I remember shaking the Polaroid picture with both hands, then holding it up into the wind that filled the ship's sails, gripping tight so it didn't blow overboard.

I was a child, and watching the photograph develop was magic to me, something a man in a tuxedo and top hat made happen with a wave of his wand, a magic word, and the help of his beautiful assistant, who he later slices in half inside a box, both disappearing in a plume of smoke.

I remember the flash blinding me, I can hear the gears grinding the picture out of the camera, and the slap of the water on the hull.

My mother waved her hand over the picture and said, "Abracadabra!" On her command, forms took shape, yellow outlines, shadows, triangles, then an invisible hand painted the details, the curves of her hair, the lines of our smiles, and the color of the sunset sank in, deep and dark. There we were, arms around each other. It's the only picture I have of us embracing.

I remember the salty spray, her hair whipping in the wind. I remember him taking the photo, always behind the camera. When he left, he left no evidence he was ever there, other than the empty space he once occupied, and many out-of-focus memories. It split her in half and the person she had been vanished with him.

Now in all my memories of her, she wears the smile from the Polaroid, an imagined past altered by the photo the way the rising moon alters the tide, the way practiced poses, and camera-ready smiles seduce emotions like mermaids on the rocks.

I try to remember his face but all that returns is the feeling of his beard, me tugging it with both hands, and his perfect white teeth shining through all that scruff when he smiled. His beard was a rough sea of dark curls tossing ships toward dragons, like on an ancient map from before the world was round, where there is nothing past the horizon.

Robb Todd's fiction has been or will be published in The Beat, Two With Water, and Six Sentences. Visit his Web site, robbtodd.com.