Ghost Town Read Free Page B

the day they closed the factory."
    "What did they make at the factory?" I asked.
    I was too young to recall Paisley's heyday.
    "Plastic novelties," she answered. "You know, what some people call five-and-dime items. Imitation flowers, loaded dice, talking key chains, an eight-ball that tells your fortune when you turn it upside down—things like that. At one time, Paisley Plastics was the biggest plastic novelty manufacturer in the world."
    "Things change," I observed.
    "Mmm-hmm," my mother responded, switching on the radio, an indication that our conversation was over.
    After a couple of false starts, I managed to make a photographic exposure of my talisman. The eyepiece of the camera shows exactly what the lens sees, so while I composed my shot, I was captivated by the object's detail. It was sort of like looking at pond water through a microscope. I saw things that I would never notice otherwise.
    This was one fine piece of work.
    Quite an achievement for an imaginary friend.

A Mix-Up in the Mail?
    THROUGH THE MACRO LENS of my late father's camera, the rabbit talisman was a wonder to behold.
    Chief Leopard Frog had carved my name in tiny letters underneath the rabbit's right paw (albeit with a minor typo, "Spender" instead of "Spencer"), and its nose, previously the rounded tip of the burl, was polished smoother than a cat's-eye marble.
    Tiny whiskers no bigger than a human eyelash were suggested by a few carefully placed, nearly invisible scrapes.
    Honestly, the more I examined my talisman, the more impressed I was with Chief Leopard Frog's talent.
    With the ability to see into a fairy world, I had no need to travel far to exhaust a twenty-four-exposure roll of film.
    I shot the star-shaped flowers in the pumpkin patch close enough to get their bright yellow powdery pollen on my face.
    I took a picture of the marigold growing by itself near the front step. Its tiny overlapping petals filled the frame from edge to edge.
    Just for the heck of it, I photographed a gum wrapper that had lain undisturbed on the ground for months, its letters faded, like Paisley itself, but still legible. I planned to title that one "Gum, but Not Forgotten."
    Caterpillars had decimated the tomato crop. From a normal perspective, they looked like ugly lime green slugs, but when I saw the first one through the macro lens, I discovered that it had a stumpy red tail, curved like a hornet's stinger, ten suckerlike feet, such as an octopus has, plus half a dozen extra little sucker hands positioned just behind its big cabbage-colored head, pale oval eyes that seemed painted on like cartoon eyes, and sixteen bigger, darker fake eyes along both sides of its body.
    If such a creature had stepped from a spacecraft and said, "People of Earth, we come in peace," I could not have been more astonished.
    I shot several pictures from many angles.
    Soon I began to enjoy the reassuring
click-thunk
sound that the big camera made each time I took a shot. Through my fingertips, I could feel the lens open and shut. Because it invisibly captured whatever it was aimed at, the camera reminded me of the mechanical ghost-catching device in the movie
Ghostbusters.
Only later, after it was properly emptied, would I find out what was inside.
    Little did I know how prescient was my fleeting choice of metaphor.
    My new hobby required patience.
    Since Paisley had all but disappeared and Wal-Mart was an hour away—a destination limited to weekly trips—I figured the best way to get my pictures processed was through the mail.
    From the recycling bin in my mother's office I chose among dozens of mail-order film-developing companies that routinely solicited business from people who had died or moved away from Paisley. The closest service used a post office box in St. Louis, so it was to the Sparkle Snapshot Company that I sent my first roll of film.
    A lot of things change when you live alone.
    Time, of course, is among the biggest. Days go by in which nothing worth