The Orchard Eats the Family Portraits

How it begins

My grandmother lost her face between breakfast and lunch.

In the photograph, I mean.

At breakfast she stood beside the orchard gate, one hand on my father's shoulder. By lunch, the space beneath her hat was a pale oval.

I checked the scan I had made the previous evening.

Her face was there.

I checked the original again.

Gone.

Outside the window, Rafi was carrying fruit toward the house in a shallow crate.

The orchard had not borne anything worth eating for twelve years.

Now the trees bowed beneath dark peaches.

I met him at the back door.

"What changed?"

He looked at the album in my hand.

Then at the crate.

"Who is it?"

"That's not an answer."

"It matters."

I showed him the photograph.

He did not seem surprised.

That frightened me more than the blank face.

Rafi set down the fruit.

One peach had a small pale hollow near its stem, shaped almost like the oval in the photograph.

"Don't cut them," he said.

I had not intended to.

Behind us, my phone rang.

My aunt's name appeared on the screen.

"Nina," she said before I could speak, "have you started on the orchard albums?"

"Yes."

"Then stop."

Her voice was steady in a way I remembered from family emergencies nobody later admitted had happened.

"Why is Grandma disappearing?"

A long silence followed.

Outside, a branch struck the window.

Not hard.

As though asking to be noticed.

My aunt took a breath.

"Because somebody has decided they can afford to miss her."

I looked at the peaches.

There were too many for one photograph.

Too many for one person.

On the table, the album opened under its own weight.

A wedding picture lay across the center.

In the back row, my own face had begun to fade.