Photographs don't burn like paper. I learned that the day he left, when I sat feeding the woodstove in the back room with all the paper I could find that held a trace of him. I burned every picture with him in it: him running that 10k last year; the two of us fishing when I was five. I burned him holding me as a baby, my big sister looking on; him holding her high over his head, with all his hair, looking young; all their wedding pictures except one of my mother alone by the lake, looking empty and beautiful, like a model. I burned him glaring at the camera in his unused passport pictures. I burned him as a child,his big eyes and crooked schooltie. It took me a long wet afternoon. I watched all his faces flaming blue and curling, losing colour until all that was left was a thin sheet of ash holding the imprint of his image. I never got in trouble for it, though she must have missed them. Nobody said anything about it after that day.

I used to really wish he'd die. I thought that would be easier. We would be orphan kids then, half orphans. Kids whose dad had died, like Kathy Sheridan at school. There would have been care and sympathy on fathers' days, proper pity instead of that other thing you get when you're a kid from a broken home, a welfare kid, a problem kid. And we could have buried him. She would have stopped watching the door for him then, stopped waiting. Sometimes, like around his birthday, or Christmas, we'd both be wound up, Mum and I, she wanting a letter or a phonecall to say where he was, when he was coming back. I would be hoping for terrible news of a crash, or even a suicide. Nothing ever came.

My sister thought she saw him on TV once, in the background at a race meeting in Doncaster. His brother visited from Germany when I was twelve, and we all thought there were things he wasn't telling us. But he never came back. My Mum sent him a card every Christmas, and always asked if there was news. He sent one back with angels most years. Or a star. No clues.

It's been years now. I've gone from home. It's okay now, I know he's not coming back. I still don't know why he left, though. He left a note, but I burned it too soon. That really burned — blazed and faded and I can't remember the words, It's completely gone. Photographs burn differently. I can't get his face out of my head.

Sheila Killian lives in Limerick with her husband and three children. She teaches for a living, and writes for other reasons. She has published in The Shop, Brevity, Smokelong Quarterly, Eclectica, The Irish Times, Revival, and others. She won the 2005 Molly Keane Creative Writing Award, and the 2001 Strokestown Poetry Prize for political satire.