Scene of the crime

She’s so beautiful as she lays there. 

You can imagine somebody’s entire life and how they’ve lived just based on their body. How much sun they saw, how much they ate, how much or how little they washed their hair- even how badly they wanted to live by how much dirt is found under their fingernails after they’ve been dragged through the woods. 

This girl must have wanted to live very badly. There was so much dirt under her nails that it filled every cuticle to the brim. She clawed all she could, all while probably screaming and crying too. I can tell that because of the mascara plastered underneath her eyes, or maybe she just didn’t pick the right kind. I usually use the waterproof stuff imported from Japan, but she probably just picked up the cheap ones from China you can find at any drug store; name brand or not. 

As I’m imagining her stealing mascara and candy bars from a CVS, I’m taking pictures of her closed eyes and wondering what color they are under her painted lids. As I walked around her contorted body, I took pictures of her bare feet; curious as to where her shoes went but not curious enough to start looking for them. That wasn’t my job. 

My job, as a crime scene photographer, is to take pictures of the crime scene; not to make my own personal theories about the bodies or humanize them in my head. At least, I’m not permitted to do that out loud, but nobody can control what I think about. 

Finally, as I snap all of the close-up shots I need for my quota, I can take my favorite. I step backwards, zig-zagging between yellow evidence markers. 

7..4..2..different numbers sitting on top of random objects. If you put all of them together, you can create a series of events pretty effortlessly, and an innocent girl’s death can become nothing more than a vivid flip-book in your head. 

My boots crunched over dead and nearly dead leaves brisk with a very fine layer of November snow. Some splattered with blood, some not. 

I’m standing before her now. I lift my camera up to my face and see her again through the tiny square that has become my preferred way of seeing the world my entire life, and I hold my breath as her last moment becomes cemented forever in the town hall case files. Secret to everybody but the detectives, and me. 

I’ve always felt helpless against my urge to capture the world around me. Especially people. 

My first gig out of college after getting a degree in photo-journalism was paparazzi, and I was pretty damn good at it. I whipped my camera out before anybody else could. I got to see celebrities up so close that I didn’t even need my zoom-in lens to see that first flicker of acknowledgement register in their eyes. 

Before they could blink my camera had already done it for them. I didn’t care if I was getting in the way of their day, ‘interrupting’ their blissful existences. In my opinion, people who love themselves so much should love candid pictures of themselves even more. Even if it’s through a window of the hotel they’re staying at in Times Square, or from an open funeral in their hometown I had managed to stake out at. Their privacy meant nothing to me if it made me a living. 

We learned about something similar in college; ‘the invisible hand’. The economic theory that if everyone operates based on their own personal interests, the world will never stop turning, and all will be well. 

Everything was well, until I fell down the library stairs of my university during my senior year while doing the very thing that I loved, and, well, I smashed my head open. For the life of me, I can’t remember what I was taking a picture of, because the film was exposed and smashed open too, along with my memories. Not all of them, thankfully. Mostly I was able to retrieve them through my scrapbooks, diaries, and dreams that woke me up in the middle of the night. Eventually I was able to regain all of the important events that make up a 20 year old girl's life, however, when I think back to these memories, it’s almost like I’m just watching a movie. Like I’m watching a movie about a girl I hate. 

I wish I could see the picture that was worth losing who I am, but I never will. None of my friends recognize me anymore. I apparently used to be bubbly and sociable. A girl you would want to have around, and would do anything to keep in your life. I didn’t know how to be her anymore. I would plaster pictures of my old self next to my mirror and tried to emulate my smile every morning after the accident, but nothing worked. I looked like a shitty look-alike hired for some insufferable work event. Like how people hire Marilyn Monroe impersonators for retirement parties. 

Everyone laughs jovially as she blows kisses and flirts through red lips but all the retiring old man is thinking about is how depressing it is that her curves sitting on his lap can’t get anything up inside of him. He hasn’t made love to his wife in 15 years, and her lipstick is probably the cheap stuff from China you can find at CVS. 

Over time people stopped coming around. I could tell some just hung around out of pity and guilt, like they would feel bad about themselves if they stopped seeing me, so I let them hold onto their self-centered beliefs for a while. But eventually, people tired of lying to themselves. They would’ve rather felt like bad people than waste time with someone as soulless as me. 

I graduated leaving behind only a blood stain that I doubt my university will ever be able to wash out. That carpet actually saved my life, maybe if it weren’t there I’d be dead, but then again I died anyway. Or at least, the girl who lived in my body before me did. And now, I was just somebody new but in a life that has already been halfway lived, so how can I reinvent myself under those conditions? 

Photography. That’s how. 

Crime scene photography helped me to understand myself more. Seeing other girls like me in worse situations, in a sick way, helped me feel better about myself. Yes, I may be nobody, but at least I’m alive. At least I’m not naked in a forest a week before my nineteenth birthday. At least I make enough money to buy waterproof mascara. 

One day, I was assigned to a scene in the early hours of the morning in an area of Appalachia that was strangely familiar to me. On the way there, I listened to music from my old iPod in the hopes that I’d remember more. I remembered how I lost my virginity this way, although, maybe Nickelback should have been left forgotten. 

I couldn’t shake the feeling of deja-vu as I parked my car and walked along a typical Mid-Atlantic cul-de-sac to where dozens of police cars and ambulances were already parked outside one house in particular. This house had a huge red door that for some reason I couldn’t look away from. My camera was already out, and my reason for doing so was already forgotten. 

There aren’t many crime scene photographers in the region, and being that my job is also one of the lowest on the totem pole within the local police force, everyone with authority knew me and so I got to walk right up to the scene. The mother was crying in the living room as I crept up the stairs behind her,

“Suicide. No sign of foul play. A shame though, she’s a beauty.” 

The chief told me while leading me to her body. I was excited now, imagining the potential of such an image. I had never photographed a suicide before.

I nodded while fumbling with my camera equipment, trying to hide my morbid interest. Making small talk about freshly dead victims was something I tried to avoid out of fear that I would love it too much. Still, the scent of the house kept my mind occupied in that familiar feeling I felt earlier until it hit me like a truck when I stepped into the bedroom. 

Her bedroom. 

‘Maui Fantasy’ perfume by Britney filled my nostrils. A citrusy, girly scent that I remembered from someone..

For once, the jittery excitement I usually felt festered into a ball of anxiety that spread throughout my entire body as I forced myself to move from her suspended blue feet up to her eyes. 

The smell of mildew mixed with perfume, and the sight of dead green eyes swimming wide with terror and regret, were the key to unlocking that piece of my memory I thought I would never recover. 

The photos weren’t exposed after all. They were taken and developed while I was in a coma and handed to someone who claimed to be a friend of mine, this friend of mine was now hanging from an apparatus made of her ceiling fan, designer belts and exotic scarves her dad had bought her on international business trips. I had just taken a picture of her going down on her psychology professor in his office and had fallen trying to run away from her once they turned their heads at the sound of my shutter. 

It came back to me as quickly as it probably took you to read that. 

She was a good friend of mine too. I don’t know what I was planning on doing with the picture, but I just couldn’t help myself. Honestly, she was right to push me. If that picture got out, well, it wouldn’t go well for her or her new professional interest. I don’t think she was trying to kill me. I don’t think she realized the stairs were there. Maybe she was just trying to grab the camera. 

Maybe she killed herself because of what she did to me. 

Trying to seem unfazed, I wind back my shot, but I can’t gain the courage to hit the shutter. Her eyes are open and staring right back at me, and it feels as though she’ll wake up to the sound that caused all of this in the first place. Steadily, I even lightly close her eyelids so that she just looks disgruntled instead of terrified. Like she keeps trying to fall asleep but her little brother keeps playing the drums; that’s what she looks like now. 

I could hear him coming home from boarding school down stairs, already whimpering with confusion at the contradiction between his happy childhood home and his sobbing mother.

She always thought very highly of herself and cared heavily about her appearance. She’s even wearing a flattering night slip, and I can still smell nail polish remover fresh on her cuticles.

I stared at her nails then, thinking quickly and guiltily that at least they were manicured and not filled with dirt. I could imagine her painting them as snow falls outside her pink room. She waited for them to dry before she hung herself, maybe that was her timer. Her brown hair was straightened, conditioned, smoothed…

“What are you waiting for? It’s a clean cut case, let's get the poor girl down from there already.” 

The Chief said behind me. 

She wouldn’t want pictures of her alive, so there’s no way she’d want pictures of her dead, even though she still looked so beautiful; I don’t think she ever saw that. 

“I can’t..”

I mumbled. I couldn’t shoot. 

For the first time in my life, I just couldn’t shoot.