has no idea what to say, though it’s an odd kind of relief to know that she isn’t the only person in the world who dislikes her own sister.
* * *
—
In the basement Aurelia flicks off the garish overhead lights and turns on the red safelight that, mercifully, is still working. She gets to work quickly, worried that Derry might fall asleep with the baby on her lap.
She slides the negative strip under the small square eye of the enlarger and opens the aperture on to the sheet of A4 developer paper. Then she uses the tweezers to dip the paper into the first tub of liquid, then the second. In college she would use her fingers on account of a lack of funds to buy tweezers—she got used to burning her fingertips off in the acid—and she often did this same process in the pitch dark, and without a timer. Even now, she counts the seconds in her head. One, two, three, four . . . She holds her breath. This is a holy moment, the closest she has come to prayer and worship—bringing the past to life on a blank page. Coaxing it there, and fixing it so that it doesn’t become over- or underexposed, both of which would inform the eye that it’s a poor simulacrum and not the true past. Get the image right and the photograph hooks you back to the moment it captures with all its sensory context—smells, sounds, even the mood of the day.
But when she glances down at the finished image, she’s confused. The image is obscured by a word drawn in capitals, as though on a windowpane, or perhaps in the wet sheen of the film:
MUST
She can’t make any sense of what she’s seeing, or why she should be seeing it. Her thoughts race to work out how the image could have absorbed these letters. Sometimes an overexposure will cause cloudlike shadows and shapes to appear, but this is a word scrawled over the image of Gaia spinning in the snow, her head tilted to the sky.
With shaking hands she pins the sheet to the line to let it dry. After all, she’s looking at the paper in the strange red glow of the safelight, not daylight—perhaps when she takes the photograph upstairs she’ll see something else entirely.
She struggles to keep her breath steady. Sweat beads her forehead and crawls along her collarbone as she dips another sheet into the fluid. She counts, stares hard at the edges blackening into formation, then gasps when another word appears.
YOU
In the haze of the safelight she stares at the letters on the print, so startled and sickened by the absolute dearth of reasons why an image of Gaia upside down in midcartwheel should be obscured entirely by these three large letters. What does it mean, “you”?
She glances up at the stairs leading to the house, listening out for Coco’s cries. Nothing. One more. She’ll do one more print and then she’ll take them all up to the light to get a better view.
LEAVE
She pins the print to the line, no longer wanting to hold it in her hands. The word shouts from the page. When she turns on the main overhead light, bleaching the room in a cold white glare, there’s a second where she’s convinced the words will be gone. But there they are, now a chilling triptych swaying on the line:
YOU MUST LEAVE
* * *
—
It is morning. Aurelia sits up in bed and looks over at the crib. Coco is laid flat, her head turned to one side, her lips puckered in deep sleep. Aurelia has barely slept. After the discovery of the weird words on her photographs last night she rushed upstairs to Derry—who mercifully still had Coco on her lap—and showed her the prints. Derry admired them, said she saw no words, no letters at all . . . And when Aurelia looked again she saw that the prints were merely images.
“But . . . they had words on them,” she stammered, holding the prints to the light, and began to explain what she’d seen and why she was so flustered.
“What happened?” Maren asked, returning with the shopping, and Aurelia thrust the prints at her, to see if she would confirm what Derry had said, that the words had disappeared.
“I see only some trees and Gaia dancing,” she said. Aurelia sank into a chair, equal parts relieved and baffled. Most of all, she felt tearful.