Shutter(3)

Back at M2, I hovered above the bag and dropped my scale on the concrete. The bag was ten inches long and six inches across. The white leather was soft, worn, and scuffed underneath, the brown leather handles darkened with oil and dirt. The zipper was open. I raised the camera and framed the purse, the only witness here to what had really happened. On the right side of the bag, there was a shoe print pressed into the leather. It looked like a work boot. One of the investigators pulled a wallet from the bag and opened it, sending a tattered photograph to the ground. A young woman with long, full, and slightly curled hair, smiling, her right arm around the neck of another woman with a glowing white halo of hair. The young woman had an electric smile and wore a red tank top, a tattoo of a baby’s face on the right side of her chest. I had seen that tattoo before—well, what was left of it. They found her driver’s license and laid it on top of the wallet. I snapped a photo of the ID: Erma Singleton. Size 7 shoes. Thought it would last forever. I pressed the shutter down. Image number 1,000.

As I made my way off the bridge and back to the highway, the sky was turning from black to blue, the stars disappearing from bottom to top. The new light revealed the uneven strip of aged blood that skittered left, right, and in spirals on the highway— the path of her body’s final movements. I changed memory cards. The light allowed me to frame the scene from above as it unfurled beneath the red shoes, the first splash of blood directly below the dangling, stained leather.

The Office of the Medical Investigator had collected and sealed nearly all the body. Only a few yellow evidence markers remained. The haggard-faced investigators were eager to crawl back to their homes and bury their heads beneath the pillows. I could only hope that I would be able to fall asleep when I got home.

I followed the blood and searched for anything we might have missed. The lingering smell of death was developing.

I saw it then. A small hunk of flesh hadn’t been spotted by any officer or investigator. We all had walked this path before, more than two or three times, but we had missed it. The skin matched the color of the slightly reddened clay on the roadside, drawn into the earth, the pull of death’s process.

“Over here!” I called.

I took a few pictures before they had a chance to contaminate the scene. The beams of the flashlights dropped, the hollow light fixed on my boots. A piece of face, the ear and the eye still intact, the lid partially open. The eye was green, turning iridescent as they watched.

“Can you go ahead and make a marker for this one, Officer?”

Nothing.

“Officer?”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” Officer Branson was three days on the job. He laid down a yellow marker.

One hundred.

I took the picture. I had taken 1,015 pictures of over a hundred separate pieces of a human being and her belongings. I had five scrapes on my own hands and knees and one filthy white paper suit.

I sat in my car for fifteen minutes and labeled three photo cards and five pages of notes.

The pain started somewhere in my temple, I closed my eyes, hoping to escape it, but it stayed—the pain, and the heavy yellow light that was sitting in my front seat.





CHAPTER TWO

Exakta VX 1000

THESE LIGHTS HAVE been with me for as long as I can remember. And even now, I remember almost everything.

I was a quiet baby. My grandmother told stories about how I would stay silent for twenty-four-hour periods, depriving her and my mother, Anne, of sleep because they wondered if I was dead. But there I would be every morning, eyes wide, looking to the sky, where there was a ray of light only I could see. I didn’t cry. I was just awake. All the time.

“I think something is wrong with her, Mom.” My worried mother would watch me stare into space, letting out a giddy laugh.

“There is nothing wrong with her,” my grandmother would say. “She’s just talking to someone out there, and it’s none of our business.”

I remember my grandmother saying this. She looked over her shoulders all the time, trying to glimpse what I was staring at. Now I know there was nothing there.

For me, there was a collection of lights and smiling faces— high-pitched giggles and highlighted silhouettes. The lights played with me like parents play with their newborns. They would pull close to me, enough that I could smell their sweetness. I learned to love them and the honey drops on their whispers. They never hurt me or brought darkness to me, so I always smiled back.

As an infant, I watched my mother sneak over my cradle railings at night, her creaking camera shutter snapping pictures of me while I lay awake. Her eyes were a distant abstraction of brown fragments through the elongated viewfinder. I remember her Exakta with the left-handed shutter button, her chipped fingernails, her deep-set brown eyes, just like mine—I remember all of us sitting under the golden light of my mother’s bedroom and marveling, awake.

I felt the expanse between us as my mother would take frame after frame, pulling the camera away from her face only to look at me like a specimen, a jagged piece of a puzzle that she couldn’t finish. My mother was beautiful. She was too young to be my mother. Her face was soft and naive, with the easy, gentle hint of an unrecognized future. When she held me, I was afraid of falling. Her arms were small, bony, and inexperienced, rocking from side to side unsteadily, drawing me closer and looking at me with blurry, watering eyes. When I was hungry, she fed me. But her gaze moved past me and into a future that I could not be a part of.