The Wedding Photograph
- 3 minute read
- Ages 10-13
- Horror Stories for Kids
My grandmother had one photograph on the wall of her front room and it had been there my whole life.
It was her wedding, in 1961. Forty-one people standing on the steps of a house, in three rows, everybody looking at the camera except one boy at the end who is looking at something off to the side.
I had looked at it a thousand times without looking at it, the way you do with a picture that has always been there.
The counting
The summer I was twelve my grandmother had a fall and I stayed with her for six weeks while she got better.
There was not much to do in the afternoons.
So one day I stood in front of the photograph and counted the people in it properly, for no reason at all, and got forty-one.
I told her at dinner. She said yes, forty-one, and named about thirty of them from memory without getting up.
Forty-two
Three weeks later I counted it again, because I had forgotten the number.
Forty-two.
I counted it four more times. Forty-two every time. Back row fifteen, middle row fourteen, front row thirteen.
I fetched my grandmother and asked her to count it.
She counted forty-two and said that was right, and that it had always been forty-two.
"You said forty-one."
"Did I?" she said. "Then I miscounted. I am eighty-one."
The man
There is a man in the back row, second from the left, whom my grandmother cannot name.
She can name every other person in that photograph including two she has not seen since the sixties. She goes along the row and does it without hesitating, and when she gets to him she stops and says he must have been from the groom's side.
My grandfather was the groom.
She was married to him for forty-four years and she never once, in six weeks of me asking, said his name.
Now
My grandmother died two years ago and the photograph is in my house now, on my wall, and my daughter is five.
I have not counted it since I hung it.
I am not going to. And I have worked out that this is the whole trick of it, because the counting is the part that costs nothing, and it is the one thing I will not do.
But my daughter is learning her numbers, and she likes the photograph, and she stands in front of it in the afternoons.
And yesterday she asked me who the extra man was.
Moral of the story
Whatever is in that photograph does not do anything except be counted. The narrator can protect himself by refusing to look, and he cannot protect a five-year-old who is learning to count.
Questions and answers
- What is in the photograph?
The grandmother's wedding in 1961, with people standing in three rows on the steps of a house.
- What number did the narrator count first?
Forty-one, which his grandmother confirmed.
- What did he count three weeks later?
Forty-two, four times over.
- What was strange about the grandmother's response?
She counted forty-two, said it had always been forty-two, and blamed her age for the earlier answer.
- Why is the man in the back row unsettling?
She can name every other person in the photograph, including people she has not seen for decades, but not him.
Word meanings
- hesitating
- Pausing before doing or saying something.
- groom
- The man getting married.
- miscounted
- Counted wrongly.
- row
- A line of people or things side by side.
Questions about The Wedding Photograph
What is the moral of The Wedding Photograph?
That some things can only reach you if you engage with them, and that you cannot make that choice on someone else's behalf. That is what the last line is for.
Is anything frightening shown?
No. Nothing moves and nobody is harmed. The whole story is a number changing.
Why does the grandmother deny the first count?
The story leaves it open. She may have forgotten, or she may be doing what people do when they have lived with something for sixty years.
What age is this suitable for?
Ages ten and above. It is one of the more unsettling stories on the site because of the ending rather than anything in the middle.