The Locket Holds a Photo That Ages

Victorian mourning lockets are melancholy things — worn to remember the dead, often holding a photograph or a lock of hair of the departed. I bought this one in a junk shop for its craftsmanship, a heavy silver oval on a chain, and inside it, behind a little glass, was a tiny photograph of a young woman, perhaps twenty, in the stiff formal pose of an old portrait, looking off to the side as sitters did when exposures were long.

She was young when I bought it. I want to establish that clearly, because it's the whole of the strangeness. A young woman, early twenties, looking away.

Over the year I've owned the locket, the photograph has changed. Slowly — I only noticed because I looked at it often, drawn to it, opening the locket to consider the sad little face. She aged. The young woman in the tiny photograph grew older, month by month, imperceptibly at any single glance but undeniably over time: her face fuller, then lined; her hair, dark at first, greying; the stiff youthful pose softening into the settledness of middle and then later age. A photograph — a fixed, developed, Victorian photograph, which cannot change, which is chemistry on paper sealed behind glass — showing, over a year, a woman living out her life, aging from twenty toward eighty, in an inch of silver-framed image I keep on my dresser.

I've had it examined, discreetly, by someone who knows old photographs. He confirmed it is a genuine period image, the process consistent with the era, sealed behind its glass in a way that hasn't been disturbed. He could not, of course, explain how a fixed image shows a different, older face than it showed when I brought it in, because that is not a thing photographs do, and he handed it back rather quickly and did not want to see it again.