Gemotions

The attic was stifling, the air thick with the smell of mothballs. John found a box of old photographs, and then one jumped out at him. His parents, in a photograph from before he was born. In a way he'd never seen them. Smiling. Laughing. And his mother was holding hands with a man who was not his father.

He felt a wave of nausea roll over him. The shock was intense. His father was a quiet man, and his mother was a saint. Now, everything shifted.

He found himself struggling to breathe, the air suddenly thin and insufficient. The world was now somehow a different place.