The next thing I knew, I was standing face to face with Alice. And for the first time in five years, she looked at me as if she knew me.
Twenty-Three Snapshots of San Francisco by Seth Lindberg
Seth Lindberg’s short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Phantom, Denying Death, The Darker Side, Brainbox, Brainbox II, Haunting the Dead, Jack Haringa Must Die!, Jigsaw Nation, and in the magazines Not One of Us, Twilight Showcase, Gothic.net, and Chiaroscuro. He is also a former editor of Gothic.net and currently works as a sysadmin in San Francisco, where, as the title implies, this story takes place.
In nineteenth-century photographs, nobody is smiling. The subjects sit rigid and stare out at you with cold, serious expressions. You might think humor hadn’t been invented yet, but actually cameras in those days had such long exposure times that no one wanted to hold a smile for that long. People, at least, can be instructed not to move; photographing animals proved more challenging. One early photographer decided that the only way to get a pair of stray dogs to sit still long enough for him to take their picture was to shoot them with bullets, stuff them, and position their stiff, lifeless bodies in front of his camera. In the resulting photographs, of course, the dogs appear to be alive.
This brings us to our next story, which also features photos of things that seem to be alive but aren’t. Photographs connect us to the past, fading only a little over time, especially compared with our memories, which quickly become vague and distorted. Since the dawn of photography people have obsessively compiled photo albums, keeping important memories locked safely in place. With the advent of digital cameras, it’s not unusual for a person’s personal collection to run to hundreds or even thousands of images. But what if all of that disappeared? What if a handful of photos were all that remained to remind you of an entire world, now lost?
Our next story is about just such a collection, and, as in nineteenth-century photographs, in most of these photos, nobody is smiling.
My ex-girlfriend May used to accuse me of starting every story or joke straight in the middle. Like she had to ask a thousand questions just to figure out what the hell I was talking about. I’d just babble on and she’d have to route me back to all the concrete facts about the case at hand. I can’t help it! I’m bad with beginnings: I’m suspicious of them as they are. Life doesn’t begin, not really.
Well, life begins in the physical sense, but as far as your memories go, it’s not like that. It’s not like one day you remember things, the day before you didn’t. These memories kind of fade out back, little moments, like a vision of your dad’s face, the way the back porch smelled. The rest you got to fill in, you suppose all together. A lot like pictures, really. People all frozen in these expressions they never really have because you caught them in mid-motion or something, you have to fill in who it is and what they’re about based on that one moment.
So I was talking about them the other night, but here they are for real. Twenty-three snapshots of San Francisco; the last roll of shots I ever took, the last roll I ever got developed. The end of my brilliant amateur photography career.
I guess the roll had twenty-four exposures, so I’m not sure why I only got twenty-three. Maybe it got underexposed or overexposed, maybe there was some kind of error when it got developed. I’ll never know. I lost the negatives, so these prints are all I have.
#1
Freeze frame of me, awkwardly leaning into a picture with May and her Japanese pen pal, Kyoko. May’s got an expression from the tail end of a laugh, Kyoko has this half smile while flashing a peace sign at the camera for some reason. I’m standing there, looking like an idiot. Forgot to brush my hair, my hands are shoved tightly in my pockets. I made the mistake of putting my arm around May while Kyoko was around before all this, and May got all weird on me. So I’m just standing there.
If you look hard enough, you can sort of see Alcatraz in the distance, sitting in the waters of the San Francisco Bay. Behind that, faded by haze, is the Marin Headlands.
Yes, this was before everything happened. Maybe you think so because we were smiling in that picture. But I think people smile for pictures out of habit, really.
#2
Picture of the famous “Painted Ladies”: Victorian houses in old San Francisco, in a park in the middle of the Western Addition. You can see a few people sunbathing in the grass just before it to the left. I’ve never lived in houses like that, but I bet it’s nice. Admittedly, they look better in the post cards, but they’re still quite pretty.
Behind the Painted Ladies lies the whole San Francisco skyline, including the Transamerica Pyramid. To the right you can see a pillar of smoke rising from the southern part of the city.
#3
Just May and Kyoko, hugging each other and grinning. Close up zoom on their faces, so close you can see Kyoko’s acne scars. That old gray 7 Seconds tee shirt that May’s wearing, that’s mine.
In the background people walk past and stuff. I think this one was taken in the Japantown Peace Plaza, but I don’t remember.
#4
Picture of my neighbor, Mr. Sumpter. He’s standing in the hallway, wearing an old polyester button-up shirt, leaning to one side and putting his weight on one foot. He has his head tilted and eyes open, mouth closed. One fist is clenched.
Mr. Sumpter’s eyes didn’t glow red when I took the picture, it just looks that way now. I think it was the flash from the camera. I didn’t know then what I know now.
The hallway frames Mr. Sumpter. You can’t see where he’s looking at, but he’s looking at a blank wall. I was walking down the hallway and saw him like that. I called out to him but he didn’t say anything, so I took a picture.
#5
Face of my roommate, Bradley. He’s grinning and the color of the photograph is bleached out by the flash. His eyes are red, too. You can see that blond stubble of a goatee that he has, and the blur in the corner is his hand holding a bottle of Miller Genuine Draft. This is important because it was the only alcohol he ever drank. He wouldn’t even drink Miller Lite or Miller High Life. Just MGD.
Bradley was always a little bit weird. I took this picture at a party we had in our apartment. It got shut down a little after this because of noise complaints from my neighbors.
#6
Picture of May, caught in a half-laugh. May hated this picture the most, though I personally think she looks really cute. That thing in her hand is a bottle of beer, I think, but I don’t remember what brand she drank. Behind are the windows of the apartment Bradley and I shared. You can’t really see the view of the west side of the city that we got, though.
Yeah, the smudges and rip on one side is from my fingers handling the sides once or twice too many.
#7
Group shot. I don’t remember a lot of these faces anymore. The couple to one side, those were May’s friends. The two guys in faded computer tee shirts, those were my coworkers. Of course, May, Kyoko, and Bradley are easy to spot. I’m not in the picture because I was behind the camera. You can’t tell where this was taken, but I’m pretty sure it was in my apartment at the party.
#8
Blurred picture of Kyoko. She’s standing in the living room with one hand raised with half of her coat off. She has her head tilted and her mouth is open, but you can’t quite see that. She just got stuck that way putting on her coat. Kind of an odd time for it to hit. The blurry black cloud-looking thing is the couch that Bradley and I bought with our tax returns. It doesn’t look like a lot in the picture but it was really comfortable.