Sight Unseen

Cecilia often viewed the world through the lens of a camera, believing photographs could capture more mystery and enchantment than reality itself. Even as a small child, she was rarely seen without a camera slung around her neck, her tiny finger poised on the shutter. Her sharp eyes constantly scanned the world around her for an image that needed to be immortalized on film.

However, she quickly learned that taking pictures of people could sometimes lead to trouble, especially if they were unaware of being photographed. One sweltering summer day, an intrigued seven-year-old Cecilia spotted her mother stepping out of the shower through the small bathroom window. Impulsively, and with a vague notion that it was wrong, she raised her camera and captured her mother’s nude form. Later, as she pored over the photo alone, Cecilia thought her mother looked beautiful, almost ethereal.

She hastened to show her mother the picture and hurried to the kitchen, where she was washing dishes with scalding water. Beaming with pride, Cecilia handed it over and held her hands behind her back, rocking gently on her feet with delight. This happiness melted into confusion, then horror, as her mother’s cheeks colored and she ripped up the picture, tossing the remnants into the dirty dishwasher.

“You wicked child! No more pictures of me,” she hissed, holding a sponge soaked with burning hot water tight against her daughter’s hands. “Cameras have the power to capture your soul.”

Cecilia escaped her mother’s grip and tried to swallow the sobs bubbling in her throat. Tears blurred her vision as she grabbed the strip of negatives and took them outside. With her brother’s magnifying glass, she melted the entire roll, solemnly watching the film burn to nothing. 

From that day forward, Cecilia abandoned any voyeuristic inclinations and developed a preference for photographing nature, whose unwitting participants never complained.

Even now, nearly a lifetime later, Cecilia visibly tensed whenever asked to take someone’s picture. Though she had occasionally acquiesced to taking portraits in the past, mostly to pay the bills, these days she considered herself retired with enough funds to relax and take pictures strictly for pleasure — strictly of nature.

Cecilia lived alone in a quaint cottage nestled deep within a lush valley surrounded by ancient oaks and interesting critters. Her solitary life allowed her the luxury of basking in the nature around her. She would knit while sitting on the wicker rocking chair on her front porch for hours, listening to insects buzzing and birds singing. She tended to her garden and found spots in her yard to decorate with tiny gnome villages. On nice days, she would sling a camera around her neck and venture into the forest to look for interesting vegetation to photograph. She had recently purchased a powerful macro-lens and delighted in taking ultra-zoomed-in pictures of plants and bugs, fascinated with the different perspectives these magnified images provided.

One crisp autumn afternoon, while exploring a remote corner of the forest, Cecilia stumbled upon a peculiar sight — a patch of vibrant, jewel-toned mushrooms clustered around the base of a towering oak tree. A particularly brilliant emerald green mushroom had a cap covered with a smattering of white specks, resembling stars scattered on its surface. Fascinated by their beauty, she knelt down with the macro lens attached to her analog camera and began capturing their intricate details on film.

When she photographed professionally, she mostly used a digital camera, which offered the benefits of live preview and easy editing. These aspects were crucial as her income often depended on uploading and selling images to customers according to specific requirements and timelines. However, Cecilia often felt that digital photography lacked some of the essence found in film. Maybe she was a purist, or perhaps it was the nostalgia for the simpler times of her youth, but she believed analog photos captured richer colors and subtle details that digital couldn’t match. In essence, film captured more soul. She shivered, remembering her mother’s words.

Cecilia’s preference for film meant she couldn’t review her pictures before leaving. As twilight descended and light waned, she was satisfied that she had captured a few worthy images. Smiling, she turned to leave for home but hesitated. These mushrooms would make a perfect addition to one of her gnome villages. Lacking a container to transport the fungi, she plucked the emerald-colored mushroom and cradled it delicately in her hand as she made her way home.

Upon returning from her nature walks, Cecilia usually developed the day’s film in her darkroom right away. She relished the anticipation of images appearing before her eyes, often discovering details she hadn’t perceived initially. However, that day, she went straight to the kitchen cupboards to find a mason jar and filled it with moist soil from her garden. Gently nestling the mushroom into the dirt, she placed the jar on the windowsill above her sink. These attempts to replant mushrooms didn’t always work, but sometimes she was lucky enough for the fungus to propagate and she’d be able to grow patches of this marvelous species in her own garden.

Completing this task, she went to work developing and printing the film. Selecting her favorite negatives, she headed into her makeshift darkroom. Printing from negatives always felt like magic to Cecilia, and she hummed contentedly as she worked. Loading the negatives one by one into the enlarger, a device which shone light through them onto light-sensitive paper, she next bathed the paper in a series of chemical solutions and hung them up to dry, yawning as she did so. Rubbing her bleary eyes as she shuffled to bed, she couldn’t decide whether she was more excited to see her prints in the light of day or discover if the peculiar mushroom had survived the night.

Morning light seeped through her bedside window as she sat up, perturbed. Strange dreams of odd creatures had plagued her sleep. She remembered waking several times with the disquieting feeling that bugs had just crawled over her body. She tried to shrug off the restless night as she collected her dried pictures from the darkroom, bringing them to the desk in the bedroom. Cecilia marveled at the images of the fungi.

The mushrooms resembled illustrations for a children’s story about fairies, with rich hues of sapphire blue, ruby red, and emerald green. She discerned fine details on the photographs that she couldn’t catch with her naked eye; gossamer golden threads hanging from the stems, glistening microscopic beads of water, and what she had taken for white dots on the surface of the green cap were not mere spots.

Frowning, she leaned closer to the first picture of the green mushroom cap, trying to force her eyes to focus. Distractedly, she reached across the desk for a magnifying glass. Centering it over the picture, Cecilia bent low and examined the puzzling image. She looked at several of the little dots, focusing intently…

She gasped and stood up quickly, her heart racing. For a delirious moment, she thought these tiny figures resembled microscopic people. She giggled nervously, realizing her worsening eyes must be playing tricks on her.

Shaking her head, she bent back over the picture with the magnifying glass in hand. But she realized she wasn’t mistaken. Although their exact visage was slightly grainy, these dots looked like minuscule people. It wasn’t just their physical features — though she discerned two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head — it was their posture and mannerisms captured in a single frame. If someone presented this photograph to her with no context, she would have assumed it was a drone-shot of people relaxing in a meadow. She spotted one creature lying with arms crossed languidly behind its head, while others huddled in groups with heads bent as though conversing. A few seemed to be pointing at something, one arm raised.

“They’re bugs, just bugs,” she muttered as she sifted through the stack of pictures on her desk, knowing she had taken at least two shots of the poison-green mushroom cap. Her hands shook slightly as she lifted the second picture and set it directly in the middle of the desk. Holding her breath, she leaned forward and examined it with the magnifying glass.

The minuscule “people” were marginally clearer in this photo, appearing even more human-like. They all stood straight up on two spindly legs, with long, sinewy arms and large, round heads. The faces were too blurry for many details, except for two bulbous black eyes that would be vastly out of proportion on a human face. Cecilia’s stomach dropped, and she covered her mouth with one hand as she realized that on every single individual, these vacuous, black eyes were pointed directly toward the camera. Toward her.

Mechanically, Cecilia drifted toward her living room, where she began pacing, trying to rationalize her racing thoughts. They were insects, she thought. They had to be insects. She opened her laptop and tried to seek answers online, but found nothing. Then she considered scanning the pictures and sharing them on the web. The thought of an entomologist she had once worked with crossed her mind; he would surely take a look if she emailed him a copy.

She had almost made up her mind when she paused, her shoulders drooping slightly. Would he laugh, assuming she had doctored the photo? Photographers and editors had used technology for decades to manufacture fake pictures of supernatural beings for attention, profit, or just amusement. Although she wasn’t terribly worried about her reputation, she blushed at the thought of being perceived as a fraud. Could she send him a physical sample somehow?

Stopping her pacing suddenly, she turned toward the kitchen, where the emerald mushroom lay in a mason jar above the sink.

“Those were just bugs, and that’s just a mushroom,” she said, taking a tentative step forward, then pausing. “Oh, you old bat, you’re being silly.”

Chiding herself for her imagination, she stepped into the kitchen. There, on the shelf, was the mason jar with holes punched in the lid for airflow. Inside sat the innocuous green-capped fungus. It stood straight up in the dirt. Hadn’t she laid it down on its side yesterday evening?

When staging little gnome villages for her photos, Cecilia sometimes took interesting-looking toadstools from other parts of the forest and planted them to appear as if they had grown there naturally. The same thing must have happened yesterday, she reasoned. She thought she had placed the mushroom horizontally, but obviously, she had positioned it vertically in the soil. Her eyesight, though declining, didn’t lie as much as her memory.

As she reached toward the jar, she thought she spotted movement out of the corner of her eye to her left. She snatched her hand back and whipped her head so fast that her neck stung, but there was nothing there. Of course. Although her eyes didn’t tend to lie, they could certainly misdirect her. Or maybe that was her brain, another organ she felt was deteriorating ever more rapidly.

An abrupt desire to remove the mushroom from her house overcame her. Grabbing the jar and holding it at arm's length, she walked out the front door and set it down in the grass alongside her pathway. Unable to stomach unscrewing the lid, she walked back to her porch, sat on the old rocking chair, and picked up her knitting project, hoping to calm her nerves. Click, click, click went the knitting needles, not quite as rhythmically as usual due to her shaking hands.

Cecilia’s mind was so occupied with the little creatures in the photograph that she didn’t notice the unsettling quiet that had descended around her. Not a single chirp from an insect or a solitary trill from a bird broke the silence. The hairs on her neck rose, and a chill crept up her spine as she felt herself being observed.

“Hello? Is anybody there?” she said to the stillness, scanning her front yard. Nothing answered, but she knew something was watching.

She spotted a darting movement in her peripheral vision. Standing up quickly, she looked in that direction and scrambled back toward the front door, clutching the knitting needles firmly in her fists.

“Hello?” she said in a hoarse whisper, squinting and straining to hear, raising the sharp needles in front of her like a weapon. Again, there was no answer. Cecilia backed slowly into her house, heart thumping forcefully in her chest. Once inside, she locked the door and leaned back against it, squeezing her eyes shut, her gray hair plastered to her sweaty forehead despite the autumn chill. After several shuddering breaths, she opened her eyes and was surprised to see she was still clutching the knitting needles, but she didn’t put them down.

Double-checking the lock on the front door, she lurched toward her bedroom, quivering. If she got rid of the photographs, maybe the feeling of being watched by some unseen force would cease. In her bedroom, she stepped toward the desk to grab them.

They were gone.

There was no trace of any of the prints that had sat on the desk mere hours earlier. Only the magnifying glass remained. Irrational and slightly hopeful, she thought this was all some sort of fever dream. Maybe she hadn’t actually gone into the forest, taken pictures of some intriguing mushrooms, and accidentally obtained photographic evidence of a microscopic humanoid species. She laughed weakly and balanced her hands on the desk, the knitting needles making a soft clack against the wood. As she shook her head and tried to control her trembling, Cecilia felt tiny notches under her fingers. They were everywhere on the desk, hundreds of little nicks in the wood that looked like indents made with needles, but needles with points several times smaller than her knitting needles. Curiously, almost without thinking, she picked up the magnifying glass and examined them. Her breath caught in her throat, and she froze in terror.

They were little etches in the wood, each one depicting the same crude, infinitesimal image: an eye crossed by an “X.”

Cecilia sensed a swift flicker at the edge of her vision. She swiped the needles from the desk and hurried toward her darkroom, slamming the door behind her with such force that printing paper and negatives fluttered into the air. For several heartbeats, she couldn’t move, observing numbly how comforting the complete darkness felt. Somehow, the loss of vision meant safety, but the goosebumps creeping along her arms compelled her to turn on the red light. Among the chaos of papers and negatives, she spotted a familiar shape with flecks of white, and her heart sank.

Cecilia solemnly gathered the negatives of the pictures she had taken yesterday and held them delicately in one hand, the needles in the other. Leaving the safety of her darkroom and the darkness behind, she stopped briefly to swap the knitting needles for the magnifying glass before walking purposefully outside. The harsh afternoon light cast odd, flickering shadows throughout her garden, as if miniature critters dashed from one plant stalk to another in a twisted game of hide-and-seek. She sniffed and realized dazedly that big, globular tears were slowly leaking down her cheeks.

Childhood memories flooded Cecilia’s mind forcibly, engulfing her in shame and confusion as she raised the magnifying glass to burn the negatives of those odd fungi. She stared at the film as it curdled and smoked, tears obscuring the scene with a prismatic sheen. Once it had shriveled and dissipated into nothingness, Cecilia looked around. 

The garden seemed unnaturally still, as if holding its breath. Shadows danced eerily among the plants, elongating and distorting in the fading light of the autumn afternoon. She glanced toward the mason jar where the mushroom had been, but it was empty, leaving no trace it had ever existed. Panic gripped her as she scanned her surroundings, half-expecting to see tiny figures darting between the flower beds, their eyes fixed on her.

A movement caught her eye, and she spun around, the magnifying glass clutched tightly in her hand like a talisman. Was that a fleeting shape darting behind the old oak tree? Or just a trick of the fading light?

Cecilia retreated back toward her cottage, every nerve on edge. Inside, as she restlessly wandered the dimly lit rooms with shadows lurking in every corner, she couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. Questions raced in her mind. What had she captured on film? Were those tiny figures real or her imagination? 

Were they gone?

Exhausted and unsettled, Cecilia finally sought refuge in her bedroom, but sleep eluded her. The night outside was eerily silent, devoid of the usual nocturnal sounds. Just as she began to drift into an uneasy doze, a faint scratching sound at her window jolted her awake. Her eyes snapped open, heart racing as she stared into the darkness. Another scratch, louder this time, like tiny nails tapping against glass.

Slowly, she turned her head to look toward the window. There, illuminated by the faint moonlight, were several small, dark shapes moving rapidly across the glass. Their movements were erratic, and somehow menacing.

Cecilia’s breath caught in her throat. The magnifying glass lay forgotten on her bedside table, but she dared not move. She watched in horrified fascination as the tiny figures continued their strange motions and she imagined impossibly large eyes fixed on her.

And then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they were gone. The scratching ceased, leaving behind only the faintest traces of condensation where their little hands had touched the window. 

Shaken, Cecilia knew she would never take another picture again, nor would she forget the sight of those tiny beings. They had invaded her world, shattering her love for photography and leaving behind a haunting question: had she stumbled upon something that should have remained hidden, or had she simply lost her grip on reality?