Photograph

In our 60th anniversary photograph, he stands beside me in the garden, wearing his favorite dark suit. My face looks dreadful without powder; his looks fine, unshaven. He was still moving stray hair out of my face when the picture was taken. The pink hydrangeas behind us bend in the late-August breeze. The cat licks her paws, her head bent before us. The pink of her tongue rivals the high color of the hydrangeas. And then there is that dreadful atrocity that the photographer’s lens caught, the critical glimpse that put my husband away for the rest of his life: the limbs of the slaughtered, unnamable beasts, buried, recklessly, beneath the bushes. Once I wanted to visit him when he was rotting in that hot, dreary prison cell. I mean sixty years of blissful marriage without a single error. Who knows why he decided to butcher and bury my genetically engineered menagerie. My new beau tells me that burial site is enough ground for divorce.