Skye turned the metal lock on the glass door even though there were five minutes left to closing time. Outside, the last red and orange streaked clouds faded to purplish-blue. He watched the coming storm through One Hour Photo’s big front window. Funny how something so beautiful could be so terrible, Skye thought. The weather said the storm would be the worst in years.

One Hour Photo occupied a concrete island in the parking lot of the Cherry Wood Shopping Center, a small strip mall in the outskirts of Albany, New York. Its window looked out on the road and the wooded undeveloped lots beyond. A Cineplex was to be built in the vacant lot, but until then One Hour Photo was an excellent place to watch the sun go down.

He had only wanted to prove himself, Chun-Jin thought. He had just wanted people to believe that he was a man, Knei-Gong especially. When he thought of his brother’s words, his ears still stung with them.

"You, little worm? You will never be a man. You are worse than a girl, just as pretty and twice as useless. You had better run for cover if the barbarians do attack. They will probably take you as a concubine for the khan. Or perhaps that is what you are hoping?"

I’m opening the cabinet now…The solitary tin can contains beets, what else? Only I can access the cabinet; the little ones are shrunk oh so small; they circle my legs, scratching at my heels. Wait, I tell them, mustering up bravado against welling tears. Dinner will be ready soon...I’ve believed each dinner would be the last, but I keep waking up to another last meal, and always a can of beets.

Nights she’d go flying in her tin pajamas, flapping her arms and kicking her feet, a clanking metal fish in the deep black phosphorescent night sky. Her aeroplane dreams were long hauls over the icing-topped world to the Far East, to the urgent pulsing electric sea of Taiwan. Here were spare parts and wiring, robotic buffers, machines that stripped the pajamas down and fixed them with shiny new rivets at the seams.