You say, Babe, lemme take sexy photos of you.

You want me on a four-poster bed, to catch my skin in the afternoon glow. I’m as good at picking a man as I am the best checkout lane at the grocery so you’ve become a guy who photographs more midwestern models than I can figure. My recon is partial, the evidence incomplete. Sometimes I wave the receipts I have, stop you in your tracks, like you don’t know how light internet stalking works. I say, Damn babe why do it like this?

You’re building your portfolio with college girls whose media accounts overflow with bikini photos from spring break and black and white studio sessions exposing concave bellies, naked under the jean jackets. They’re all looking for a decent photographer to launch them into runway jobs on a coast and you’re perfecting the craft with your Leica. This is your passion now. Those girls want to outgrow the Big 10 bros and their hard seltzer on the summer lake boats. Those girls want high fashion, Negroni on Lake Cuomo. I just want you.

You say, It’s all practice. I’m still not very good. You say, Loosen up, this has nothing to do with us. You say, They don’t want me anyway.

Everything’s light meters, Portra 400 film, solvent developers. It’s model meet-ups in old mansions and community camera nights at breweries downtown and it’s Can’t I have new friends? It’s studio sessions and This is collaborative, the model wanted topless shots like that.

I say, Okay babe shoot me, because if you can’t beat them, join them.

I like the soft set up, the white sheets on the bed, the dust motes floating like nostalgia of a life that’s never existed where my body isn’t a prop to please a man. I can be fun, and so I make the photo session a game of chance, popping a quarter into my mouth and manipulating the outline of a man centuries-dead with my tongue until the metal’s hot. I spit it out into my palm and do a little sleight of hand, caress your hair, pull it out from behind your ear dry and shiny. I drop it down the front of my top.

I ask, Do you wonder if a woman could ever have power like a president, govern you into behaving?

You don’t answer. I take your direction. You depress the shutter.

When I shift my body one way, it’s Heads: You smell different when you come home from your business trips to Cincinnati. Maybe they include visits to another family, a kindergarten-teacher wife and four-year old twins. Maybe she loves the condo but wishes you were home more often to start looking at houses in a better school district. It gets hectic when you’re away all the time. There’s no way to know if the twins are good in restaurants or run wild and bang spoons under the tables, if the clang of metal convinces their mother they’ll be musicians one day. You’re always humming a random tune.

I shift another way, and it’s Tails: We’re at the beginning again, in a love-haze, eating pancakes at that cafe in Vermont, winterlight carving wide plank floors. When I jump rope inside our apartment because I’m trying to stay slim, I accidentally catch the overhead light and pull it down, slicing my arm open. We call your mother for advice about stitches while you wipe blood with such tenderness. Over the years my scar has faded to a pale pink you don’t notice anymore. You depress the shutter.

When my father got his first Leica, he took me and my sister to the beach at the lake all summer to be his models.

He’d say, Girls, wade in there, make some ripples. We wore purple bathing suits over our goosebumped skin, sometimes even jean shorts, as if wet denim might keep us warm. Strange things laced our ankles and we hopped on our toes in the mud and smiled for him.

He’d say, Girls, make something sparkle! My sister hated wet hair, and I pretended not to notice her tears mixing with the water I threw around us. Our father stood close to shore with the sun behind him, his face a black box. But at dawn, in our movement, in our laughing, in the water flying past my fingers, the world was ours, and we could not be contained.

About the author:

Part of our Summer 2025 Issue. New stories, poems, and essays now through August 31, 2025.

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