By Sandy Gringas

Once I posed for nude pictures. It was just with a guy I was seeing at the time,
who called himself a photographer. He was someone I found on the internet. I
think it was big fish dot com. Is that still around? His profile picture was cute, and
his voice was smooth on the phone, but he really was unemployed and living in
his mom’s trailer and was much fatter in person. Truth emerges, as they say. They
weren’t really wild pictures or anything. It was just me lying on my bed. Lying or
laying? Laying is when it’s an object, right? You lay eggs for example. It must be
lying. Anyway. I had my jeans on, so I was only half-naked. I had a belly-button
ring at the time. I don’t have it anymore, but I still have the hole. So, you’d know
it was me if those pictures surfaced. Why I did it was because I can’t ever seem
to see myself. I mean, can you? No matter how many mirrors I look in or photos
of me there are, I always think, Is that me? Why I thought this photographer
guy would be the one to show me my true self is really the issue here. I know.
And I don’t do that anymore. I grew up, I promise. Just in case I am running for
president one day and you’re worried about my judgment in men. But I really
can’t run for president, even though the world is so stupid, and I’d be good at
giving speeches or at least I’d be better than most of the presidents I’ve heard
over the years. I know those photos would do me in. And that guy. I can’t even
remember his name. But I know he’d be the kind to keep the photos, you know?
Just in case a situation arose where they’d come in handy. He told me once that he
was in the army, and he got this special survivalist training so he could stay under
the snow for eight hours at a time. After we stopped seeing each other, which was
pretty much right after he threw a hoagie at me, it snowed at my house, and I was
convinced that he was out there watching me from under a snowbank.

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Sandy Gingras has written and illustrated 25 gift books and a novel, Paradise Girls (St. Martin’s Press). She received The Crime Writer’s Association Debut Dagger Award in 2012 and a 2026 Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts for prose. She designs products for the gift industry, owns two retail stores, and lives on Long Beach Island with her husband and a golden retriever named Turtle.