The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

by Ken Liu

[A] photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. —SUSAN SONTAG

She has nothing to turn to, to trust, to lean on but herself; her angry, frightened, trembling self. She is naked and alone, as she has always known she is, as we all are.

My darling, my child, my connoisseur of sesquipedalian words and convoluted ideas and meandering sentences and baroque images, while the sun is asleep and the moon somnambulant, while the stars bathe us in their glow from eons ago and light-years away, while you are comfortably nestled in your blankets and I am hunched over in my chair by your bed, while we are warm and safe and still for the moment in this bubble of incandescent light cast by the pearl held up by the mermaid lamp, you and I, on this planet spinning and hurtling through the frigid darkness of space at dozens of miles per second, let’s read.

There are many ways to say I love you in this cold, dark, silent universe, as many as the twinkling stars.

But the past is consumed even as it is seen. The photons enter the lens, and from there they strike an imaging surface, be it your retina or a sheet of film or a digital sensor, and then they are gone, stopped dead in their paths. If you look but don’t pay attention and miss a moment, you cannot travel farther out to catch it again. That moment is erased from the universe, forever.