Dark Light

by Bernard, Bonnie; Ellery, Stefan; Hansen, John; Browning, Amanda R. ; Thomas, S. J. ; Barrett, Ruth; Sharpe, Dennis; Parker, Megan J. ; Purdy, Alexia

“No. Not of you.” He stands quickly and rushes from the room.

  “Why Daddy? Why?” She runs down the hallway as her mother stops her.

  “Let him go, Cora,” she instructs. “He is tired. Taking pictures makes him…tired.”

  Eventually, as the years pass, he takes family pictures again, almost compulsively as if to negate his work for the newspapers.

  20 Years Later

  Cora is called home to identify her father. As she enters her home she finds a picture taken two years ago. It is the last picture taken of his eldest daughter, strangely labeled ‘Picture One’. It is crumpled and smeared with tears as it lies next to her father’s dead hand. Beside the camera aimed at her father’s dead body rests another manila folder of pictures. ‘Picture Two’ through ‘Picture Six’. She instinctively grabs his camera, the strap is frayed and smells of her father. She scrolls to the last picture. Her father is falling to the floor, halfway to a fall like a dropped marionette. His eyes are open and his temple is bleeding. This is his parting shot.

  Picture One

  Cora knew what her father expected. Her sister stood under the boy’s arm in front of the van, smiling on command. The dusty bumper was warm behind her sister’s knees and the remnants of the plumber’s name and phone number framed her in the photograph. The lighting and composition could certainly be better. But this is the picture her father deserved, ambushing these two unwilling subjects as they rushed from their house.

  Her sister was small and dark haired like her mother. But she had her grandmother’s large eyes and quick smile. She wore shorts, flips flops, and a faded gray hoodie. Her smile was perfect - slightly annoyed but still fetching. The boy, he didn’t matter. A friend, a lover perhaps, but the relationship was of little consequence – on and off, irrelevant.

  None of them will see her again. Her face will be frozen in time, framed by years of smiles, birthdays, and milestones that have been stored neatly on the family computer, classified by year and by event. Thumbnail pictures of a once living girl. In two nights, she will disappear, a few hairs left behind inside that van, and this is the final photograph that her father will take of her.

  Picture Two

  The house stands behind a rusted For Sale sign. The yard is dusty, the front storm door hangs from its hinges, and cardboard covers the living room window. Three children and their mother stand outside. Their house is in the shadows of a West Virginia mountain. Three-year-old boys smile at the world, their identical faces look like sunshine painted with happy eyes. The mother is gaunt. She is as skinny as the day she will die. While she isn’t as happy as her sons, she does seem relieved to be standing outside again. The thirteen-year-old daughter is the most alarming subject. Looking over her shoulder, the girl glances nervously at the house nobody wants to buy. Most of the bad things in the family happened to her. At her feet is a framed picture of a smiling man who resembles the twins but not her. This man was trapped and found dead in the coalmines three days ago. Three days ago, she came back to life. With her right foot, the girl stomps on the picture, leaving her stepfather’s face cracked through a tangle of bright lines. The camera clicks as she lifts her foot again.

  Picture Three

  The eye can’t count faces and feel certain about the number. Perhaps fifty Iraqis stand together, no room to spare. They were almost dead for eight months, burned in a club fire set by a man who was angry with his girlfriend. By chance, the girl survived. Alone, she sits on the floor of the hospital lobby before the others, the flesh on her face incinerated by the heat.

  She wonders, why should you be able to keep your fingernails and your teeth but not your hair? None of them grow hair anymore. But she is beautiful, and her lovely body wears a fine dress that is a counterpoint to her stretched and pulled skin.

  Picture Four

  Her face hides in the shadows, make her body more real as a consequence. Sunset flows across a long lovely woman. She sits on cushions and wears nothing. Her breasts and belly seem too large for such a thin frame. They look swollen and dark. Her left hand rests on her swollen stomach, waiting. The baby has been dead for two weeks inside of her yet she still hopes for the next hard kick. The picture jars Cora with the forceful negligence of medical care in parts of Africa. Mothers of malnourished children carry the corpses of their dead babies inside their wombs. Waiting for release, waiting to labor for a child that will never draw breath.

  Picture Five

  The camera is too distant to show faces or the details of any single body. What impresses is the wash of bare flesh, pale and lovely. Hundreds of bodies stand where they died, closer as lovers.

  Aid workers stand on the margins of the clearing in Bogotá, shouting instructions and encouragement in the sea of death and lifelessness.

  There is no noise in the photograph, no motion. The quantity of flesh seems infinite.

  Picture Six

  Cora is surprised to find her own face. A picture from her birth. She is nothing but a round face inside a hospital blanket. The flash from the camera annihilates shadows while her oily green eyes gaze up at a round piece metal that means nothing to her. Torn from the warmth and gentle waves of her mother, she will cry and cry and cry. Five minutes old and she is miserable. This is how her entire life will be.

  She drops the pictures, each one heavy with in its story. Each photograph is a moment captured. Each one represents only a mere fraction of the painful images from her father’s career. Yet these were the ones he chose to die with.

  She looks at the nightstand. The camera had been pre-positioned, connected to banks of strobe lights that throw their glare at the piece of floor where her father crumpled after his self-inflicted gun wound. A note taped to the mirror read, “All my life I took pictures. Pictures of pain, war, poverty, and death. This is the last one.”

  The Last Picture

  Cora scrolls through her father’s camera again. Pictures of the sky, of broken glass on the road, and the minutiae of life fill her eyes. The policemen drape the body and the voices of the emergency technicians scramble her thoughts. The oak floor is cleared, but the image of her father remains as the last photo . A picture he took of death. Of his death.

  She sees her father’s face, unblemished with a closed mouth and open green eyes. His face is blurred yet the body has clear delineation. It seems only halfway real as she holds his camera. Flames lick the still burning fireplace as she pauses. She sets the camera on the logs. Burning plastic and noxious chemicals burn her nostrils as she leaves the camera to die also.

  Table of Contents

  Andrew Katz – Headless Homecoming

  Dennis Sharpe

  –

  First Boy

  Megan J. Parker

  –

  A Scarlet Night

  Char Hardin

  –

  Empty The Bones For You

  Jana Boskey

  –

  The Lost Changeling

  L.D. Ricard

  –

  A Full Wolf Moon

  Linna Drehmel

  –

  His First Snow

  Amanda R. Browning

  –

  Dementria’s Task

  William Greer

  –

  Blood and Soil

  Linna Drehmel

  –

  The Darkon Prophecy

  Alexia Purdy

  –

  The Faery Hunt

  Bonnie Bernard

  –

  Breakdown

  Dominique Goodall

  –

  Ouija’ust Wanted To Have Fun

  Rebecca Gober

  –

  Ghost Reapers

  M.R. Murphy

  –

  Death Becomes Him

  S.J. Thomas

  –

  Dark Fairy Reflection

  Lisa Goldman

  –

  Spider Whisperer

  Jenny Phillips

  –

&nb
sp; The Kiss

  John Hansen

  –

  Goddess of Death

  Linna Drehmel

  –

  The Flaming Vengeance

  Stefan Ellery

  –

  The Miller’s Daughter

  Ruth Barrett

  –

  The Transformation

  Naomi Bonthrone

  –

  Open Your Eyes and See

  K.R. Jordan

  –

  Alba

  Alicia Cannon

  –

  Honest Nightmare

  S.J. Davis

  –

  The Last Picture