coal-mine

The print was an old one made from a negative taken in the 1960__ of her parents in Sydney Mines, dancing with thrilled, excited expressions on their faces, in front of a classic car that had been a wedding gift at the time. Her mother__ hair, red back then, was held back by a blue handkerchief, and she was dressed in a billowing skirt and white blouse. Her father__ denim jeans and faded t-shirt were streaked with coal dust as he held her hands and spun her around in the front yard of their old clapboard house, yellow grass under their feet and a cobalt-blue sky with white clouds drifting above. Mandy could almost feel the late summer breeze as she gazed deeply into the print, watching the flamboyant colors come to life. She hung it up to dry on two wooden clothespins hanging from a string above her.

I pulled the sheet off their faces. Their faces were black with coal dust and didn't look like anything was wrong with them except they were dirty. The both of them had smiles on their faces. I thought maybe one of them had told a joke just before they died and, pain and all, they both laughed and ended up with a smile. Probably not true but but it made me feel good to think about it like that, and when the Sister came in I asked her if I could clean their faces and she said, "no, certainly not!" but I said, "ah, c'mon, it's me brother n' father, I want to," and she looked at me and looked at me, and at last she said, "of course, of course, I'll get some soap and water."When the nun came back she helped me. Not doing it, but more like showing me how, and taking to me, saying things like "this is a very handsome man" and "you must have been proud of your brother" when I told her how Charlie Dave would fight for me, and "you're lucky you have another brother"; of course I was, but he was younger and might change, but she talked to me and made it all seem normal, the two of us standing over a dead face and cleaning the grit away. The only other thing I remember a nun ever saying to me was, "Mairead, you get to your seat, this minute!

Good thing we weren't here when this happened," Fred added. "We'd be pancakes - DEAD ones!

Yeah, you__e right about having entire rooms full of film and photos_ in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage_ I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides_ I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that__ happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs,_ Alecto responded. __eople say that a time machine can__ be invented, but they__e already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world__ first time machines_ The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I__e been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to.