The Girl in the Picture: A Flash Fiction

In this modern age of digital camera phones and cloud storage it’s not often you see good old fashioned printed photographs. So when I do, I take them for my collection. I’ll buy them if I have to but I’ll steal them if I need to and no one’s looking. I’ve got thousands of polaroids and photographs. I long for a time when good pictures were few and far between. When people cherished their lives enough to want to document and file away pictures in all their sepia toned loveliness.
Weddings, birthdays, holidays and days out at the seaside. Families frozen in the moment to be looked upon and remembered forever more.
You probably think it’s weird having photographs of people I don’t know or that I didn’t take myself and you’re probably right. But I cant stop. The thing is I’ve never told anyone about my collection before. But I need to tell someone because I’ve got the inescapable sense that something terrible is going to happen to me.
I first noticed the girl in a picture of the Natural History Museum I had procured from a car boot sale in Cardiff in 1998. She’s queuing with lots of other people at the entrance to the museum. Nothing unusual, sure, but here’s the thing; I’m pretty certain that when I bought the picture she wasn’t in it. But that was just the beginning. Since then she’s appeared in no less than
32 pictures in my collection. Images spanning over fifty years showing families and locations all over the world. It just doesn’t make sense. I’ve not slept because I can’t stop thinking about her. There she is by the houses of parliament in 1999. Again at the finish line of the 2004 great North run. And most recently aboard the ferry at Sydney harbor in 2012. Who the hell is she?
She’s about nineteen or twenty and has long blonde hair. She looks unkempt
and dirty and is wearing scraggly old clothes. In each image she’s staring dead eyed at the camera. The more I look for her in my older photographs, the more she seems to appear. And in the original museum picture I swear she has moved closer to the camera. Am I losing my mind?
I spread my collection of pictures before me and notice that she’s appeared again in several others. She’s started to look angry. Hungry for something. Malevolent. I’ve tried talking to her, as crazy as it seems, to ask what she wants, alas she doesn’t answer. Yet still she gets closer and closer to the
camera.
I had to go back to where I first saw her. So here I am standing in line at the Natural History Museum. I look up just in time to catch a glimpse of a girl nineteen or twenty with a Polaroid camera aimed straight at me. She has long blonde hair and is dirty in appearance. It’s definitely her. I can finally ask her who the hell she is and what she wants with me.
Before I can approach her she raises the camera as if to snap a picture of me. In the split second before I’m blinded by the flash I see my reflection in the lense of the camera.
It’s a strangely familiar sight.
I’m stood in the exact same position that she was in the first picture. I stare dead-eyed into the camera, unwashed and filthy, blonde hair grown out having not cut it since my obsession with the girl in the picture started. I realize that piece by piece she has stolen my soul. Pilfered my very existence. I’ve let my obsession with her take over my whole life, and by coming here to
where it all started, I’ve left the door open for her. I’ve set this strange phantom free.
The world around me slows and I realize that I can’t move.
I have replaced the girl in the picture.
