The Tin That Wanted More

Every December, I drag the red metal tin down from the highest shelf in my closet. It’s dented in one corner, and the painted angel on the lid has faded to a ghost of gold and blue. My mother gave it to me the last Christmas we had together, still warm from the popcorn she’d made. After I’d eaten every last kernel, I filled it with photographs. Not the good ones, not the ones in frames. Just the overflow, the candid shots from camping trips, the cousins at the lake, my dad balancing a fish, my mom laughing with her mouth full of watermelon.

I never got around to making the album. Life got busy, and the tin sat under my desk, gathering dust. But sometimes, on slow Sunday afternoons, I’d pull it out and go through the pictures, telling myself I’d organize them soon. That’s when I first noticed it: the tin seemed less full than it should be. I’d ripple my fingers through the glossy rectangles, counting the ones I knew should be there, but there were gaps. I dismissed it as my own forgetfulness. I’d misplaced a few, perhaps slid them into a drawer by accident. But as months passed, the loss became impossible to ignore. I’d open the tin expecting a jumble of memories, only to find three or four lonely photos at the bottom, like fallen leaves.

The photos themselves began to change. The ones that remained felt slicker, colder, as if laminated in a way they hadn’t been before. And in some, the faces were wrong. In a picture of my cousin’s birthday, her mouth was open wider than I remembered, showing too many teeth. In another, the sky in the background was darker, swallowing the trees.

Last Christmas Eve, I finally resolved to put the remaining photos into albums. I took off the lid, and the tin was nearly empty, just a single photograph lying face up. It was a picture of my mother taken at the edge of a cornfield, the one where she’s waving at the camera. But now she wasn’t waving. Her hand was pressed flat against the glass, palm out, as if pushing against the boundary of the image, and her face was pressed close, mouth slightly open, eyes wide with something like hunger.

I slammed the tin shut and shoved it to the back of the shelf. I didn’t open it again for six months. Then, one sticky August night, I dreamed I heard a faint scratching from the closet, like a mouse in the walls. I woke to a full moon and a metallic clatter. The tin was on the floor, its lid off, and scattered around it were dozens of photographs, more than I’d ever had. They were all pictures of me, taken at different points in my life. But in each one, the background was wrong. My college graduation photo showed the crowd wearing black veils. My wedding photo showed the flowers all rotted. And the one from my mother’s funeral, a picture I’d never taken, showed my own face in the coffin, my eyes wide open.

I don’t know how the tin does it. Maybe it feeds on what we hold dear, growing fat on the images we love. Last week, I opened the door a crack, and I saw the angel on the lid had turned its painted eyes toward me, and the smile had become a toothy grin. I’m writing this from my bedroom, the door locked, the tin in the corner. It hums, a low, vibrating sound, as if it’s digesting all the faces I’ve forgotten. There are no more pictures left to lose. Only me.