[Memory] What: Memory Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing Warning, this memory contains: Violence, vague themes.
It’s been days and days and months and minutes since. Since when, she doesn’t know, she knows it’s petalling in her core, her dreams stretch outward like fingers spreading in the dark of the place between night and morning. It’s the dark-room that does it, and deadlines. She’s been locked away in the cocoon of chemicals and red light, emerging late at night with her hands reeking to eat whatever is left in the hulking fridge in the corner of the studio room, before sleeping heavily, wracked with wraiths of what could be, might have been.
She knows it’s building when she’s catching fragments from the surfaces around her. A hand on the bar that opens the fridge door spills a moment of stood in front of cold, a man pressed to her back like two pieces of wet paper soaked together and a hand across her belly that has never been there. The knife - there are infinite possibilities in a knife. But the deadlines mount like snow, soft and encouraging at first and then weightier, compact. She needn’t care, there’s money enough in the account to survive a summer but she has words and faith in keeping them. It is her faith that presses her on, nudges her back into the gloom of the room.
She sees him in a line for coffee. Little paper blue and white cups, bitter and black and she knows his face. It’s like that, when it swells, irrepressible against her ribcage. She knows things without knowing them, the whisper of them in her ear a murmur and then a scream and she approaches with the cradle of it between her palms. She’s seen his face and she thinks it is photographs, the slice of cheekbones caught in ferric amonium citrate, pressed down onto paper. It’s a regret later, like dead songbirds that never had opportunity to sing.
She’s not unattractive. Even in a shirt stained from fixative, she sees the way his chin will drop to look at her in front of him before she’s even fully-formed the thought to approach. She drifts forward, caught in a loop of what might happen, what may happen and asks. People don’t, you know. They don’t ask for what they want, they wait for it. She knows well enough that fate does not expect to do all the work.
It’s a week later. His appointment, it’s a week later and she wonders later - she’ll wonder in the midst of dreams tonight and yesterday if a week made any difference at all as she sees it twist in on itself, curling like paper in a flame. She’s dreamed enough that sleep hasn’t left a mark and there are shadows at her eyes and hollows at her collarbone and she invites him in with a smile painted wine-dark into the interior of the studio. She leaves the door open; the heat. Nothing in here is worth stealing, except perhaps the camera and she has hold of that.
Her camera sees it first, or perhaps it’s because she’s cradled up against the camera, eye cupped to the viewer. She has it on a stand, on a tripod and he’s sat on a wooden stool against the glass, the window behind him a view of wrought iron and brick-work, the slices of sky. She isn’t sure exactly as it happens. She comes closer, to move his hand, arrange him as she would a doll.
Her memory is like smashed glass. In pieces. Screaming. The bloody smile of a slit throat, the body of a woman with spindle-thin bones, clutching a little girl whose head is shattered like an egg. The misery-collapsed shoulders of a woman twisting her hips, mechanical as a music box in front of men, men and men who bid. This man, money counted into his palm as the screaming fills her head - a void that rings and rings until her head is a bell and the room is a church or a shrine, she can't remember the difference.
Her hands are sticky. Blood-streaked, he’s shouting over and over, his voice cracked and shattered on glass, and there are hands on her shoulders, iron, the wash of blue and red and blue and red into an wide open room that still smells of the ghost of chemicals.