The Photograph That Develops Slowly

The Okafor family had taken the same photograph every Halloween since 1998: all of them lined up on the porch steps in costume, the same angle, the same old box camera that Grandpa Femi insisted on using long after everyone else had switched to digital.

For the first ten years, nothing about the photographs was unusual except the children growing steadily taller and the costumes growing steadily more elaborate.

In the eleventh photograph, a family member scanning old prints for a scrapbook noticed a faint shape in the doorway behind the group — barely more than a smudge, easy to mistake for a lens flare or a trick of the porch light.

By the fourteenth year the smudge had resolved into the unmistakable shape of a person standing just inside the screen door: tall, still, dressed in something old-fashioned that didn't match any costume anyone in the family remembered wearing or owning.

Nobody could say who it was. Grandpa Femi, when asked, only said that every family collects a few members it doesn't formally introduce, and that the important thing was to keep taking the photograph in exactly the same spot every year, because a tradition, once started properly, does not like to be interrupted.

By the eighteenth year the figure in the doorway had turned to face the camera fully, and its expression, once blank, had begun to look distinctly, uncomfortably fond — the look of someone who has been included in a family gathering for so long that they've simply become part of the family, whether the family agreed to it or not.

This year will be the twenty-third photograph. The Okafors still take it on the same porch, at the same hour, in the same costumes-that-aren't-quite-repeats, and they have started, without much discussion, leaving one extra chair on the porch just out of frame — not because anyone has asked them to, but because it felt, all of them agreed, like the polite thing to do for a guest who has clearly decided to stay.