The Cut-Out Portrait

Not enough for anyone to notice on entering the dining room, but enough to irritate Camille every time she passed the sideboard. The right corner sagged two or three millimeters, as though the wall itself had given up holding the house together. That morning she put the stack of folders on the table, took the frame by its black sides, and straightened it without thinking.

Someone has been cut out of the 1912 family portrait. An intact photographic plate reveals a fifth woman. The sequel shifts the question from who erased her to how families, institutions, and archives construct, protect, abridge, or contaminate a story.