Scoff all you want, cynics. In order to publish the following piece in Fate Magazine, I had to sign an affidavit swearing to the authenticity of the facts as I had presented them. That declaration was then stamped by a notary and sent off, a document attesting to either unexplained phenomna or a glaring derangement of my young mind.

As a child, I would repeat the line over and over, a mantra to keep bad thoughts away and to reassure myself of what was real.

“I am standing to the left of dad. My brother stands to his right. I  am standing to the left of dad. My brother stands to the right. I am standing to the left of dad. My brother stands…”

I was eight or nine at the time and my father was not around to hear the insane repetition. He died when I was six years old and came to exist only in the photograph that so vexed me. That simple framed photo that hung on a living room wall: a father and his two sons, standing in front of the house in their Sunday bests, smiling against the sun.

I stood to his left, I am sure of it because for years the photo on the wall revealed as much. A blond younger me posing in a royal blue suit and smirking because I was unaware that the image would come to haunt me.

He died of a brain aneurysm, my father. A mailman, he had taken the day off to shingle the roof of our modest home. We found him up there in the afternoon, unconscious and snoring the snore of the dying. He never woke up. A day later, he was gone.

It was perhaps two years later when something funny happened within the photograph. I used to pause to study it while passing from one room to another. I always liked the way the three of us smiled together at the camera, like conspirators in some silly Sunday caper.

And then one day, it was different. That one day, so chilling for me to remember 32 years later, the photograph revealed the young me standing to the right of my father, my brother to the left.

It’s easy to dismiss the fancies of children as oddities of an underdeveloped mind. But I knew then and I know now, that the positions within that picture had changed. I rebelled against the idea as a child because to accept that figures could swap places in a still photograph was to accept that fantastic things, irrational and  unexplained, might occur at any time.

I ran to my mother and told her what had happened. She examined the photograph and told me, as any adult would explain to a child, that if the picture showed me standing to my father’s right, than certainly that’s how it had been and always would be.

Only she was wrong. Weeks later, the boys changed sides again. Once more, I stood to my father’s left. No variation in the happy smiles of those depicted, no other changes at all. Just that swap from one side to the other that produced in me a fever of horror and many sleepless nights.

That’s when the chanting started. “I am standing to the left of my father…”

Only that would not always be true.  A year or so after the first change so shocked me, the tiny boy in the blue suit moved once again to the right.

I was an imaginative child and witnessing this strange event nearly crippled me. I began to doubt other things as they were presented to me and I developed a creeping unease that phantasms knew of my wariness and delighted in tormenting me.

I began to think of my dead father, proud and beaming with his sons, as the executioner of this strange manipulation. Was this some form of punishment that afflicted a young boy’s mind instead of his flesh? Was he trying to tell me something? Or was some other entity, a cruel and clever one, responsible for this fright?

The subtle haunting continued. I went to such lengths to avoid the photograph and made such a clamor about it, my mother eventually took it down. The last I saw of it – through the crevice between fingers held to my face – I was standing to the right of my father.

I’m all grown up now and while I’m open to the strangeness that occasionally leaks into the world, I do not dwell on it and I never seek it.

I visited my mother a week ago. She had stumbled upon the old photograph in a box tucked into the basement. Back it went onto the wall where it had hung decades earlier. I paused when passing, surprised to see it again, pricked into weird memories. The boys were still smiling with their father, now long dead. Smiling against the sun in their Sunday bests.

And I was to the left of my father once more.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 12:46 am and is filed under Etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.