So last week, Rob over at Bighappyfunhouse.com started a short story contest called Tales From the Funhouse. He ran an old found photo, and asked everybody to come up with a story to go with the photo.

I didn’t think of a story right away, but I have been meaning to write a sestina, so I did. It didn’t win, but I’ve decided to share it with you here. It should maybe be noted, in case you should read this and wonder, that this is in no way autobiographical. Also, the word wrap messes things up a little bit, but you’ll get over it (copy and paste somewhere with a more lenient wordwrap if you must). Enjoy.

In a drawer in my old room, I found a photograph
of my father. He is standing in front of a shed, a man
with a skeptical face and an army uniform, his shadow
angling from his feet. In his hand, he grips a tabby cat,
which you can see just barely reflected in the shed’s window
behind him. It’s 1944, the year my father was sent to war.

It was not a good time for him, the second World War.
Not that it was a good time for anyone. There’s not a photograph
around that shows a happy face: the lowest of times for man
and his kind, when a dark and disturbing shadow
crept across the continents like a prowling cat
stalking its blurred reflection in a tinted window.

I’ve always seen my father that way, too, as through a dark window,
the brush of disheveled hair and those guarded eyes, at war
with himself and the world. This is the only photograph
I have left of him, but any others would look the same, my old man
in his wrinkled army uniform, half covered with shadow,
with all the mysteriousness and superiority of the modern house cat.

In the picture, one-handed and uncomfortably, he holds that cat,
and I’m reminded of my mother. I’d see them through the kitchen window,
each fighting on various fronts, his hours and job, her dinner and dishes, a war
between my own kin, never fatal but always fighting. Photograph
the both of them, and you’d see a marriage, but I saw a woman and a man,
each dealing with their own darknesses, each with their own shadow.

I’ll name them, if you want, though it hardly matters. My father’s shadow
was the bottle. My mother’s was her love for him. Yes, though loyal as a cat,
(not very) she loved him as I did. There were times when he seemed free of it, windows
and doors inbetween walls of turmoil and depression, when the war
broke and we found that we could be family, that we were family. A photograph
of that would show you only a little of what I remember, what my father was, what kind of man.

I don’t mean to say there weren’t problems, but the greatest blessing my old man
gave us is that despite his drinking, his failures, despite his shadows,
we were happy. I see him standing there, in the photo with that cat,
and I search for how much it hurt him. I look for a window
into how much he sacrificed for us, how much he suffered to hide his own war
to try and give us peace. That’s what I look for in my photograph.

And yet all I have left is a photograph of a man and memories drowned in shadow.
And I can just barely see, with cat eyes through a window, a glimpse of the war he fought for us.