return. The ice bucket in my room, plastic liner inside, holding a shallow pool of water from the night before. The laundry room they left open, white sheets spinning, the indifferent Romanian woman there reading a book. The teen at the front desk with acne like spider bites, the piece of carpet with a stain like blood, a dog relieving himself in front of my door. It got so I’d snapped hundreds of these, but nothing seemed to say what I wanted.

I called her just so she could hear my voice, how even it was, how it didn’t ask about who held the camera for her photo.

She sounded sleepy. “Who is it?” she said.

“Me. I thought I should call.”

Silence a moment while she considered this.

“The children miss you,” she said. “I can’t for the life of me tell you why.”

“And you?”

Here the line started to crackle. I tried to push the end of the cord more firmly into the receiver, thinking the connection was loose. She was saying something, but I couldn’t hear. Her voice was like a fighter pilot on his way down, spitting static at me.

“I can’t hear,” I said. “Are you yelling?”

I put the receiver down to press some buttons on the dock, to fiddle with the cord there. By the time I picked it up again, the line was dead.

“Rosie?” I said. “Rosie?”

I tried to fix it for a long time, plugging and unplugging the jack, shining the number pad with spit, pressing and unpressing the lever that hung it up, but whenever I listened to the line even the dial tone was raspy with static.

I took a picture of the phone to send to her, my way of apology. But then I couldn’t tell what it showed, and knew she wouldn’t be able to either: a phone fallen to disrepair despite all the best intentions, or a phone that would work just fine if her husband bothered to try it again.

Bruce Johnson is a PhD candidate in the University of Southern California Creative Writing program. His work appears or is forthcoming in Joyland, Cutthroat, The Adroit Journal, decomP, and The Able Muse, among other journals. He lives with his wife and two cats in Quito, Ecuador, where he is working on a novel.