She Used to Be Catie

It’s June twenty-eighth

The house is filled with sunlight while nobody is home

The ground floor is clean, spacious, picturesque, dusty in the corners, a family's worth of shoes sit on a mat by the front door

There are many pictures of the same few people hung up on the walls, displayed on all available flat surfaces in packs of three or four

The older photos depict a family of four.

The older photos depict a teenage girl with her high school volleyball team, posing in polite smiles on some beach somewhere

The teenager is tan and smiling

There are large spaces between time periods

A snippet of two infants and their mother sits on a coffee table beneath a hung frame showing two smiling teenagers in cap and gown

The young man’s hair is bleached blonde in someone’s backyard, a jarringly unnatural red on a carousel, light brown at a funeral.

Everyone’s eyes become darker

There is a noticeably aged quality to every photo in the exhibition

The young boy gains weight

The girl does too, then loses it sometime after mom’s hair has begun to gray at the roots

The (real) smiles on the walls only come from faces whose adult teeth have not yet all arrived

My favorite shows two young kids laughing at a kitchen table covered in recently spilled chocolate milk

Those kids don’t really seem to be in many photos

There is a middle aged man in the older pictures.

He seems able to do two things: support children on his lap and stare miles out into a horizon no one else can see.

The kids can be seen cocking their small heads to study his predictable expressions

The newest picture frame still has a price sticker stuck on the stand

It shows three people, one fat, one old, one sad, eating burgers and fries together in the dining area of a fast food restaurant