Someone Joined the Group Chat
horror◐ TeenZoe: "that's photoshopped. it has to be." I zoomed in on the man. His face was a little wrong, like a photo of a photo. And he wasn't looking at the cake like everyone else. He was looking at whoever was holding the camera. Me: "who took this picture?" The gray circle: "You did." Me: "i was SEVEN" "You handed me the camera. You said, take one of all of us." I don't remember that. But we did lose a camera that year.
Sam: "wait. was it the silver camera?" Me: "how do you know that" Sam: "because it's in my closet. it was already there when we moved into this house. i thought it was dad's." He sent a picture of it. Old silver camera, dusty, a roll of film still inside. The gray circle answered before any of us could. "Don't develop the film." So obviously Dad drove us all to the one-hour photo place in the morning.
What happens next?
1 ways forwardThe man behind the counter came back looking sick. "Twenty-three pictures," he said. "They're all the same." Every photo was our family, sleeping. Different rooms. Different years. In each one, the camera was a little closer. The last one was me. Asleep. Last Tuesday. Close enough to count my eyelashes. The gray circle sent one final message: "One left on the roll." Dad smashed the camera in the parking lot, and the chat dropped to 5 that same second. Last week, Zoe's phone said storage was full. A new album sat in her camera roll. One she never made. It's called One Left. It's empty. For now.