Camera Shy
There were things Ashley continued to think about long past their peak points. Mulled and obsessed over way beyond the expiration of whatever effects they might have caused, any meanings they may have conveyed. All their significance as discharged as digested food shat out the following morning.
The lie she had given to skip out on jury duty, forgetting her father’s sixtieth birthday, the course (Gestalt Therapy) she failed in college. Even as far back as the Romantic Bride Barbie doll she had lost, inexplicably, as a rather meticulous eight year-old.
With the way the world spun these days, did anything retain import past the next month? Scandals? Disasters? Ex-lovers?
She had run into Layne at the grocery on Claiborne. She never went there but she needed heavy cream for Dean’s tres leches birthday cake and the store was on the way home from the clinic. Layne was much heavier and his beard had a sprinkling of white, but his eyes were the same tantalizing aquamarine. A kid, a girl of four or five, hung from his cart. She had chocolate on her cheeks and fresh scabs on her knees.
As they exchanged surprise and pleasantries and Layne told her about his family and selling demos over the internet, and as his daughter raised her arms to be lifted and placed into the cart seat and demanded his phone to play with, while Ashley smiled and cooed and complimented, what she thought about was this…
When they used to make love he would take videos. Videos only of her face, her eyes. She believed this idiosyncrasy to be another indication of why she loved him just as his silly impersonations and his appreciation for Bergson and his swimmer’s physique were. He wasn’t vulgar; he didn’t want to make a porno with her boobs flopping up and down, or, like a vain boy flexing in front of the mirror, to ogle himself pumping in and out of her. He just wanted her face and the soft, secret unveiling of her eyes—as revealing as any confession or garment shed. Something like a new light discovered or the quiet splendor of a doe stepping free from thick forest cover. So he said and so she let him. And as she stared up into the humid air between their sweaty faces to his flipped open phone (the black reptilian skin, the round red eye of the lens) she felt herself swelling and shedding and swelling until with a monstrous wave he came and she climaxed, closing her eyes and turning her face into the pillow, where she breathed and hardened and breathed until hearing the clap of his phone closing and feeling his weight sliding off of her.
A couple of years later, after repetitive periods of boredom and frustration, lies and infidelities, disappointments, grievances, good times, hatred, tenderness and guilt, as they stood alone and apart in their small trailer amidst the disheveled ruins of their life together—broken coffee cups; dying flowers; dirty underwear entwined on the floor; cd’s and dvd’s waiting to be divvied up; photographs of them together, laughing and embracing, some done professionally and others taken by chance strangers, hanging dusty and crooked on the yellowing walls—having come to the final, inexorable conclusion that it was finally OVER (Who had said it? Him? Her? Or was it one of those unspoken commands that passed between them like once upon a time they had shared on Saturday afternoons when, with only a glance, they would put down their respective books and collide at their unmade bed.), it surprised her that the first thing she thought of was not their shared bank account or the trailer or her engagement ring, nor her fear, her future, or her broken heart but his phone. They had not done the thing with the camera in a long time. They had tried other things since, kinkier things, things more graphic, more eroding, more sinfully intense. But it was his phone and the videos it held she remembered now and asked for. It wasn’t that she feared she would find those grainy pixels splashed over the internet, or that, in a fit of drunken spite, he would send them to their friends. What she feared was that he would watch them. And the thought that he could see her in that way again embarrassed her, angered her, threw her in desperate rage. Made her feel like she had a catastrophic wound, leaving behind a trail of boiling blood on the ground. It sickened her to think he would still have such…access. Whenever he wanted. He had her. That old, primitive fear of a soul captured. She could not abide their existence.
He stopped dumping some of his things into a box and looked at her funny, but he dug into his jeans and pulled out his phone and opened it. Delete them, she demanded, breathing fast. For a long time he stared down at his phone, slowly pushing buttons, but all of a sudden he shrugged his shoulders and snapped his phone shut, shaking his head. He left without his box. She chased him outside, hollering down the steps but she fell and he was gone, his Silverado swallowed up in the afternoon traffic. Barefoot and bra-less in tank top and red running shorts she hugged the railing, crying and raging, as her neighbors stared at her from windows and doorways and gardens, taking pictures of her in their minds. Joyce, the neighbor she was most friendly with, came for her with hands out but it was a touch she could not stomach and so she ran back up the wooden steps into their abandoned trailer, slamming the door shut behind her.
Under the stark glow of the grocery’s fluorescent lights, she mostly avoided looking into Layne’s eyes, instead focusing on his daughter as she stabbed his iPhone with moist fingers, giggling. The feeling from the trailer returned just as raw. Desperate vulnerability. Did he still have them, those videos? Had he kept them, transferred them to a laptop, stored them in a cloud?
Even after their curt goodbyes, gravity remained heavier.
This sunken, cut-out feeling stayed with her as she scanned the cream, the candles, the cigarettes, dumping them in the carousel of plastic bags.
And the feeling persisted as she thought about it in the private comfort of her bed; Dean snoring drunkenly beside her, having blissfully passed out before his birthday blowjob could be performed, and her two teenaged children left safely to their devices behind the closed doors of their respective bedrooms. This unyielding feeling that a part of her had been stolen, or was lost, and even twenty years later she was still only flittering along, ghost-like, insubstantial. Or even worse, that a large part of her would always be a wound, constantly agitated, forever exposed.
She tossed and turned, rubbed her feet together, scratched the thick tangles of her hair. Almost woke up Dean with her mouth.
So strange what stayed, what survived, what was allowed to die.
Had he pulled up her videos? Was he watching them now?
Absently, her fingers went between her legs. The same wound spreading open again like a favorite confidante. Her eyes opened wide in the dark.
M. Palmer is a graduate of the Miami University writing program. His work has appeared in such places as Fantasy Magazine, Crossed Genres, the anthology Tattered Souls, and most recently in the journals God’s Cruel Joke, Superpresent, and Rock and a Hard Place. He can be found on X (MPalmer33) and Facebook (MPalmer).