There is a photograph of you on a rocking horse. Your mother and father are in the photograph too, your mother giving her Marilyn Monroe smile that makes her face look thinner, your father looking the same as he always has. Everything is lit with gold in the photograph. You, your parents, the rocking horse—all shine like you’re on the surface of the sun.

When you are older, you won’t remember getting the photograph taken, how they put you on different things—a little motorized car, an oversized stack of blocks, a child-sized chair—before they decided on the rocking horse. How you clutched its wooden mane in both your small hands. How your father said how long is this going to take.

You will remember how, that morning, your mother cut herself shaving and swore in her native tongue. Your father always called it gibberish, but there was something beautiful in it, you thought, more than his assholes and cocksuckers and shut the hell ups.

Someone helped your mother with her makeup for the photograph, and you and your father too. You had never worn makeup before and twitched, but your father held perfectly still when the brush touched his face. You laughed. You remember you laughed.

But you won’t remember the photograph itself, how they used a simple camera trick, how your father stood closer to the cameraman than you and your mother did, how he filled the frame. So when you find the photograph again, all those years later, after the first trial and then the others, after everything, your father will be the first thing you see and you will think, yes, he is just as large as I remember.