Love, Lose, And Repeat

Frames

    People in pictures never change. Across the room, starring at her, was a picture in an eight-by-ten frame of some strangers.
    A man and a woman on a blue blanket are outside in weather like you see in postcards. They kneel by a basket of food. Two children--younger girl, older boy, sit behind them spooning potato salad into hungry mouths at a park in mostly summer but about to be fall. They have on small stained t-shirts and wrinkled jeans with running creases. Dave has on an a real smile, one she had not seen in a while.
    They asked if they could play on the swings just seconds before. After the picture was taken by more strangers, Dave put his hand on her knee and went for the chicken wings. The kids were off running to seesaws and into the sun and she was happy.
    She sat in an old easy chair, reclining. On the rocks Bourbon in her hand, then down her throat. Her fingers caressed a cigarette. It clung to life as ashes contorted then consumed it. Smoke climbed up her glowing yellow lamp: the only light in the living room. The kids were out all night now.
    Dave came on weekends. He threw struggling teenagers into his mid-life crisis Lincoln MKZ and waved at the dog from the driveway. When she asked to talk to him, from the front porch, he asked: "What could you possibly say that I haven't heard before?" or "What do you want now? I already paid your alimony." They became perpendicular lines that met once then went off in shooting, separate directions. They became games like: who can make the kids like them more. But the kids, they hated everyone but the kids in their school's cafeteria, and they hated most of them too.
    She was once a wife who left her friends to be with him, he was once a husband who left her so he could be alone. There she was, alone, counting wishes burned into cigarette butts, the days until her kids go to college, and the freckles on faces of people in pictures. Her cigarette was out, ice was melted. The people who sat on a picnic blanket, laughing because they loved each other, died a long time ago. They are preserved only on a piece of paper.