Remembrance

       Her camera dropped from her hands, falling and falling, until it hit the ground with a loud bang. The woman stared at it, unmoving. 

            No…this must be some sort of joke, right? She thought to herself. Someone had just pulled a prank on her or used her camera somehow. Because this…these pictures…can’t be real.

            She slowly crouched down onto the floor, almost as if she was approaching a wild animal. Her arms reached out to pick up the camera.

            She froze.

            “It’ll be okay,” she muttered. “A camera can’t hurt you, even if this one is kind of suspicious.” She’d randomly found the camera cowering in the back of the closet in her new apartment, gathering dust. She hadn’t planned to use it at all, but her camera had run out of battery and she was out of time for an assignment. She decided to take a chance and try turning it on and thankfully, it still had battery. She put her memory card into the camera and decided to try to return it back to the original owner after using it herself. 

            She took a deep breath and willed her shaking hands to still. Then she, very gingerly, picked the camera up from its resting place on the ground so the lens was pointing towards her face. In the reflection she could see her disheveled appearance, hair pulled up in a messy bun so not to get into her face, wrinkled clothing, and eyes wide in disbelief. She squeezed her eyes shut and turned the camera around. 

            She opened her eyes.

            The picture was still there.

            “How can this be possible?” she asked out loud. Normally the picture wouldn’t be a spectacular one. It was mildly out of focus and the people walking by were slightly blurred. That wasn’t the problem. It didn’t make sense to her. 

            Earlier that day, she’d gone out to take photos of New York City for the magazine she worked for. After finding the camera in her closet, she’d ran out of her apartment and started snapping pictures of the cityscape. She took pictures of the buildings climbing up past one another to the sky and the rainbow of colorful cars that drove by. The woman had pointed her camera towards the people of the city, living their day to day lives. All of it, the beauty of the city, she’d tried her best to capture. She’d spent hours that afternoon taking pictures, retaking, and changing the settings of the camera until she’d gotten the pictures that she herself could even be proud of. 

            But they were gone, and she’d cursed her stupidness.

            In her rush to take photos, she’d forgotten the most important thing. She hadn’t checked the quality of the photos after each one was taken. Even so, she knew what they were supposed to look like. But the picture that stared up at her wasn’t one she’d taken.

            Horses pulling wagons walked through the streets, carrying loads of people and goods. Men in suits strolled by on the crowded streets, bowler hats sitting up atop their heads. Women wore long dresses with skirts that flowed out at the hemlines. Young girls were clothed in dresses and the boys in smaller versions of the men’s suits. The buildings were much smaller and drabber, no longer able to be called skyscrapers. 

            What had happened the moment she’d taken these photos? She hadn’t walked through any areas that had looked like the photo. And the clothing that they were wearing along with the buildings weren’t anything she’d seen outside of movies. 

            Was there some problem with this camera? She asked herself, trying to come up with some sort of reasonable solution. She began to rapidly flip through the photos, to see if any were normal. But each photo she saw was some sort of variation or had some similarity to the first one. She took a shaky breath and put the camera back down onto the ground. Then she practically jumped away from it. She began to pace throughout her apartment. She walked from one wall to the other and then back again. 

            What can I do? If I was to tell anyone, I doubt they’d believe me. Anyone would just think that I was playing a joke on them.

            She whirled back to the camera with a start. She had an idea. She picked it up once more, albeit with a bit of hesitation, and put it on her table. She then hurried into her room and grabbed her computer. She carefully took the card out of the camera and attached it to her computer. After she had uploaded all the photos, she began to flip through them. In each one, she became more sure that this was real. It couldn’t be a set because if it was, there had never been one more realistic. The setting of the photos and even the way the people were standing and the motion in the pictures seemed realistic for a time long ago.

            She kept looking through the pictures until she came to one of a man holding a newspaper. The woman zoomed in on the photo to see if she could find any information. The newspaper was called The Sun and under the name, she found the date.

            Sunday, January 28, 1900.

            For a minute, she simply stared at the date. Then, she blinked, and quickly looked up the newspaper and date to find if it truly existed. It did. Every picture, article, and word was the same. She practically shoved the card back into the camera and ran out of the apartment, slamming the door shut behind her. She ran down three flights of stairs, tripping every few steps with the camera cradled in her arms. She threw open the doors to the building and stepped outside.

            She turned on her camera.

            Pointed it at the tall building across from her.

            Shakily pressed the button.

            Click.

            She went to her images and watched as it flooded her screen.

            The skyscraper had been replaced with a small building. The endless windows of the present had been replaced with the drab walls and small terraces with clothes drying in the sun. She rubbed her eyes and looked up. The skyscraper was still there.

            “Huh,” she said, and as if in a dream, stumbled back up the steps to her room. Before she knew it, she had collapsed onto her bed, camera still in her arms. It was all too much for her to process. Thoughts ran faster and faster in her head until they blazed by so quickly she couldn’t tell one apart from the other. She felt her nails digging into her skin in an attempt to wake up because this just had to be a dream. She lay on her bed for hours, unmoving, scared to even take a breath. And then, she felt her eyelids begin to droop down further and further until she didn’t open them at all. 

            Her head being buried in the pillow, she didn’t awaken when the camera began glowing. A brilliant and blinding figure leapt out from the camera and into the room. With a grace only the unliving could have, it glided over to the woman’s body. It reached out a glowing hand and placed it on the unmoving figure’s head.

            “I’m sorry for the trouble, I truly am,” it whispered, and picked up the camera. “I just wanted to see it again.” With the camera in its grasp, the figure floated from the building. In the sky, it took a picture of the city, because it knew without a doubt, it would one day be completely changed, with only pictures left to show how it truly used to be.