At last, something new :) The first line (rewritten of course) actually started out as a poem, but I guess I wasn't inspired enough to finish, so it turned into this instead. Not too bad. Almost 900 words in about 20 minutes. Enjoy :)
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He could see three photos on the mantle, garlanded with fake leaves and autumn branches in vibrant orange, far too extravagantly perfect to be real. They glistened vaguely in the dim light, twinkling like a secret in a person’s eyes, when you know they’re lying but aren’t stupid enough to say you noticed. His eyes settled on each frame first rather than each photo, for each frame was the same: leather-bound, aged without aging, a stale sort of earthy color that nearly matched the autumn plastic things around t, but not quite.
In the first photo, a tiny child sat perched on a man’s shoulders, like a tower holding up a smiling balloon in some distant city., except it was only a lawn. An empty lawn that seemed to go on forever, but he knew better; it only went as far as they money went before it turned into someone else’s property. The child was smiling. The man was grinning. Neither of their eyes glistened as they should have in the brightness of summer. Behind the camera, he could almost see the near-emotionless photographer that held the camera perfectly still and demanded silly words from them to force a smile. So someday they’d look back and grin once more and say, “How happy we were then, yes yes.” So someday they think, How horrid she was. It didn’t interest him much.
The second photo was a little smaller and more in the backdrop, as if it were just an afterthought to fill a space. An unnecessary little thing that didn’t matter much, but the frame’s so nice and matches so well. He couldn’t see much in it for how many people stood within the leather boundaries. At least 15 people filled the photo to the brim with pointless sameness, each man, woman, and child clothed in the same monotonous royal blue. It reminded him of the photo they had been forced to take in the navy, with each man sporting the same new baldness and the same blue and white outfits that they would never wear again. None of them smiled then (and wouldn’t have enough if they could have), and most of the faces in the picture didn’t smile now, either. Not really, anyways, and it was hard to tell. Maybe among the sameness was a secret smile, too far off to really notice, but enough to matter all the same. He thought he could almost see one, but it danced away like a pixie and into the dust. Maybe just his eyes going. Probably. Maybe.
A third matched the second, but not quite in content, only in that the two frames were placed symmetrically to each other, facing one another endlessly. This one was a little different, older (truly), and the leather frame couldn’t entirely hide the tiny peak of frayed edge in the left corner. This time the smiles weren’t present at all, not even false ones, making the wedding scene very strange. A funeral in white and gray, more like. A funeral for freedom and happiness, he guessed. He was the same man in the first photo, only younger and strangely sadder. Darker, even. As if the world of that time had been in a constant shade, a mild tint of blackness everywhere you went. He knew of the woman’s sadness; he’d seen it a thousand times over from a thousand photos taken in a hundred different years and times and eras apart from his. The man’s was stranger. He somehow doubted the little gray man that stood stoically beside his mistress himself knew of his own depression. Consciousness, he knew, came with time and calmness and acceptance.
He stood to gaze more closely at the photos, hands clasped behind him in a doctor’s studying clasp as he leaned forward into the mantle, eyes flitting back and forth from frame to glinting frame, leaf to plastic leaf.
A bare little spot where the dust hadn’t quite settled in yet caught his gaze. A line of slight darkness between colored leaves. A void. A place that needed filling but never was, and so was merely covered up.
“Something else used to be here,” he mentioned casually, as any guest in a stranger’s home would be: prying, curious, yet with mild uncaring that seemed to also mention that the answer wouldn‘t be judged too harshly if it was given quietly. She paused, thought about this, then took the deal.
“Oh, nothing’s missing,” an answer from the kitchen echoed off shining white tile, forced nothingness in its ring. “Well, there used to be another one there, but the frame broke so we took it down. It was a while back.”
Ah. So that was it.
It was a missing person, not a missing photo. A void. And place that needed filling, but couldn’t be, so it was covered up. He frowned at the three tiny panes of glass.
“I hope you fix it soon.” Silence from them both a moment. “It would be a shame to leave something so beautiful so empty.”
In all his observations, he didn’t hear the silent mouth form the words in truth behind his back.
If ever it was beautiful to begin with.
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