The Photographer's Divorce by BJ Ward

She walks out the door for the final time and her absence is already moving in, clutching its baggage, looking for whiskey in his cupboard, negatives in his camera. Her absence sets the table for one where it and the man will dine alone together for many nights. As they eat each night in the stark light of a single candle (how could flame be so cold?), the absence’s shadow flattens out across the walls he and she once painted together, leaves a film that thickens his house, aggregately closing the space he lives in like a constricting automatic camera lens attempting to photograph an object or occurrence to which he’s too close to see clearly. It’s focusing and focusing not able to get it— it focuses so hard it pulls the garden into the house, and then the street— after that, a mountain, a few distant clouds— soon the whole world is something he can’t see as it crowds his house. In fact, everything is now in his house except her.