THROUGH THE MACRO LENS of my late father's camera, the rabbit talisman was a wonder to behold.
Chief Leopard Frog had carved my name in tiny letters underneath the rabbit's right paw (albeit with a minor typo, "Spender" instead of "Spencer"), and its nose, previously the rounded tip of the burl, was polished smoother than a cat's-eye marble.
Tiny whiskers no bigger than a human eyelash were suggested by a few carefully placed, nearly invisible scrapes.
Honestly, the more I examined my talisman, the more impressed I was with Chief Leopard Frog's talent.
With the ability to see into a fairy world, I had no need to travel far to exhaust a twenty-four-exposure roll of film.
I shot the star-shaped flowers in the pumpkin patch close enough to get their bright yellow powdery pollen on my face.
I took a picture of the marigold growing by itself near the front step. Its tiny overlapping petals filled the frame from edge to edge.
Just for the heck of it, I photographed a gum wrapper that had lain undisturbed on the ground for months, its letters faded, like Paisley itself, but still legible. I planned to title that one "Gum, but Not Forgotten."
Caterpillars had decimated the tomato crop. From a normal perspective, they looked like ugly lime green slugs, but when I saw the first one through the macro lens, I discovered that it had a stumpy red tail, curved like a hornet's stinger, ten suckerlike feet, such as an octopus has, plus half a dozen extra little sucker hands positioned just behind its big cabbage-colored head, pale oval eyes that seemed painted on like cartoon eyes, and sixteen bigger, darker fake eyes along both sides of its body.
If such a creature had stepped from a spacecraft and said, "People of Earth, we come in peace," I could not have been more astonished.
I shot several pictures from many angles.
Soon I began to enjoy the reassuring click-thunk sound that the big camera made each time I took a shot. Through my fingertips, I could feel the lens open and shut. Because it invisibly captured whatever it was aimed at, the camera reminded me of the mechanical ghost-catching device in the movie Ghostbusters. Only later, after it was properly emptied, would I find out what was inside.
Little did I know how prescient was my fleeting choice of metaphor.
My new hobby required patience.
Since Paisley had all but disappeared and Wal-Mart was an hour away—a destination limited to weekly trips—I figured the best way to get my pictures processed was through the mail.
From the recycling bin in my mother's office I chose among dozens of mail-order film-developing companies that routinely solicited business from people who had died or moved away from Paisley. The closest service used a post office box in St. Louis, so it was to the Sparkle Snapshot Company that I sent my first roll of film.
A lot of things change when you live alone.
Time, of course, is among the biggest. Days go by in which nothing worth mentioning happens. It's not that they're all the same. I imagine that if I were floating on a raft across the Pacific Ocean my ship's log might read a lot like my life in Paisley:
Hot today. Caught a fish.
Cloudy but still hot. Saw a seagull.
Another hot day. A truck went down the road, turned around, and went back the way it had come. Must be lost.
Another hot day. No rain expected. After bedtime, heard coyotes howling.
Watched a hawk catch a skink. Not easy.
And so on.
With no other people around, it's easy to let your appearance suffer. Certainly there's no need to dress up. Daily bathing becomes optional, too. You could give yourself a haircut if you wanted to, but what's the rush?
Thus, by degrees, people slip into a barbarous state.
"All the more reason to practice your art," Chief Leopard Frog urged. "Art lifts you up and separates you from the lower species."
The return of my first roll of film after ten days of waiting stimulated a Christmas-like feeling. My hands shook as I held the fat yellow envelope.
What if my pictures were no good?
But I needn't have worried. Except for the first two exposures, which were simply red streaks against a dark gray background, each of the images that followed was crisp, clear, and colorful. Yellow flowers. Green multieyed, multilegged monsters. A sprig of hay that looked like a cactus in the desert. The talisman's shiny nose and laid-back ears. A faded gum wrapper.
But then, the last picture in the stack startled me so much that I actually jumped up from my chair.
It was a snapshot of Tim Balderson's sister, Maureen, combing her hair!
What in the world? I thought.
Somehow, Sparkle Snapshot in St. Louis had managed to mix in a picture meant for the Baldersons.
Oh, well, I thought. Nobody's perfect.