When I asked about the photographs long afterward, my aunt said that the box of images didn’t exist and I must have imagined the whole thing. A few years later, I asked again, and she acknowledged the box’s existence but said it had vanished. Photographs, which are supposed to serve as the anchors of an objective past, are as unstable as everything else that constitutes my paternal family history. My father and aunt are gone now, their parents gone long before, and there is no one to repeat or contradict the few scattered stories they told. Each story came as a surprise, an utterance not to be
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