May I? Day 5 - The Girl who Loved Film

My usual process is to write during my commute, post when I get to a wifi hotspot. This means that weekends are ironically the least likely time for me to post, as I like to have the day with my family and need to have it with chores.

This one I'm writing on an airplane, en route to Dallas for some training. More on that later this week. For now, we'll pick up the next daily-ish writing exercise, another of the "May I?" photoprompts from over at G+. This is a core conceit that I very much like; it might be one of the daily flashes which grows into something more. Yesterday's writing accomplishment - sending "The Witch of Suburbia" out in search of a home - grew directly from a flash piece I wrote from one of these. Very little of my original prose remained, and I moved it from third-person to second-person, but it kept the idea and some of the tone of the original.  I'm not yet sure where this one will go if I carry it forward, but it might be fun to see.


"The Girl Who Loved Film"

On her first date with Zach, Jane brought an old, battered film camera. She wished she'd been born decades earlier, when photographs were something one took with a camera. Carefully and mindfully, followed by a patient wait for negatives, slides, prints. She'd set it at the table, gently touched it as she sipped her drink.
"Nobody even uses a camera anymore. They use phones or even iPads. And they don't take photograps. They take pictures."
Zach looked from the camera up to her eyes, his gaze lingering for just a half-beat  "What's the difference?"
"A photograph is a thing, an artifact, a unique work of art. The alchemy of the darkroom, double exposures, the enlarger lit or a heartbeat too long. It's magic in a way that a digital photo is not."
He grunted an assent through a mouthful of eggroll, discretely checking that his cameraphone was safely hidden in his pants pocket. If he knew one thing, he knew that if you wanted to get anywhere, you needed to humor your date. Besides, the craziest ones were often the kinkiest.
He'd later learn that she wasn't especially kinky, but was an agreeable lover with a soft, pleasant body. Her one quirk was, predictably, her damn cameras. She watched him undress through the viewfinder of an old SLR, playfully snapped shots of him with a refurbished polaroid, even photographed herself nude in the mirror, barely concious of his body pressed behind her, his hardness against her soft curves, one arm reaching across her body to cup a breast. He was barely aware of the camera. She smelled faintly of chemicals. Always.
At last she lead him, still naked, to her darkroom.  She gave him a moment to memorize the locations of shallow pans of developer and fixer, sealed cannisters of film, the remaining arcane tools of the photographer's trade. She turned off the lights, cloaking them in deeper darkness than he could remember; no illuminated clock, no streetlight spilling in through a window, no nightlight, nothing. Now she moved behind him, fingertips tracing his flank down to his hip, erect nipples scraping erotically against his back. She whispered, "don't you love this? Isn't it so much more real than digital?"
He whispered back a breathy yes, whether to the question or her touch unclear. To speak outloud seemed wrong, almost blasphemous. In the darkness, he became hyperaware of her touch, disconnected from any other awareness. As she wrapped a hand around him he closes his eyes, enveloping darkness in darkness. As the tension grew in him, she whisered,
"some say that the darkroon is a place of magic, of alchemy. That a true photographer can catch your very soul."
Her words came from impossibly far away, her touch impossibly near. The sounds of flesh against flesh, her hand squeezing tighter, moving faster, then at the moment of release a brightflash of white hot light, from nowhere, burning into the back of eyes and his brain and then fading
fading
to nothing.
Hours later, Jane returned to her darkroom. Alone, she examined the latest soul-print pinned it to the wall with the rest of her collection.
Prompt image, linked here, is NSFW.

May I? Day 4

I'm editting today, but wanted to give something quick and different here. A few lines of iambic pentameter referencing the story of Candaules and Gyges from Herodatus's histories.


In darkness on her throne beneath the earth
the dead and nameless queen did read her tale.
The king - her mate who'd shown her as his prize
betrayed her naked form to unfit; eyes
and slain in turn be he who'd seen her form.
And now she sits there naked on the throne
and reads the in the tale she's further stripped.
The writer of events has named the killer and the king
but left her name buried in the sands of time.

The first thing that strikes me about the Histories is that it isn't history the way we know it today; it is much more narrative, much less focused on root causes and historical context and more on individuals and their stories. Candaules, for example, was so intent on proving to his advisor Gyges that his wife was the most beautiful woman in the world that he contrived to let the man see her naked. The digital camera was a few thousand years from being invented, so this involved hiding in her bedroom, getting caught, and having the embarrassed woman convince him to murder her husband to get even with her. It's the kind of story, with broad characters leading to some lesson, that would not feel out of place in a religious text.

Interestingly,while she does instigate her husband's murder, the wife is never given a name and vanishes from the narrative after marrying Gyges. That was the prompt for today's exercize.

Today's image prompt is courtesty of bo_frannson onFlickr under a Create Commons non-commercial license.

May I? Day 2. Summer

May I? enters Day 2 with another vignette, in the first person this time.


"A Taste of Summers Past"

Twelve popsicles. Three grape, Three orange, three lime and, best of all, three cherry.

The yellow box wasn't as I remembered it, but the picture took me decades back in time, to bare feed on grass, a baseball game on the radio, sprinklers to run through and, of course, cherry popsicles. My mother scolding me for refusing the grape and the orange, the lemon. They only came as an assortment and, didn't I know there were kids starving in Africa? Hot, dry Africa where they'd die for a popsicle? She was unimpressed with my willingness to send the grape ones.

It's been a long time since I'd run through sprinklers, but it is summer and the popsicle box caught my eye on my way to the frozen dinners. Back home, stripped to my undershirt in the sticky summer air, I hold each white-plastic wrapped shaft to the light, peering through for the telltale red shadow. Ah, this one. Peel it open, the faint crinklink of plastic barely audible over the window fan's rattling. I bite the end off between front teeth, and am punished with a sharp lance of pain deep into my gums. Damn. That never used too happen. I need the dentist. Badly.

The flavor isn't as I remember. Cloyingly sweet, with barely a hint of actual cherries. Too sweet.  I find that I can't bare the taste. Sticky melting popsicle drips onto my fingers. I rub the half-bitten popsicle around my lips, under my tongue, savoring the stickycoldwetchill against the hot summer air. That feels good, if I at least keep it off of my teeth. A bit trickes down my chin, my neck, bloodstaining my shirt as I flip on the radio, hunting for the baseball game.

As the stickyred dries onto my face, a hint of sunset across my five-oclock shadow, I rifle thorugh the rest of the box. Eleven popsicles. I carefully set the two remaining cherry into the freezer and toss the rest into the trash.

xaphanz on Flickr via an Attribution-NonCommercial
Creative Commons license http://www.flickr.com/photos/xaphanz/381187149/