Paul Shim

What Stays and What Fades

     I was seven when I threw the stone. Not a pebble. A full fist-sized thing with weight and a smooth surface. I’d found it in the garden bed behind the church, crusted with dirt, cool from the shade. I remember brushing off the soil before closing my hand around it, surprised at how smooth it felt.

     That summer had the kind of heat that made metal buckles untouchable. The church windows were cracked just enough for the sharp soprano of Mrs. Henley to carry outside, wailing out some hymn that sounded more like punishment than praise. Above her voice, sparrows darted in and out of their nest on the window frame, their quick wings cutting through the heavy air. I wasn’t part of the choir, never had the patience for it, but Mom did, and I’d wandered out back to wait.

     The gravel in the garden bed stung. I minced across the sharp little pebbles, my toes curling against the sting, and that’s when I spotted the half-hidden stone. I bent down and pried it loose. I must have been barefoot because later, when I had my first baby, Noah, I noticed how his toes curled the same way mine did when they met something rough. Small things echo like that.

     Across the cracked pavement behind the church stood my brother Aaron, pointing Dad’s old handheld. He wasn’t recording; he never did, not until he thought everything looked exactly right. He was too much of a perfectionist to ever hit the record button, always chasing the perfect shot that never came. He lifted the camera, squinted through the viewfinder, then lowered it again and shook his head like the world refused to cooperate. Or maybe he was afraid, afraid that once he started, reality wouldn’t live up to what he saw in his head. 

     “Do something dramatic,” he called. “Like in a movie.”

     He said it with that half-smile that made it hard to tell if he was joking or judging. The air shimmered between us, heavy with heat and something unspoken. He lifted the handheld again, and for a second the lens caught my reflection, a warped little girl in a sundress, hair stuck to her forehead, looking smaller and sharper than I felt. He waited, eye still pressed to the viewfinder, as if the version of me trapped in his lens was already a disappointment. He’d been doing this all summer, lifting the camera, squinting, lowering it, asking me to do something “interesting,” then starting all over again. I was sick of being his practice subject, sick of the way he hovered behind that lens like it gave him permission to direct me. Then suddenly, a fly landed on my arm, and I swatted it, forgetting I had the rock in my hand. It wasn’t that I’d hurt myself. It was that Aaron laughed, not cruelly, but like he’d just captured something funny for his invisible audience.

     “Perfect,” he said. “Do that again.”

     The laugh and the lens together had pinned me in place. I could feel my face flush, a pulse in my hand already tightening around the stone. Later, in college, he would switch to animation, saying drawings stayed still long enough for him to control them, unlike real people. He didn’t want anyone to move too quickly, say the wrong thing. He wanted life to pause on his terms, every smile, every glance, every step exactly as he wanted it to be.

     I raised the stone. “Here’s your drama,” I said.

     And I threw it.

     Not at him. Not exactly. But close. It hit the bike rack next to his leg with a clang that startled the sparrows first. But then he dropped the camera. Its lens cracked against the ground like an egg.

     Silence.

     Aaron and I fought sometimes, mostly words, never much else. He was older, steadier, the one who usually walked away first. But this time, he didn’t move. He just looked at me with a kind of disbelief I didn’t yet know could hurt.

     I ran. I didn’t tell anyone what happened. Neither did Aaron. That was the worst part. He didn’t tattle, didn’t scream. He just left the stone where it landed. A few minutes later, I slipped back inside the church, the air thick with dust and hymns. Mom was still singing, her eyes closed, her voice steady. Aaron came in after me, quiet as ever, and slid into the pew beside me. Mom glanced over and must have seen that something had erupted between us, but she closed her eyes too tightly, like she could wipe that image from her mind. When practice ended, she came over and saw the cracked handheld. Without a word, she tucked it into her bag, and later put it in the closet when she got home. That was her way to ignore whatever she didn’t want to deal with.

     The handheld sat in Dad’s closet for years after that, the lens never fixed. Dad had another four years in him, though none of us knew that then. But sometimes, when he came home late from the shop, I’d hear the sound of him rewinding it, a soft clicking in his study. His slow, steady sickness had turned the house cautious by then. Mom told us to give him space, so we lingered in doorways, whispering, waiting for the coughs to stop before moving again. I used to wonder if he was watching old home movies or just running the film, trying to fix something beyond the machine.

     When he died, they buried him with his reading glasses in his breast pocket. Aaron said we should’ve added the handheld too, to “finish the shot.” I laughed, but it hurt, because I still couldn’t shake the feeling that breaking it had broken something else too. Rationally, I knew it was impossible; one thing had nothing to do with the other. But I know now that guilt isn’t rational. It just sits quietly in you, hard and round, like a stone you forgot to drop.

     After Dad’s funeral, we drank too much root beer from the fridge, the kind that came in the stubby glass bottles he liked. Aaron grabbed the handheld from the closet and squinted at the busted lens.

     “Still mad you cracked it?” I asked.

     He shook his head. “Nah. It never worked anyway.”

     I wanted to believe him.

     But even now, when I pass the old church during my morning runs, I glance toward the back garden. The fence is gone, the gravel replaced with mulch, but I still see the moment, the arc of the stone, the space between us taut as wire.

     After my dad's death, my mom stopped going into his study. She’d pause at the doorway, stare at the stacks of film and manuals, then turn away. She never said why. Aaron and I ended up wandering through our own sadness without her, two kids trying to read a map she refused to look at.

     The memory has changed. I used to think it was just mischief, one more dumb kid moment, or maybe that’s just what I tried to convince myself. But now the moment feels heavier, like the first time I tested the edge of something that wouldn’t heal easily, a kind of hurt I didn’t understand back then. Not until I lost my own husband, when Noah was six and our second was due in two months, did I finally feel the weight Mom carried after Dad.

     A few weeks later, my son, Noah, came home from school with a scraped knee and a look in his eye I recognized. I asked what happened. He shrugged. Said nothing. That night, while he was brushing his teeth, I noticed a rock sitting on the windowsill by the sink, not as smooth or flat as the one I had thrown, but it was enough to make me realize he was holding something in, some quiet hurt or guilt, and I didn’t want it to settle into him the way it had with me.

     I didn’t ask about it.

     Instead, I opened the freezer and pulled out the lemon popsicles we used to eat in July, the ones so sour they made our eyes water. I brought him one. He looked at it, then at me, and nodded. 

     We sat on the back steps in silence, our tongues turning cold and sharp from the citrus. He didn’t say sorry. I didn’t ask him to. We just watched the last light fall through the leaves. 

     And as I watched him there, small and still, I thought of Dad’s study, of the soft whir of the handheld rewinding over and over, how maybe he’d been trying to find a moment he could start again, too.

     Noah leaned against my arm, sticky with sugar, and I realized I didn’t want him to carry that same quiet guilt, the kind that calcifies with time. So I stayed beside him, letting the light fade slowly, and thought how strange it is, what stays and what fades, and how sometimes, forgiveness tastes like something you have to learn to bite into before it melts away.