Through the Lens, Redemption

Hope was a false thing.  

She’d truly believed that returning would make the loss less of a gaping hole where her liveliness and innocence had once resided. Before the war, the words coming home had meant safety, a place where she could curl up with her mother or chase down her siblings in glee. But now, coming home meant nothing. She was a shell carved of meat and flicked to the ground to hollow out in the sun. 

Her feet had taken her deep through the forested English countryside, forging past broken branches and worn ravines, ignoring the crude remains of bomb shelters hastily constructed on the sides of roads. She knew she was safe now; everyone said it everywhere, whispers of the war’s end and the German surrender. 

It was more than that, however. No one would touch her after looking at her in the eyes, because she knew what a clawed-out, ravaged creature she had become. 

She was not quite sure what she wanted from her hometown. Closure? The barest scrap of hope? More anger for what she had lost in a single night?

I am coming home. 

Black smoke marks streaked the stone walls of the nearest collapsed houses, where little bits of debris littered sooty, dead patches of grass. She ran a hand over the jagged edges, noting that the roof of this house had fallen in, and her fingertips came away the color of charcoal. The smoke marks were old, washed away by rain; even Mother Nature was beginning to forget the tragedy that had occurred here. 

She kept wandering, her feet taking her on its rambling path. More signs of smoke and fires in blackened timbers and shingles. Porcelain vases smashed and scattered in fragments on the sidewalk like broken-up puzzles waiting to be pieced together again. Sometimes, she caught glimpses of still-intact buildings, where tables and chairs thick with dust presided. At times, windows were clogged by spiderwebs or smashed through by clusters of neatly spaced bullet holes, leaving little crystals of glass on the windowsills. Cars lay on their sides or their backs, rust peeling from the doors and fenders. 

She took in these little, devastating details with a dull detachment, for she had learned that it was the best way to survive this desperate homecoming. Look at the destroyed town like it is not your own. Feel sorry for the people lost here, but do not remember who they were to you. She’d repeated this to herself again and again during the blurred journey here, hardening her words to the same sequence as she tried not to rake over her memories of what happened one chilly evening five years ago. 

But here, standing in the wreckage of ghosts, straining her eyes to look for the dried blood in the grass amongst the terrible quiet, it was impossible to forget. 

Her knees sank in the middle of the cobbled street, folding in on themselves as she crumpled at last. Then, she opened her mouth and released a ragged scream. 

The girl sat by the wall, huddled into a shell-shocked ball as her grass-hued pupils flicked listlessly over the ruins. 

She had long given up hope of finding more survivors here, and she was beginning to realize that that applied to her anger too. Why hold onto a broken fury for the ones who had flown their planes over her town, who had merely fired a few bombs and at that moment, destroyed her entire life? They had been defeated, and so had she. There was simply no more use for that anger.

The girl slowly untangled her limbs and stood. She owed it to her dead to poke through the wreckage. A foolish fear of finding bodies flickered in her head, but she shook it away; she knew that locals had already come down here weeks after the bombing to clear some of the wreckage.

Her footsteps faltered on the chunks of brick and stone that littered what had used to be the porch. She shut her eyes, opened them, then proceeded through the rubble. 

Here and then, a shattered frame, a table leg, the cracked face of the grandfather clock that had once stood by the door to greet the coming hour. From her peripheral vision, she caught sight of a blackened but unmistakably intact leather shoe, and nearly fell into the stones, but some resilient part of herself caught hold, hauled her back onto her feet, pressed her to keep walking. 

And in the back, nearly buried by the smashed wreck of the kitchen stove lay her father’s camera. 

Oh. Forgotten memories, buried memories, memories too agonizing to pluck from her mind. They all came rushing back to her, a divulge of her childhood that she had been too afraid to recall in the wake of the destruction. Memories of her tiny, soft fingers pressing each button, trying to turn the lens through brute force, giggling at the flash and crisp snap of each picture taken. Memories of her father’s soothing voice as he’d pressed it into her hands, encouraging her to capture the perfect lighting. Memories of her mother shaking her hand, lamenting over how expensive fresh film was as she returned from the post, holding a new stack of developed photos in her hand. Memories of smiling at the line of neighbors, squabbling in a friendly manner to get their portrait done and over with first. 

She clutched the camera to her chest as she stood, gazing down at her old life. Something hot prickled in her throat; she swallowed, wondering if she should take a picture here, but she had no desire to capture her greatest sorrow.

No one should have to. 

So she pivoted, turning instead to the hills that circled the town like the rim of a cup. Hills that she had spent all her life examining every detail of, hills that she had taken countless photos of to satisfy her need for more satisfying vistas. 

She raised her camera, as scratched and battered as it was, and angled it at the hills, adjusting in incremental measures to strive for that fleeting second when everything was perfect - the height of the sun, the angle, the depth, the shadows gathering from London to the west. 

A snap. 

She had lost everything and knew nothing, but somehow, a single photo had captured all that she needed to know.