With Smudge In Yard

So you start out looking for old dog photos. There’s usually at least one in those big cardboard flea-market boxes full of postcards and yellowed maps and pictures of somebody’s forgotten relatives. You always take the 10 or 20 minutes to look and there it is.

The problem is, there are these other pictures waiting there too, oddities you feel fairly certain no one else will appreciate, and because they only cost 50 cents or maybe the dealer throws them in for free, you take them like a person who goes to the pound for just one puppy and comes home with a litter, afraid of what will happen if you leave even one behind. This is how you end up owning photographs of carefully posed chickens, old ladies smoking pipes, families cheerfully picnicking in gothic cemeteries. And this. What the heck is this?

Let me start by saying I found this in my favorite booth in my favorite antiques store in Muncie. (I am very likely the youngest person by at least 20 years to have a favorite Muncie antiques booth.) I had flipped past it by a few photos before it registered as something more than a rather mundane portrait. Wait, was that a face over the girl’s shoulder on the left? I flipped back, I looked more closely. Holy crap, was that four faces?

Tricks of shadow, double exposure, some old-fashioned hoax — no doubt there is a reasonable explanation. But reasonable explanations aren’t that fun, and this photo, with its strangely bemused faces melting into the foliage, into each other, is fun in a very creepy, ghosty kind of way.

Happy Halloween, and thanks for reading With Smudge in Yard. Next time I’m back to dogs, I promise.