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.

She is old now. In the year I've owned her, the young woman has aged into an elderly one, and the changes have been coming faster lately, as though her life is running down toward something. And in the most recent change — the one that made me finally write this — she has, for the first time, stopped looking off to the side. She is looking, now, out of the tiny photograph, directly forward, directly, it feels exactly, at me. An old woman where there was a young one, meeting my eyes, from a locket made to mourn a death, and I find I am very afraid of what the next change will be, of what an aged face looks like in the last photograph of a life, of what it means that a mourning locket is showing me a woman age all the way to the end while looking straight at the person holding her.

I've thought about getting rid of it. I can't, quite — it feels like abandoning her at the end of something, like closing a book on a face that's finally looking up. So I keep it, and I look at it less often now, and each time I'm afraid she'll be older, and afraid of the day I open it and the little glass holds not an aged woman looking out at me but an empty chair, or a shrouded shape, or a grave, or nothing at all — the mourning locket, at last, mourning, the way it was always made to.