I Only Know My Older Siblings through Photographs

They have fat cheeks and blonde hair and blonde skin; tiny white-person eyes. These are the kids he deserves, perfect cherubs in bleached Polaroids.

Later I see a shot of his daughter, recently graduated, standing beside his new wife, both beaming. The wife looks younger than the daughter, but she isn’t; that’s just the way it is with her kind.

Why he married a brown woman is beyond me. All she could give him were mottled-skinned children with coarse black hair and eyes too large.

Halflings.

We were raised to be perfect and blonde. We never would be.