"She let me take her picture, but not without taking something back.
Not trust—maybe curiosity. Maybe just the silence between frames."
—Ethan's journal
⸻
Ethan
The light in Madison Hollow didn't behave like city light.
It didn't bounce off glass or carve shadows in concrete.
It bled—slow and heavy—across rusted metal and cracked earth, staining everything it touched with the color of abandonment.
Ethan crouched behind a collapsed fence near the old mining site, adjusting the focus ring on his lens. June stood a few feet ahead, one boot in the gravel, the other balanced on a weather-beaten rail that led into the dark mouth of a caved-in tunnel. The morning fog wrapped around her calves like a reluctant ghost.
She didn't smile. She never did.
"You don't have to do this," he said, for the third time.
June turned slightly, her face angled just enough to catch the light. Her expression was unreadable—calm, if distant.
"I said you could take a picture. I didn't say I'd pose."
Her voice was flat, undecorated. Not hostile, but not warm either.
Ethan didn't press her. He took the shot as it was: her silhouette standing defiant against the ruins, caught between what had collapsed and what still stood. The frame wasn't beautiful in a traditional way. It felt honest—raw, even resistant.
When he lowered the camera, she was already walking away.
⸻
They didn't speak again until they reached the old toolshed Ethan had turned into a makeshift darkroom.
June leaned in the doorway, arms folded, watching him through the red haze of the safe light as he worked. There was something unusually reverent about her silence—not curiosity exactly, but something quieter. Something like caution.
Ethan moved with instinctive precision. Chemical trays lined up. Clothespins clipped to string. Silver nitrate staining the pads of his fingers. Slowly, a figure began to emerge on the paper in the developer bath—June's outline taking shape from the milky whiteness like a memory surfacing through fog.
She took a small step closer.
"You always shoot film?" she asked.
He nodded. "Digital's too clean. I like the friction. The waiting. The flaws."
June tilted her head slightly, eyes still on the photograph.
"You like control. But only the kind you have to earn."
He looked at her. That caught him off guard—not because it was untrue, but because it was perceptive. It wasn't judgment. It was observation.
"I guess that's fair," he said quietly.
She studied the photo. Didn't touch it.
⸻
June
I watched myself appear in that tray of chemicals and thought about bones.
The way they rise after floods. Quiet things we bury, only for time to dig them up again.
He worked like someone afraid to lose what little he could hold onto. I know that feeling. Those careful movements, that fragile rhythm. It's the choreography of people who've made mistakes and don't want to make more.
I used to be photographed too. Not like this—no film, no silence—just the usual: birthday parties, school picture days, my mom crouching with a disposable camera shouting, "Say cheese!"
But the one I remember best wasn't like that.
I was six, in a clinic. My foot had fractured on the playground. They strapped me down on a cold X-ray table. I was crying so hard I couldn't breathe. And just before the machine clicked, my mom said,
"Don't be scared, baby. This is just so they can see inside you."
See inside you.
That stuck with me. From that moment on, I understood what cameras could do. Not record—invade.
So every time someone lifts a lens, I wonder: What are they trying to see inside of me?
And what will they take when they do?
Now I'm here again. Watching him lift my face from chemical shadows. The light is soft. The angle flattering. But it's not me.
It's what he sees when he looks at me.
And for now, I've only let him see a very small part.
⸻
Ethan
"No," he said quietly when she asked, "Do you always take pictures of people who don't want to be seen?"
"Just the ones who disappear even when they're standing right in front of me."
A long silence settled between them, broken only by the soft drip of fixer into the tray. Outside, cicadas hummed in slow rusted rhythm.
"Your kind of seeing," she said finally, "feels like stealing."
Ethan didn't look up. "Maybe it is. But sometimes it's the only way to understand something before it's gone."
She said nothing. Just turned toward the door, her silhouette framed against the long flat horizon—abandoned telephone poles, dirt roads leading nowhere, clouds curled low and bruised.
"I used to think everything worth keeping could be remembered," she said. "Turns out memory lies too."
Then she left.
⸻
He stood in the red-dark for a long time after.
And maybe that's when he thought of New York.
⸻
The last gallery show had been titled The 3AM Series—moody, stark, showered in praise by critics who liked the word "gritty." But the photo that had earned him recognition wasn't poetic.
It was of a woman—exhausted, hollow-eyed—smoking beneath a DO NOT ENTER sign in the subway. Ethan didn't know her name. Just that she cleaned transit stations from midnight to dawn.
He hadn't asked. Hadn't needed to. The image said enough, or so he thought.
Until she found him.
She showed up at the gallery wearing a brown coat and heavy eyes.
"You made me a ghost," she said. "But I'm not dead."
He'd tried to explain. That it was a tribute. That it meant something.
She didn't care. And he didn't blame her.
That night, he deleted the negatives. Not out of guilt—but grief. Grief at himself.
That was the last time he ever photographed someone without asking.
Maybe that's why he came to Hollow—not for art, but penance.
To see if he could capture something that mattered not just to viewers, but to the person inside the frame.
But June… June was different. She didn't hide from the camera.
She just didn't let it see all the way in.
She was one of those old maps, the kind that warned "Here Be Dragons."
He could circle the edges forever.
But the center might never belong to him.