The Autobiographies of Photographs

Nine 100-word snaps | short fiction

iStock

I

I felt like the bearer of heavy news.

His thin mouth expressed the man’s habit of breaking twigs for kindling in a forest of terrible ideas, the offshoots of poor soil. He stood against the washed-out garden partition.

In the greyish landscape, where the winds, in their scouring way, warned of pelting rain, a downpour would occupy the morning hours that day. You, haunted creature, time-stamped the day you went away: explain why she kept me there so long, tacked up.

Silence.

I still don’t know why I eventually came off that wall, except by then I was so old.

II

My name’s IMG20250506_23202641. I’m a squirrel and chickadee puzzling at a tin cup full of rain left outside by some long-gone traveler, while a train whizzes by, dark with workers who accept their commute without complaint. I’m rich, yet snapped as an afterthought. This easy medium! I barely exist at all and can be deleted without warning. I am only pixels, after all. There’s a garbage patch where we live, the Cloud, it’s called. I worry for myself and the others. We could be trapped here forever if the owner loses his account or password. We hear it’s not uncommon.

III

If she’d had a lachrymatory vessel, a tear-catcher, she would’ve used it to measure how long to wait. The blind particles did as they were told, forever securing his face, its terrible joy and beauty. She should develop as well as I have on this paper, but my success is just luck in the darkroom. My power resides in her blind desire. Imagine if Zeus had seen him and tripped the shutter, to capture his soul on the palladium emulsion. It's what gods do: to see and want and take. She settled for me, and his vague promise to return.

IV

I’m a bold one, eh? My colors, my attitude. The taker had an eye and terrific reflexes. Not afraid to capture people doing the things that could get them into many degrees of trouble. You don’t believe me, but I’m a hot item. Who possesses me wields the power to create and destroy. I am currency. I am agency. I am positive proof.

I will trade hands, unless those hands are the wrong ones. What then? I face deletion. My grandfather always had backup. Negs could be hidden away like frozen embryos. Whereas, I am a testament to audacity and will burn down in a toxic, multicolored flame of scandal.

V

I’m hard to look at, I know. I will stay with you for a long time, possibly forever. I am the truthful testimony that must aid in the rendering a judgment. I’m not artful, but forensics will need my banality. My duty is to attest to what remains at the scene of someone’s last day on earth. I will show you things no one should have to see. Not in factual black and white, but in living, screaming color. My business entails spatter, sticky drops and high-velocity sprays. Forgive me. I hope you, the jury, have the stomach for it.

VI

My purpose is to aid the ones who have seen too much, whose minds overflow with the cascading years. The plethora breaks apart as their eyes dim. Memories swirl and vanish. I am a rescuer of sorts, a conservator. I light the path that is longer behind than before them. They go from point to point, in bursts of poignant memory. These old hands, now new ones. The snowman hasn’t melted, and nascent, defining qualities shine in the eyes of their children. Whole blocks of time ignite cortex and brain stem, and flood the body with wellbeing. I am medicine.

VII

Even polite people smirked. I looked weirder than a dog wearing panty-hose. Defiant me manifested in scornful disregard, but neurotic me curled from the pressure of being rejected. On grumpy days, my subject seemed to be mocking photography. Joker me laughed because why I should care? It couldn’t be called a handsome face, but it was mine. It was the subject I’d captured for all time, that misshapen thing whose features seemed in quotations, the “Nose” or “Chin”. Sparking such hilarity was, if not matinee-idol material, still normal, human-looking. Unhappily, it was my lot to provoke the penchant for cruelty.

VIII

In her dreams, her sister is still five, and wearing the sweater she bought for her, the blue swirly one with the little wooden buttons. A kind stranger agreed take me in the museum with her phone. I’m not of the highest resolution, but lovely nonetheless. She is crouching and holds the child alongside her, not much more than a child herself. They have their mother's smile, all that's left of the woman who made them native to this city. This was her mother’s favorite museum, and that was an exceptional day. How do I know that? I am framed.

IX

A little overexposed.

Not me, my values stand within acceptable limits of taste and practice—no, I refer to something else: the person who overexposes themselves. Visual oversharing. Here I am, revealing things anyone with intelligence—especially the emotional variety—would get. It’s the thousand-yard stare of a damaged interiority he didn’t know to conceal, or possibly, how to conceal, unless it was deliberate. And then it went on social media, and now it’s viral. All those eyeballs and itchy liking fingers, an instant internet darling. This was not his intention, but he himself was struck by the chord it struck in others.

– ⴽⴰⵎⵉⵍⴰ

Thanks for reading my work.