Photographs lacking context offer numerous possible stories, and few photographs are more mysterious than those without a known author or time period. In every print issue of Don’t Take Pictures, a writer is presented with a found vintage photograph to use as inspiration for a micro-fiction story. In doing so, the photograph is given new meaning, and the truth of the image is subject to interpretation. To coincide with our our current issue’s theme (The Fiction Issue), we are looking back at some previously published stories.

The New Frontier
Christopher Farnsworth 

“A pack of Luckies and a suntan. It’s like she was auditioning for cancer,” his son says to his daughter as they look through the old albums. 

They don’t know he is on the stairs, listening. It’s not meant to be cruel. 

 Anyway. They weren’t Luckies. They were Kents.

They don’t know why he kept it. A camping trip, somewhere that’s probably been turned into a subdivision by now. His foot is in the shot. She wasn’t their mother then. They hadn’t even been invented yet.

They don’t know what it was like. Every day, the news was like a ticket for a seat on some kind of rocket to the future. When they talked about putting cities on the moon and under the seas. When flying cars would roll off the lines in Detroit. When they all had more money and more fun. When they only worried about the Russians, not the whole damned planet falling apart. 

And the music was better then, too. Just like every other old fart says. 

You can miss anything, he thinks. He never thought he’d get misty for the days of nuclear war, but there you go.

For him, this was the high-water mark. He remembers making love with her—corny, yeah, but that’s how it felt—that night. He kept opening his eyes to find her looking back at him, smiling. How much like a miracle that seemed.

There was a whole new world coming, and they would face it together.

He remembers that feeling every time he looks at her laughing in that picture. He’d give almost anything to remember what he said to make her laugh.

“It was a different time,” his daughter says, and turns the page.

Christopher Farnsworth is the author of six novels, including FLASHMOB and KILLFILE. His work has been translated into nine languages and published in more than a dozen countries, and optioned for film and TV. He lives in Los Angeles with his family.

This story first appeared in issue #7, Fall 2016