Four Susans
by Michael Martone

Susan took him home to meet her parents. Her parents had kept her bedroom exactly the way it had been when she was in high school. He was on the four poster bed looking through her yearbooks, The Cauldron. He turned to the back of one from her senior year. The freshman pictures were minuscule, cells in a hive. The pictures enlarged as he paged though the classes, sophomores and juniors. The seniors, finally, stamp-sized and autographed. Susan's portrait, an embarrassment of hair, a string of studio pearls at her neck. He could see the Susan he knew in it though shadowed now by age.