Photographs

Half brown, half leucoderma-pink, her fingers scrabbled and pulled at the edge of the paper. The two thick black sheets refused to part. Revengefully, during the years when they lay on the bare floor of the cupboard, they had secreted from themselves dark thick runnels of photograph-gum, and now they clung obstinately, edge to edge. Inside there could be precious photographs, the best photographs, photographs which held the key to some blissful day otherwise sealed from her memory forever ... her fingers began to press jerkily all over the paper, trying to find a spot where the two pages had separated.