The Inch Between Them

by D K Daniels

He found the photograph under a ribbon the color of old sky.

It lay at the bottom of a shoebox that had once carried a pair of leather boots to a life that was mostly standing on factory floors, on pier planks, in kitchens where you waited for kettles to boil. The shoebox had softened with the years, its corners bruised to a roundness. Inside: grocery receipts turned sugar-brown, a hymn card, three hairpins, a wooden button, a ticket stub with the date rubbed thin, and the picture.

Evan held it by the edges. Two boys stood shoulder to shoulder in their shirtsleeves and heavy denim, flat caps at a tilt. They were younger than the paper made them look—eighteen, maybe—though everything in the old chemist's print gave weight to their faces. Their hips touched. One boy had his cheek canted just a little toward the other as if he had been turning to say something when the flash startled him. The other boy's jaw was set too calmly for it to be luck. They weren't smiling; they wore that earnest half-solemn expression people put on for a camera when they've been warned a dozen times that it steals something.

What it had stolen, if anything, was only their secret: that inch of closeness.

Evan's grandmother, Mag, was downstairs, making tea loud enough to be heard through the ceiling. "Find anything?" she called up the stairwell, voice like a bell muffled by wool.

"Just dust," he lied, already slipping the photograph into his back pocket the way teenagers hide cigarettes. He didn't know why he hid it, only that the boys looked like they'd asked him to. He pressed the picture to his leg and felt its cool hold. When he went down, Mag passed him a mug without looking up, steam fogging the window where gulls tore at the tide line beyond Newhaven's sea wall.

He meant to ask her. He didn't. He kept the picture like an ember.

That night in his room, with the lamplight peeled back low, he made their names without knowing: boy on the left with the plan drawn in the way his mouth did not quite soften—R. Boy on the right with the eyes that never settled on the lens, always sliding toward R's sleeve as if drawn by a string—K.

He slept badly, dreamed of salt.

Newhaven had always been a city that faced what could undo it.

Storms slammed the mouth of the bay as if they were owed. The wind scissored down the long streets and came back with the laughter of people who had gone ahead and built anyway. In 1926—when the photograph must have been taken—dock cranes wrote their rusted lowercase letters against the morning. The Merrick & Sons cannery stank of fish and brine and metal filings. The boys who worked there ran feral after the midday bell, their palms rough as rope, their shoulders already taking the stoop their fathers wore. On summer fair days the ferris wheel stalled long enough at the top for the brave ones to spit and count to see where it would land. A traveling photographer set up his tripod by the penny arcade. For ten cents, you could take a piece of yourself home.

Kit Merrick came off shift with fish scale in the lines of his wrists and hunger in the rest of him. He met Rowan Hale by the loading dock, where the shadow stayed all afternoon, and you could hear yourself think. Rowan had a cigarette he never lit, and a way of leaning that suggested he was never burdened.

"You're late," Kit said. He said it with a smile, which is another way of saying it didn't matter.

"Caught a crate," Rowan said. "Loose rope. Would've taken me with it if I were smaller."

"You're the size you are," Kit said.

Rowan shrugged. He had shoulders like he had borrowed them from a man and meant to give them back when he was done. "You hear about the fair?" he asked, toeing a dark crescent into the damp sawdust.

"Clara won a goldfish."

"Not that."

"What then?"

"Photographs," Rowan said, like he was saying a word in a language he hadn't decided to learn. "Ten cents. Posed. Against a painted sea that looks worse than ours."

"How do you know it looks worse if you haven't seen it?"

"I can imagine," Rowan said, and when he said a thing like that, it made Kit want to make less of the world so that Rowan had space enough to put his imagining.

"It'll be silly," Kit said.

Rowan watched him. The part of him that didn't laugh often reached the soft edges of his eyes. "It'll be proof."

"Of what?"

"This," Rowan said, motioning at Kit without touching him. "That we were here at all."

Kit pressed his tongue between his teeth and looked out past the cranes. "You want our faces in a box under someone's bed?"

"I want them somewhere the damp won't find them," Rowan said. "Somewhere my father can't."

The mention of his father hung there like a torn net. Mr. Hale drank pebbles and spat glass. Kit knew the stories. He'd heard them told like weather: factual, unpreventable.

He said, softer, "He can't take what isn't in your hands."

Rowan had that cigarette again. He rolled it between his fingers like he was warming a seed. "He takes the days I owe him," he said. "The hours. He takes the plan my mother made when she had me, and he puts his thumb on it. He would take the part of me that keeps you in it, if he could find it."

"And could he?" Kit asked.

Rowan met his eyes, a thing he didn't do often. "No."

They went to the fair.

The photographer's booth was a low tent with a flap propped by a broom handle. Inside, the painted backdrop too blue. A woman in a mended dress with a collar crisp as a forgiveness sat behind the counter. The photographer himself was a man whose hair had admitted defeat, the bones of his face listing like ships. He had pupils like pinheads. He had seen all of it and loved none of it, yet he kept it anyway.

"Two," Rowan said.

"What kind of two?" the man asked without interest.

"Just two," Kit said, and the woman's mouth twitched as if that was a kind of answer.

"Do you want the sea?" the man asked. "Or the roses? Or the veranda with the wicker chair?"

"What are wicker chairs for?" Rowan asked.

"Waiting," the man said.

Rowan looked at Kit. "Sea," he decided. "It's a lie less obvious."

They stood before the backdrop, between scuffed tape marks on the ground. The photographer lifted his hands and lowered them like a conductor. "Shoulders together," he said, "chins level, stand like you belong to yourselves."

Rowan shifted. Kit moved with him. Their sleeves brushed and stayed. Kit could feel the breath come out of Rowan and, because it came out, he knew it had been there.

"Look at me," the man said, though he was talking to the shape of them and not to their faces. "Don't blink. Don't change your mind. Think of something you cannot say where anyone can hear you and put it in your eyes."

Rowan went quiet in the way a hillside goes quiet before snow falls. Kit swallowed. He thought of the way Rowan's wrist looked under river water. He thought of the hollow under Rowan's jaw where the cap never shaded right. He thought, I have not yet lived long enough to see anything past this.

The flash bucked. A moment passed, and then I returned.

"Names?" the photographer asked, already bored by the miracle.

"Hale," Rowan said.

"Merrick," Kit said.

"First names?" the woman asked, writing in a ledger whose pages were warping from the damp even now, the salt always in the air.

"Rowan," Rowan said.

"Kit," Kit said. Then, as if buying a button, "Christopher."

The woman carefully wrote Rowan Hale and Christopher (Kit) Merrick in tidy ink that did not know it would outlast their bodies. The photographer's fingers, stained in the nail beds with developer, printed the wet square and clipped it to a line, where it hung like laundry, a small, private weather.

"You can collect in an hour," the woman said.

Outside, the sky was wide and workman-gray. It spat a little. A man shuffled by with a sack of stale buns to sell for pennies. A ring toss dinged. Someone cursed, and someone laughed in the same voice. Rowan and Kit walked the perimeter of the green until they came barreling, breathless, up against their courage.

They stopped under the glare of the bare bulb over the penny arcade. Kit felt the need to speak, but failed to form the words. They had time. Rowan reached for the rail and found Kit's hand there first; their fingers shuffled and fit in the way that innocent things do before someone names them and takes them away.

Rowan squeezed, not hard. "We'll get it," he said. "And then I'll put it where I put things I want the world to think I've lost."

"Where is that?"

Rowan smiled like a man forced to remember he knows how. "In the lining," he said. "Inside the inside of my coat. A secret with its own pocket."

"That's not a pocket," Kit said.

"It will be after I make one."

Kit felt the laugh start in him like warmth. The laugh, like so many things, was something he could not risk bringing to completion in public. He swallowed it and let it change him anyway.

When they went back for the photograph, the woman slid the print toward them as if it were something she had cooked. The corners were sharp enough to pose a threat. Rowan held it by two edges; Kit took the other two, and for a heartbeat, they both had all of it. The face in the picture—Rowan's—wore a care he had not yet learned and never would forget. Kit looked like he knew a joke and wouldn't tell it because telling it would make it less true.

"You look," Rowan said, finally, and passed the square to Kit.

Kit looked, but he heard the rain change direction and the music at the carousel go thin. He felt his life narrow to a point of light and then widen to include, without apology, the boy beside him. He wanted to say it, and because wanting is adjacent to not saying, he didn't.

Rowan leaned closer, their caps nearly knocking. "Keep it," he said. "I'll make the pocket. You, keep it."

"I'll lose it," Kit said, which was the truth about everything.

"I'll find it," Rowan said.

They wrapped the photograph in the hymn card—Blessed be the tie that binds—and slid it into Kit's cap, against his head, as if the hard part of him needed the reminder.

Kit kept it.

He kept it through the week of fever when his sister took to bed and his mother said prayers that sounded like the inventory of a cupboard bare of anything except hope. He kept it when Mr. Merrick put his hand on Kit's shoulder, once, heavy, and said, without looking, "Don't go where I can't get you out." He kept it after the foreman at the cannery offered extra hours, and then he repeated the offer, as if wanting them were a test. He kept it the night he and Rowan drew a map on the back of a grocery receipt and wrote at the top of the map, immodestly, Our Plan.

Our plan ran a jagged line from the docks up past the rail station, around the long street where men rolled barrels, and out onto the road north. It advised them to take water, to keep to the hedgerows, to write when they could, even if the letters had nowhere to arrive. It reminded them to look back once but not twice. Our plan was something boys wrote when they were eighteen, and no one had yet exhaled on their hope to put it out.

Kit folded Our Plan until it was the size of a thumbnail on Rowan's right hand and tucked it behind the photograph in the cap. The cap was becoming less clothing and more confession.

The trouble was that the world didn't adhere to the terms they had made. Mr. Hale found work he hated for wages he would have hated more if he could think of it as hate and not as the grind that made mornings into the next mornings. When he drank, he made of his resentment a god, and he worshipped until he blacked out. Mrs. Hale had eyes like a thrown stone and a laugh like a bell heard through water. She saw her son and didn't say a word.

"Rowan," she said once in a low room, "the kettle's boiling over," and with the same inflection she might have said, Be careful with the only thing you own.

Kit stood at the sink, cleaning a mess that always remade itself. He listened to the kettle whistle and the quiet that followed it. The Hales lived six doors from the cannery and five from the river. The river listened to everything and gave nothing away.

"It isn't right," Mr. Hale said that night, to no one and to both of them. "A man lives and for what? For other men to pocket what he brings home? For other men to whisper about the way he walks? For his son to take a day off?" His voice had a crack in it that wouldn't be repaired.

Rowan didn't speak. Kit felt their plan curl at the edges.

After, they walked the long way around, down by the salt sheds where the air had been salted and dried for fifty years. The sheds breathed old weather. Kit put his shoulder to Rowan's as if he could stop the lean of the world. "He doesn't know," Kit said.

"He knows everything that isn't precise," Rowan said. "He knows the absence of anything he wishes to forbid."

"We can go north," Kit said.

"I can't leave my mother," Rowan said, the first time he had said the truth plain. "Not yet."

They had not yet built a home and waited in it.

The city, that autumn, took a beating. Storms came in with their shoulders hunched. The tide pulled itself up and over. Barrels tumbled down Market Row and were seen two days later at the south pier, where boys on their lunch breaks balanced on ropes to haul them out. The Merrick & Sons cannery shut for three days to let the floorboards dry out. In church, men prayed in embarrassed voices. Women made sandwiches out of the bread saved for guests who never came.

Kit spent a day nailing boards. A plank leapt and split his eyebrow. He bled a river, made a sound like he'd been surprised, and sat down on the step with his cap in his lap and his face in his hands. That would have been the day to lose the photograph. He didn't. Rowan knelt between Kit's knees and pressed a rag to Kit's head and said, "Hold still," like a promise he would keep until he could not.

"Does it look bad?" Kit asked.

"It makes you look like you were brave," Rowan said.

"I wasn't brave."

"Then it makes you look like you were lucky," Rowan said, and, because luck is the brother of love, they both laughed.

Rowan's thumb, cleaning blood from Kit's temple, paused. The air in the little gap between them went sharp. Rowan's mouth twitched as if it were an instrument he hadn't practiced. He looked at the red on his thumb, then at Kit's face, then at the cap held against Kit's chest like a shield. He had practiced not asking.

"Do you keep it with you?" he asked, and there was exactly one thing he could have meant.

"Yes," Kit said, and there was no use pretending he meant anything else.

Rowan nodded.

"Me too," he said then, and opened his coat, and showed the pocket he had made in the lining, crude stitches like a boy trying to become his mother. Inside, for a second, Kit saw nothing. Then he saw a corner of another photograph—not the same, older, a strip of paper with two faces cut half off. Mr. Hale, as a boy with his brother, maybe, standing where the harbor used to curve before the new wall. They were whole in the way that men who will break always are.

"Why keep that?" Kit asked, disbelieving and gentle.

"So, I remember the part I owe," Rowan said. "So, I remember what I am not obligated to repeat."

Kit touched the edge of the stitched pocket, not the thing inside, the way a person may touch a book but not the words for fear of what reading will require. "We could be gone by winter," he said. "It's three months. We could be gone before the year turns around."

Rowan watched the alley. He said, "I will not lie to you." Then he said, "After Christmas."

Kit listened to the way the sentence was set down. It had weight. It had the shape of kindness and delay. He wanted to be the sort of person who understood both and bore them. He nodded. "After Christmas," he repeated, and the repetition made it look like their idea.

They went to the boathouse the way they went anywhere, where they could be the size they were without folding themselves down to fit inside the day. The boathouse coughs smelled of oil and rope and old rain. Planks went dark and light with the river. The rafters held up the roof like men holding up a load together.

Rowan lay down on the boards, hat off, his hair grooved by the cap, his eyes on nothing, which was Kit's favorite of his looks. Kit lay down next to him, a handspan away, the kind of distance that can feel like an invitation or an insult depending on the hour. A moth knocked itself stupid against the window. In some other life, another boy would have reached out, put his hand on Rowan's chest, and felt the drum there, using it as a map. Kit counted the nails hammered in by men who were already dead. He put his hands under his head so he couldn't do anything foolish with them.

"Sometimes I think we're the most obvious thing in the city," Rowan said.

"Sometimes I think we're invisible to everybody except us," Kit said.

"Which is worse?" Rowan asked.

"Depends," Kit said, "on whether you're in the mood to be forgiven or to be left alone."

Rowan turned his head. He looked at Kit. He opened his mouth, shut it, and then opened it again. "There's a word," he said, quietly, as if someone else held it in a hand against his ear and he had to repeat it exactly, "for the way I feel. If I say it, I will owe something to it. And if I do not say it, I will owe something to myself. I think both are a kind of debt I would pay."

Kit breathed in. He felt the breath drag its fingers along the inside of his ribs. "Say it here," he said. "Say it where only the river can hear and the river keeps everything for itself."

Rowan smiled like he had found a stair in a floor that wasn't supposed to have one. He said it then, neither loud nor a whisper. The word in that room was not a label with a safety pin through it; it was a door. It was the sound you make when you choose the only thing that was ever going to choose you back.

Kit did not say it back. He didn't say it either. He let it settle in the space between them and soften the air.

After, Rowan sat up and wrote on the back of the photograph in a pencil broken at an angle. Kit pretended to be interested in the moth, finally finding the dark. He wanted to watch the letter make itself. He wanted to be the sort of person who didn't need to. He waited.

Rowan handed the square to him. On the back, in letters that looked like the boy who made them—sturdy, a little blunt—he had written:

For K. — fair day. For proof. I will not leave you without knowing how to return. — R.

Kit folded the picture back into the hymn card. He placed it in his cap, which he then put on his head. Inside the cap, he had the plan, and within the plan, the word. He felt the weight of it all, but he didn't buckle.

Christmas came with oranges that cost too much and paper chains and a tree that dropped its needles like small acts of sabotage. Mrs. Hale hummed through tinny hymns. Mr. Hale sat like a wall. He did not drink just then. Sometimes that was worse.

Kit made a gift: he mended Rowan's glove, the thumb always giving out first. He did it with the thread his mother had saved for a seam at the hem of a dress, using the same care you would when repairing something not worth money. He wrapped it in brown paper and tied it with the ribbon the color of old sky. He wrote "Rowan" on the tag, then destroyed it and wrote "R." instead.

Rowan made a pocket in the lining of a cap that wasn't Kit's, as if hope were a craft he had learned and meant to teach. He took Kit's hand under the table while Mrs. Hale refilled the gravy, and Mr. Hale didn't blink, and the small machine of Christmas clinked along. He pressed something against Kit's palm, cold and precise. A key.

"What is it to?" Kit whispered later, their shoulders all the architecture they could afford.

"The boathouse," Rowan said.

He didn't ask. He had asked when he said the other word, and Kit had answered the only way he could by not leaving. Now he acted and trusted. Trust is a brother of love, too.

After midnight service, Newhaven held its breath and exhaled its fog along the quay. The boys occupied their borrowed place in the boathouse, the key on the nail, the door shut, the world outside like a low drum. They sat with their backs against the wall, the river flowing beneath them, their knees bent up. Kit could feel Rowan's breath even without leaning. He had learned the measures of him.

"After Christmas," Rowan said.

"I know," Kit said.

Rowan reached for the cap and the photograph within it and held it up between finger and thumb. His breath warmed the paper. "We go north," he said, this time like he meant it. "We do not get caught between here and what we want. We do not look back twice."

"We will have to tell someone," Kit said. "There's always someone who needs telling, even if they hate you for it."

"We tell the river," Rowan said. "We tell the boards under our boots. We tell Mrs. Hale."

"You can't tell your mother," Kit said.

"I can," Rowan said. "She already knows. Some people know the shape of your absence before you go because they have practiced missing you since you were born."

Kit closed his eyes. He liked it when Rowan made sense and when he didn't. He liked that it hardly mattered which as long as he could listen closely. He leaned, finally, into the space his body had made for that leaning for months. Their heads knocked. The kiss was not a kiss the way the machine of the world used the word; it was a touch and then another, a promise to go across and back. It was careful. It learned as it went.

Outside, the water moved, but it didn't tell. The boards crowded to hear.

They slept for a while, then woke up and ate the sandwich Mrs. Hale had made for a man with extra work to do. Rowan put his hand on Kit's knee, as if asking permission, the way a person puts their hand on a door they own and still waits to see if someone is already inside. The light at the windows went pale-blue to the color of pewter and then to actual morning.

After Christmas, they would go.

They didn't. Not then.

Maybe you knew that already. There is a cruelty particular to time gates that is not the fault of any one person, and boys of eighteen are not yet skilled enough to pick every lock. Mr. Hale fell from a ladder on the twenty-ninth and broke the part of him that men break when they've had their strength kept in them too long. Mrs. Hale split herself between the bed, the kitchen, and the shared space where worry sits and refuses to eat. Rowan stood in a doorway and chose to keep standing.

Kit understood. He didn't. He stood with him.

They did not say "We will go in March" or "In April". They did not say anything date-shaped because it would be the same as watching a door close and calling it open. They worked. They met where they could. They sharpened a life to a point and used it to carve out a small room inside an enormous one. They were vigilant. They became men in the way men become men: suddenly, in the mirror of other men's demands. They remained boys anyway when it mattered.

The photograph lived in Kit's cap and then in a tin and then, in a brief moment of panic, in the hollow under a stair. It came out when they needed reminding that they had been eighteen and that their faces had once told the truth to a stranger's lens and the truth had stood its ground.

In July of the next year, Mr. Hale died in his sleep of the exhaustion that men call something else so they can stand in the pub and not cry. The day was hot and blossomed with flies. Mrs. Hale's laugh didn't ring for months. Rowan's shoulders changed; they softened, which is a thing, too.

"Now?" Kit asked on a pier that no longer remembered who he had been a year earlier.

Rowan had the key on a string, the pocket inside his coat, the same mouth as at eighteen, more careful. He looked at Kit. He looked north. He thought of Mrs. Hale, who was a house without a wall. He put his hand on Kit's neck, where the hair had grown back. "Give me one more season," he said, and he was not asking permission, and he was not asking. "I owe what I owe."

Kit counted the nails in the boards again, because men count what can be counted when everything else cannot. He nodded.

They stayed.

But old plans do not die; they erode into habits. The habit of keeping a key. The habit of the boathouse. The habit of moving closely and then apart again without bitterness. The habit of tender hands and the same five stories told over and over until they became history.

The photograph did not know how long it had survived. It lay in a tin meant for biscuits under a box meant for boots and lived the layered life of things saved by people who never learned to say out loud what exactly they were saving. Mrs. Hale moved to a smaller room and then to no room at all. Kit's mother slipped a note into the hymn book and then never found it again. Rowan's hair grayed at the temples, the place where caps never protect you. He laughed more, which you should know. He learned how. That is a kindness the years sometimes give if you live long enough to get them to bargain.

Men said there were wars and that some boys made themselves into men by leaving. Others made themselves into men by staying. Kit and Rowan did both and neither. They ran the cannery floor, and then they didn't. The city they loved dug its piers deeper and then filled them with light bulbs in a decade when they never went out. Storms came, and some winters were mild.

One afternoon in a decade, Rowan took off his cap and shook from it a small card with its corners still sharp, in the way that things kept inside and safe remain. He held it, scowling at the part of time that had dared to make even this fade. He slid it along the table toward Kit.

"Proof," he said.

They sat in their chairs like the men they had become by accident and decided to be on purpose. The picture was almost painfully young. It was offended by being exactly what it had been. Kit put his hand on the table, not directly on it, and said, "We were brave."

"We were obvious," Rowan said.

"We were invisible," Kit said.

"We were both," Rowan said, and his mouth made the exact shape it had made under a pennant at a fair when he had said a different true word.

"You kept our plan," Kit said.

"I kept the part that mattered," Rowan said. He tapped the corner of the photograph with a forefinger that had been caught in a machine years before and had never properly mended. "I kept this because if I lose what is here, I won't remember what we were before we were busy being what we became."

"What did we become?" Kit asked, the way men do toward the end of the day, not angry, truly curious, old enough to wonder if there is a grade.

"Us," Rowan said.

Kit nodded. "Good," he said, with the quiet relief of a man who understands he has been examined and passed.

They put the card back into the cap. They hung the cap on the peg by the door. The door knew the shape of it and was happier for knowing.

You want to know how it got to Mag's shoebox? Some woman—there is always a woman, and she is always trying quietly—saved it when no one was looking, carried it over a year's wide gap, and gave it a home jurisdiction where ribbon might hold it, gentle and deliberate hands might come along and pick it up.

At last, they did.

Evan lay on his bed with the photograph flattened under his palm like a pulse. In it, the boy he had named Rowan looked at him across the century and did not blink. The boy, whom he had named Kit, looked at something just off to the side and kept his mouth from breaking into a story.

"Who are you?" Evan asked, because he was the sort of person who asked the dead very solvable questions, and then he stood and took the stairs two at a time and held the picture out to Mag as if the house were on fire.

Mag poured tea into two mismatched cups and took the photograph with the resignation of someone who knows she is about to be required to do a thing she cannot undo.

"Do you know them?" Evan asked.

"I knew of them," Mag said. She rubbed the corner of the photograph with her thumb, returning the grease that the sea had put there first. "Kit Merrick's cap hung on our wall for five years after he was gone. Your great-great aunt rented the upstairs to his sister for a while, when money had the bad manners to be honest."

"And this is him," Evan said, touching the edge near Kit's shoulder and then pulling back, afraid his touch was a kind of erasing.

"That's him," Mag said. "And that's Mr. Hale's boy Rowan. He had nice manners, but his temper was not always welcome at the table. Broke his father's heart by not breaking his own."

Evan sat. The tea had gone cold. The room smelled like every dinner they'd ever had in it. "Were they—"

"Yes," Mag said, taking the work from him and doing it neatly. "Though we didn't say so. We initially described them as friends, then as loyal, and finally, when kindness was required, we said they were an example. But we knew. We aren't idiots, even when we are pretending to be."

"Did people—" Evan's voice faltered. He had spent enough time at school to know the word that would have come next and enough time in his house to know not to give it legs.

"Some people were ugly about it," Mag said, "and some were careful and more than a few kept their mouths shut and their eyes open. Your great-grandmother lent Mrs. Hale sugar on Sundays. That counts as something."

Evan felt his heart sit up. "What happened to them?"

"Nothing dramatic," Mag said, which is another way of saying a lot. "They lived. Is that dramatic enough for you? They worked. They kept a key to a place where they could be themselves for an hour every week. They ate. They were cared for, and they cared. They left the city once and came back because the sea has a way of asking you where you think you're going. They buried people and were buried by people. When Rowan died, Kit made a sound I have not forgiven the world for making him make. That is what happened."

Evan thought of the cap on the peg, of the tin under a stair, of the board that held when it could and sometimes didn't. He thought of the inch between their bodies in the photograph that the camera had kept without their permission and offered back now like some late messenger with proof.

"Can I—" He didn't finish.

"Keep it?" Mag guessed that small smile of hers was the shape of a mischief she would not do again if she had to. "You had it in your pocket an hour ago, if we're being precise."

He flushed. "I didn't mean to—"

"Good," she said. "Things like this are for not meaning. Yes. Keep it. Promise me you won't let it be one more thing you meant to frame and forgot. Put it somewhere your eye is forced to go. There's leaving it under a ribbon and there's taking it out into the light."

"I'll get a frame," he said.

"From Murphy's on High Street," she said. "Tell him to be kind to the edges. He'll know what I mean."

Evan looked again at the boys. They looked back, nearly alive.

"What did they call each other?" he asked, because in all this time he had made names, and he wanted to be corrected.

"Rowan," Mag said, tilting her head. "And Kit."

He smiled, astonished, as if she had reached inside his head and pulled out two stones he'd had in his pocket for weeks.

"Kit," she repeated, "though he was Christopher in the book. He was the sort to leave a second name where he didn't need it. Rowan was Rowan from the start. Some people get named exactly once, and it sticks."

"What did they—" He wanted to ask everything. What did they eat on Sundays? Where did they walk when the weather was bad? How did they touch in rooms that were dangerous for them to exist in? Did they say the word out loud to each other, and did it help or hurt? Did they laugh more at the start or at the end? Did it ever get easier to stop flinching when the door opened?

Mag looked at him the way she had looked at him when he was five and had understandable questions about God and the unfairness of rain. "They loved each other," she said. "They were boys, even when boys were not allowed. That is the bulk of it. The rest is detail, and the details were theirs."

"Did they know," Evan asked, "that someone would ever want to know them like this?"

"They took a photograph," Mag said, lifting her cup. "So yes. They knew."

The frame from Murphy's had edges built with the quiet rightness of a good table. Evan wiped the glass twice and slid the photograph in gently so that the corners stayed corners. He hung it in his room, where the morning light found it, and set it on fire the way morning light sets everything to its honest color.

He read the back of the picture without turning it over: For K.—fair day. For proof. I will not leave you where I don't know how to go back.—R.

He tried to write a note like that and almost did, and then didn't. He put the pen down. He stood with his hands in his pockets, which never actually held anything.

Later, on his way to the pier—because boys in Newhaven always go to the pier when they think too much—he turned at the door of what could have been a boathouse. He put his palm on the glass and left a print. He took it off, and the print stayed. There wasn't a word he needed to say. There was only the need to stand where he was and let the proof do work for him.

He met a friend at the end of the wall, someone whose name doesn't matter yet because this isn't that story and is exactly that story. They leaned against the iron rail; the sea pulled its long rope. Evan's shoulder touched the other boy's shoulder. He did not make a map. He did not draw a plan. He simply stayed in the inch and did not move away.

"Cold," his friend said, after a long time.

"Yeah," Evan said, and smiled into the wind.

You can make of it what you like. That's the gift and the problem of a photograph. It is a door you are dared to walk through with the understanding that you will not bring back anything unblemished. It is also a mirror that refuses to show you unless you stand in the right place.

What I can tell you is this: two boys stood shoulder to shoulder in the summer of a year that looked like every other year until it didn't. They decided to turn their past interactions into an object. They paid for it. They touched in the space afforded them. They sat in a boathouse while the river lit itself with reflected light from a city learning how to stay lit at night. They said difficult words in rooms that were not built for hearing them. They kept a key. They waited when waiting was the same as choosing. They became men, and returned to their own bodies whenever they could, even when nothing went unremarked.

The inch between them was not an accident. It was a declaration written in an era when true things had to be written slant, in small fonts, in the lines between the notice and the prayer. It was the inch that made a life, and you can live in an inch if you tend it.

Evan went to sleep under their faces and woke up under them, feeling more like they were keeping company than being watched. When he dreamt of leaving, he dreamt also of returning and found he could do both without letting go. In the morning, Mag called him down and handed him butter toast, asking if the frame held. He told her the truth.

"Good," she said, in the old way. "Good. Then they've got what they asked for."

And what had they asked for, really, in exchange for ten cents and an hour and the bravery to stand by the false sea and keep their chins level and their eyes open? Only this: to belong to themselves, to each other, and, in some unguessed future, to someone who would stand where they had stood and feel the proof lift him like tidewater.

That was all. It was more than enough.

Iomfats.org

The Inch Between Them

by D K Daniels

Voting

We support Ukraine — Мы поддерживаем Украину — Ми підтримуємо Україну

We support Palestine — We support Palestine — We support Palestine