The Last Photo
by Adele Zahedi
The man reached out to close the window of the room, while he was asleep and awake. That night he had ditched the nurse and stopped taking medicine. He stayed up all night flipping through the album. The whole time he was in the hospital and then in the sanatorium, the album was intact, it was on the table next to his bed until that night. Exactly one year has been passed since the incident, he had found the album in the ruins of that cottage. The same house that he had run to it, exactly, the last moment before the shooting, to escape some of the civilians he had seen in the house.
He said to himself, "The villagers had been evacuated, so why weren't they left?" There was no answer.
He looked at the photos and didn’t sleep until morning. It was a family album with photos of parents and children; Birthdays, New Year celebrations and the first days of school, all were group photos except the last photo, the man checked the album several times until the morning, only in the last photo, the father wasn't in the picture.
The headache had taken his toll, he wished he could sleep for a moment, but it didn't make a damn noise.
A band marching in the street in honor of the war heroes, stopped in front of the war wounded sanatorium. He thought, "Then why don't they go? They performed all the songs he had ever heard in his life."
He could not reach the window, he sent a curse, he got up from the bed. He still sometimes forgot the absence of his right hand, It had not been long since he had lost his hand. That day, his hand, along with all the people in that house, was under a pile of rubble. He sighed, got up and took his picture out of the frame near the window of his room, and put it in the album, in which the man had lifted his Olympic medal with his right hand.
