The Woman in the Old Photographs

Strange Feelings

The first time I noticed her, she was standing beside my mother in a faded photograph.

They were young—much younger than I had ever known either of them. My mother had one arm around her best friend, and both women were laughing at something beyond the edge of the frame. Their hair moved in the wind, their smiles were unguarded, and the sunlight had washed the picture in a pale golden haze.

The woman beside my mother would eventually become my stepmother.

But that was still many years away.

Whenever the cousins gathered and somebody brought out the old family albums, we inevitably found another photograph like it. My mother and my future stepmother at a birthday party. My mother sitting beside her on the front steps of a house. The two of them dressed for some college event, smiling as though adulthood were a simple road stretching clearly ahead.

Each discovery gave me the same strange feeling.

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Nimra Khan — original fiction published on RapidTale.