He slipped or it slipped or both and he bobbled it, and it fell, and he knew as sure as some law of physics his phone smashed.

Despite the case.

He did not buy a new one every year or two, and this one he’d had seven, eight years, so he’d have to get a new one.

But the pictures.

He wanted some of them.

He did not know how to get them.

Maybe he could take the phone someplace and pay somebody to get them.

Recover them.

Somebody might know another way.

He looked it up, but he could not find anything specific.

He asked Lucy.

“Forget them,” Lucy said.

“I want some pictures,” he said.

“Haven’t you,” Lucy said, “burned a box of photos?”

Seemed familiar.

Long time ago.

Something, it seemed, people used to do.

And he?

“I burned some pictures,” he said. “Not a box. Not a whole box. They were in a box. Where else could you have put them?”

Pictures from film.

When people wanted to get rid of them, they burnt them.

Negatives too.

Or, for example, when he was a kid.

When he was a kid, there was one phone in the house.

Other people had maybe a couple.

His house, one in the dining room.

You wanted to talk, everybody could listen.

When he was, say, 17, if he wanted to talk to a girl on the phone, that was it—dining room.

All the houses in the neighborhood, the same—front room that faced the street, that was the living room, flowed into the dining room, flowed onto the kitchen. Upstairs, three bedrooms and a bathroom, tub, no shower.

Didn’t matter how big or small the family was, that was the layout.

If he wanted to talk privately to a girl, or to anyone about anything private, he went to a pay phone.

Pay phone three blocks away.

Another three blocks from that and then another after three more blocks.

Beyond that they were scattered around he could not remember where.

He had walked to the nearest one and called the girl and talked and she said call her back in ten minutes.

He walked three blocks and waited a few minutes and called her back.

They talked.

Some guy knocked on the glass door of the booth and asked him to hurry up.

He nodded and talked for a minute and got off.

Walked out.

Joey F. came up to him. What was that?

The guy needed to use the phone.

You took that shit? Let’s kick his ass and tell that fucker it’s your phone. Now. Always. Fuck him.

“Forget it,” he said. “I was done anyway.”

He thought then that was true, and he did not know then as he knew now that he had known then without knowing it that going—finishing and leaving—was something.

A way.

That time gone and nearly forgotten though some once in a while something—a song—cropped up and brought him somewhat back. Back in that place so different it seemed now not only a different time but a different way of thinking or different construct of a world differently understood.

As in a world where the act of burning a photograph, hard black and white glossed on hard paper, had some emotional, some profoundly private, significance.

Or a feeling, burning, with the phone, with the girl, that he just did not know what would happen next.