through the lens
KEVIN YEOMAN
Through the lens of his father’s neglected Leica M3, Leonard sees them, almost by accident: Amanda and the howling, untamed boy who sometimes delivers the pizza. They stand immodestly close. She leans back into the rust-chewed door of a mint green hatchback, its idling engine rasps like an old dog in the driveway. The darkening afternoon recasts her face in shadow. The older boy’s tall, angular frame stands in sharp relief to hers; his hard mouth cracks a smile. Amanda's arms are above her head, then around the older boy’s neck, some tender footwork closes the minor distance between them.
The Leica had long been an object of his fascination, the recipient of his almost otherworldly attentiveness, due in part to his father’s decision to declare it off-limits, place it out of reach but not out of sight. It sat atop a bookshelf collecting dust until his mother, in search of a reason to scoot Leonard out of the house, placed it in his eager hands. Desire muted the boy’s ingrained, self-preservational protest. The illicit power the object held over him mingled with a new kind of exhilaration in the risk itself, the giddy fizz of willful transgression, the delight at his father’s absent authority.
Outside, Leonard chases the sensation with every click of the shutter release, every tick of machined parts advancing what remains of the old film coiled within the camera. He shifts low on the lip of the wooded ridge behind his home, watches the older boy navigate the uncharted territory beneath Amanda’s sweater, bury his face in the dark crook of her neck, dosing himself. She slackens in his arms, and still an instinctual hand traces the jagged line of his spine from between his shoulder blades down beneath the waistband of his tattered jeans.
Only now does Leonard see that living bodies can exist in such proximity, can find it necessary. The scaffolding of his understanding was constructed of cramped silences and long looks of enduring mistrust along the fault line of his parents’ marriage. Their relationship as mysterious to Leonard as the future. Tenderness had long since been relegated to the forgotten corners of his home. In its stead came cyclic cravings, a recurrent barbarian drama that left both parents bleary-eyed or utterly spent and sprawled on the couch, red wine dangerously close to spilling from the stemmed glass subverting the laws of physics in his mother’s slack hand.
The Leica’s viewfinder flattens Amanda and the older boy into two-dimensional beings. Characters willfully drawn into an unknown drama. They stare into one another, absorb one another. It is an act of consumption as much as it is comprehension. The older boy steps away from Amanda, feverish, his body and hers refusing to cool. Leonard feels better about being there, about noticing them, about wishing that he be noticed too.
Years later, with the Leica as gone as his father, when Leonard has traded growing up for simply getting older, he will wonder if his mother and father had ever generated such heat so simply. He will wonder if his father had ever not just looked at but truly seen another person in his entire life. He will wonder what memories were stamped on that roll of film. A different sort of love, perhaps. His parents, as they were before—unknowable, incomprehensible. His mother’s face, sad and beautiful, more youthful longing than silent regret. Leonard will understand this as the possibility of something great they created together. Leonard will understand it can never and will never be seen.
Kevin Yeoman is a graduate of the University of Wyoming and the University of Washington Tacoma Writing Studies program. He is currently pursuing an MFA at Eastern Washington University. His short fiction has appeared in the 2020 edition of Clamor Literary Journal.