Pupil

Vampire eyes, she said.
This photograph of you has no pupils, and mine are dilated from sleep. Your friend took it over breakfast, across our sandy blanket, a Polaroid, a gag gift she’d brought in a beach bag, in the back of the van. She looked at the photograph and laughed at your distortion. I have the only copy.
Give it here, Amy, you said, extending a hand for the photograph. Your voice had an edge to it, and a familiarity, a gentle reprimand. Gentle, because of her, but also because of me, because I was excitable, and fragile, and what I knew about the world was all contained in the edges of that print, the way your hand could brush hers and mine, and I was not sure of the difference, if there was a difference, if even you knew.
In the dream I had, I still have, even though you and she and I are gone from that beach, I run alongside the windbreak of eucalyptus, and I find you at the end, in a swirl of dust, and I grab your hand before falling off the border of this vision. We leap into the dark. I am rigid. My fists flex inside the brace of my thumb.
See here, watch, I will wake us up from memory, from paper, trace an outline of brown around our orbit, adjust the aperture. I will change these boundaries, draw a thousand new lines. My hands will bloom an iris out of you yet.