ABSTRACT
“No good will come of keepin’ all this mess packed up in a box. Take what you want, and don’t get ornery if somebody wants to take it from you somewhere down the line. Keepin’s only good for givin’.” Patrick’s maternal grandmother, oozing Appalachia, murmured this one fall while they were looking together through her beat-up bridal trunk, now full of pictures—old photographs not sealed in frames or albums, just thrown into a makeshift pyre of people and places forgotten. He found a picture of his mother asleep on a bunk when she was fourteen. It was the only time he’d seen his mother sleeping. So he put the picture in his pocket, took it home, and hung it near his bed.
