Shiny story
So first of all, you should go peruse the delightful shinies made by the wonderful Lioness.
She gives most of her pieces titles, and sometimes people write poetry or stories to go with them. It's a very cool concept that I felt a little jealous of... while I own several of her pieces and love them fiercely, I've not yet been moved to write something about them.
That changed tonight. One of her necklaces, "Double Exposure: Forest/Boardwalk," is made of stones that I got to play with when I stayed at her house a few weeks ago. Seeing them wired together as a necklace just popped a complete little story into my head.
She'd carried it around for years, one of those cheap cardboard souvenir cameras given out at weddings. She'd found it stuck to the back of a drawer in a dresser she'd rescued from the curb back in college, and figured that the film must have been ruined by whatever had done the sticking. But she couldn't bear the thought of just throwing it away... there might be a record of a baby's first smile... and stuck it into a box with a bunch of other oddball knick-knacks. Then she forgot about it.
When she finished the chemo and finally started to taste her food again, she decided to allot some of her carefully conserved energy to decluttering her house, lightening her load. She easily tossed the crushed, battered old box into the trash bag, along with all the other detritus she once thought was such an indelible part of her life.
A jaunty blue jay took a starring role in her dreams that night, following her through endless aisles of an anonymous Walmart, screeching at her to Reconsider! Retrieve! Release! She awoke with a start, sweating and shaky, and staggered into the kitchen. The bag was still there, and she was able to find the camera quickly. The rest of her night was dreamless.
She paid the extra fee for the one-hour developing service. She was on a first-name basis with the pharmacist, but had not ever wandered over to the photo department in all the years she'd lived here. The bored teen unconsciously picked at a neck zit while he waited for the big purring machine to finish its task; she tried not to seem impatient and pretended to be interested in the summer display of bug spray and lawn care items.
"They didn't turn out too good. You don't have to pay for the bad ones, you know," he said when he handed the envelope to her. She nodded but paid the full bill anyway... it didn't seem right to just paw through these pictures here in front of him. Her heart was racing as she walked back to the car, and on an impulse she very nearly tossed the whole package into a litter bin... it was almost too much to bear, finally seeing what was in that camera. If she never looked, the pictures could continue to be of absolutely anything or anybody. The potential was limitless, the mystery was achingly delicious. To see them would be to constrain the infinite universe of possibilities onto a few flat colored sheets, to reel in the graceful zeppelin of her imagination and ground it forever.
In the driver's seat, she decided she was being silly and peeled open the flap. The kid was right.... most of the photos were mottled black and deep red grainy smears of nothing. Or maybe they were still everything, then? She grinned at how relieved that thought made her, at her own foolishness, at her strange dream and what it made her do.
The last image, though, was clear. Or rather, images.... it seemed that the cardboard housing the camera mechanism failed to register the fact that the last frame had been reached, and allowed the photographer to shoot another picture right on top of the first. It was easy to separate them because they were so very different, yet they weren't disharmonious. One was a view of a laughing young woman leaning between a pair of redwood trees; the other was a shot of a beach pier closed up for the winter, painted signs and weather-beaten pilings against a calm body of water.
The blue jay was there, too, which didn't really surprise her as much as she thought it should. The odd thing, though, was that she couldn't quite make out which photo he was part of. He was equally at home in the trees as he was next to the shuttered ice cream kiosk.
She slipped it into a frame and kept it for the rest of her life.
She gives most of her pieces titles, and sometimes people write poetry or stories to go with them. It's a very cool concept that I felt a little jealous of... while I own several of her pieces and love them fiercely, I've not yet been moved to write something about them.
That changed tonight. One of her necklaces, "Double Exposure: Forest/Boardwalk," is made of stones that I got to play with when I stayed at her house a few weeks ago. Seeing them wired together as a necklace just popped a complete little story into my head.
She'd carried it around for years, one of those cheap cardboard souvenir cameras given out at weddings. She'd found it stuck to the back of a drawer in a dresser she'd rescued from the curb back in college, and figured that the film must have been ruined by whatever had done the sticking. But she couldn't bear the thought of just throwing it away... there might be a record of a baby's first smile... and stuck it into a box with a bunch of other oddball knick-knacks. Then she forgot about it.
When she finished the chemo and finally started to taste her food again, she decided to allot some of her carefully conserved energy to decluttering her house, lightening her load. She easily tossed the crushed, battered old box into the trash bag, along with all the other detritus she once thought was such an indelible part of her life.
A jaunty blue jay took a starring role in her dreams that night, following her through endless aisles of an anonymous Walmart, screeching at her to Reconsider! Retrieve! Release! She awoke with a start, sweating and shaky, and staggered into the kitchen. The bag was still there, and she was able to find the camera quickly. The rest of her night was dreamless.
She paid the extra fee for the one-hour developing service. She was on a first-name basis with the pharmacist, but had not ever wandered over to the photo department in all the years she'd lived here. The bored teen unconsciously picked at a neck zit while he waited for the big purring machine to finish its task; she tried not to seem impatient and pretended to be interested in the summer display of bug spray and lawn care items.
"They didn't turn out too good. You don't have to pay for the bad ones, you know," he said when he handed the envelope to her. She nodded but paid the full bill anyway... it didn't seem right to just paw through these pictures here in front of him. Her heart was racing as she walked back to the car, and on an impulse she very nearly tossed the whole package into a litter bin... it was almost too much to bear, finally seeing what was in that camera. If she never looked, the pictures could continue to be of absolutely anything or anybody. The potential was limitless, the mystery was achingly delicious. To see them would be to constrain the infinite universe of possibilities onto a few flat colored sheets, to reel in the graceful zeppelin of her imagination and ground it forever.
In the driver's seat, she decided she was being silly and peeled open the flap. The kid was right.... most of the photos were mottled black and deep red grainy smears of nothing. Or maybe they were still everything, then? She grinned at how relieved that thought made her, at her own foolishness, at her strange dream and what it made her do.
The last image, though, was clear. Or rather, images.... it seemed that the cardboard housing the camera mechanism failed to register the fact that the last frame had been reached, and allowed the photographer to shoot another picture right on top of the first. It was easy to separate them because they were so very different, yet they weren't disharmonious. One was a view of a laughing young woman leaning between a pair of redwood trees; the other was a shot of a beach pier closed up for the winter, painted signs and weather-beaten pilings against a calm body of water.
The blue jay was there, too, which didn't really surprise her as much as she thought it should. The odd thing, though, was that she couldn't quite make out which photo he was part of. He was equally at home in the trees as he was next to the shuttered ice cream kiosk.
She slipped it into a frame and kept it for the rest of her life.