He should never have stolen them.
He knows that now.
What was he trying to gain, he wonders, as he leafs through print after print, all as shiny and glossy as the lives and loves they depict. The smiles portrayed therein are so full, so genuine, he struggles not to find them mocking.
Most of all, he looks at her; at her bewitching combination of blue eyes, brown hair and skin like an unblemished canvass.
She should have been mine, he thinks.
He looks also at the man by her side, the man holding their two chidlren in various places, at various stages of beautiful infant growth, echoing her physical wonder, haunting him with their eyes. The man, he tries so hard to dismiss, to disfigure, but the children are different.
They should have been mine, he thinks.
He had known it for a while, of course, for years, but somehow the photographs make it real and the smiles stab like kitchen knives.
He burns the photographs; but their smoldering corpses do not nearly resmble the genocidal sorrow of the ashes of his own life.
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