My mother, who I love very much, and whose life admittedly has been difficult, showed me a picture she had found on the internet which she said was an actual photograph of Jesus. The picture, which did look photographic in quality, showed Jesus at the bottom of the ocean, which one imagines would not be difficult for Jesus, since he is the son of God, and his hands were made out of shrimp, and his glowing white robe appeared to be lined with shrimp, and he was in the act, it appeared, of blessing a multitude of shrimp. My mother had recently broken things off with her boyfriend, a fifty-seven-year-old former autoworker and former alcoholic who was now, though neither my mother nor he would admit to it, addicted to Percocet; she had asked me to come stay with her for several days while her ex, very slowly, moved his things out. She didn’t want him to make any scenes, she said. I found it difficult to imagine him making a scene. He was a small bald man, though stocky, who in my experience was always a moment or two from falling asleep. Oh, but he gets worked up, my mother said. My mother has always been attracted to bad men, men with problems which I believe she believes she can fix; inevitably however it turns out these problems are not fixable, are problems at the core of who these men are, or else the men, being bad, have no interest in having these problems fixed. I believe, though cannot know for sure, that this is why my mother separated from my father, because though he appeared at first to be bad, he turned out, upon further inspection, not to be, or not sufficiently so; that the problems which my mother wanted to fix, such as his occasional drug usage and preference for riding motorcycles helmetless, were not deep-seated problems so much as affectations or preferences, which he could take or leave. I help Rex, her now-ex-boyfriend, take out a particularly heavy box, though I mostly carry it, since he seems to have hardly the strength to lift a baby, and when I come back my mother is printing out the picture of Jesus blessing the shrimp on her photographic quality printer, purchased to print out photographs of the trip to the Grand Canyon which she and Rex had planned to go on but never got around to. I want to ask my mother, though I do not, how she believes they took a photograph of Jesus, who was not alive at a time when photography was a going concern; and who, for that matter, is the they who took the picture, who would need, like Jesus, to be at the bottom of the ocean in addition to having access to photographic equipment. I imagine that for my mother these questions, these particulars, are beside the point, which is that a thing once believed impossible—a photograph of Jesus—has turned out, through improvements in technology, to have been not only possible but in fact accomplished. Meanwhile, following the exertion of the most recent box, Rex has sat down in the La-Z-Boy and fallen asleep. For a short period when I was in the sixth grade, or the seventh, and my mother was dating the worst of her boyfriends, a man so terrible that I am still in contact with his son because we bonded over this man’s terribleness, we had a small tank containing what the pet store referred to as fancy shrimp; we bought a half-dozen of these fancy shrimp and several assassin snails, which were intended, the pet store owner told us, to keep the sides of the tank clean so we could better observe the fancy shrimp. Since we couldn’t tell the difference between one shrimp and another, we named them all Jeffrey; when I came home from school my mother might ask, for example, if I had said hello to the Jeffreys yet, or else she would tell me that it was time to feed the Jeffreys; and we named the assassin snails, because we determined they too needed a name, Frank. But then one day I came home from school to find one of the Jeffreys lying desiccated on the floor not far from the table on which we had positioned the tank, as if he had launched himself out of the water and onto the linoleum below; and the next morning I found another Jeffrey on the floor, a little further away. A few days after that, coming home from the grocery store with my mother, we found a third, still wet. What we were saying, the pet store owner explained, was impossible; fancy shrimp, of the variety we bought, are water-dwelling creatures; they do not jump; they do not have the ability to jump. And yet. We kept finding Jeffreys on the floor, or in some cases still on the table, a little closer to the tank. Once I managed to save a Jeffrey, finding it still twitching, and placed it carefully back into the water; it swam around listlessly and, or so it seemed to me, despondent. It refused to eat when I shook the tin of Jeffrey-food into the tank. The next morning, I found that Jeffrey, or possibly another, in the same location on the table near the tank, but this time thoroughly dead. At the time I believed, or came to believe, it was the horrible boyfriend playing a trick on us. I even confronted him about it, but he just laughed. Now I am tempted to think it was a miracle, albeit a small and somewhat grotesque one. I have never thought of my mother as particularly religious and she is not, she has never gone to church, for example, except for a short period during my youth, shortly after she separated from my father and not long before his death, riding his motorcycle helmetless and on drugs, when I think she was lonely and which she told me later was because she thought I, a difficult child from what she says, could benefit from some moral education.