#he's just putting it up to her camera and getting grease stains on the lens

[commsroom]

i just think it would be funny if hera could eat because i know she's had to go years hearing eiffel sing the praises of doritos locos tacos or whatever and if she ever actually tried any of the slop eiffel loves she would probably be like wow! this is awful

[ozocho]

17/20 Bob as an amateur Photographer

He no longer needed an alarm clock. He would wake up at six and once awake he would be awake for good.

Unless it was raining. The steady, window tapping kind; buildup rolling off the gutter and knocking like a grandfather clock, massaging the plaster on the ceiling through the boards and shingles. Under the drum around him the paralysis would allow his neck just enough range to check the clock and look out the window.

He woke up at eight twenty three, and the room was so bright that he had to  remember where he was. He felt like an intruder in his own bed. Somewhere past the cracks in the window frame the rain and the cold air stirred together and landed on everything, and without being at least half awake he was already on his feet and at the dresser, pulling on a fat sweatshirt.

When he opened his bedroom door the smell of cooking grease was in the hallway. He swung down the stairs, and when he reached the landing he saw that Jane had boosted herself up with a kitchen chair and had a black pan on the gas range sizzling with eggs. It was loud enough for her to not hear Bob, and he saw that Wagonwheel was just off to her right with his nose over the cast-iron edge, lusting after either the blue flame or the eggs, Bob couldn't guess which.

Jane knew how to cook without setting the house or herself on fire, but Bob had made a point that if she wanted to he absolutely must know ahead of time. Waking up at six, he would have enforced this small but important point by taking over and wagging the spatula at her, maybe telling Wagonwheel to never have a part in it again whether or not he did now. Waking up at eight twenty three, he saw himself as having no business interrupting something that was going relatively well, and he turned around and went back up the steps.

In the bathroom he fumbled around, relieved himself, cut up his neck with a safety razor and got blood on the collar of sweatshirt. On the way back to his room he heard Jane doing an impression of himself downstairs. He pulled out  a new sweatshirt. There was a broad orange stripe around the chest of it and when he looked into the mirror on the back of the door he thought it made him look swollen and feminine. He put on another one, but paid no attention to his ragged pajama bottoms or the bare feet with the uncut toenails.

When Bob went back downstairs both Jane and Wagonwheel were sitting at the kitchen table eating off of painted porcelain plates Bob had never seen before. Jane spotted him first. She already had a mouthful of egg and rose up in her seat, getting all the air ready for what she had to say by taking it through her nose and trying to choke down the bite as fast as possible. She spun in the chair and pointed towards the counter.

"We made you eggs." Swallow. "We didn't want to wake you up."

"It's alright, just ask next time."

There might have been a combined total of two eggs swimming in a pool of lukewarm grease. Their shape, and material, was almost unrecognizable. But it wasn't burnt, and after beaching the more solid chunks on the edge of the plate with a fork, it actually looked appetizing.

They sat around the breakfast table eating, quietly, until Bob commented on how nice the eggs tasted and Jane and Wagonwheel realized that they weren't going to get trouble, then Jane started prodding Bob for more critical insight towards the meal and its comparison to other meals. Bob mostly nodded and chewed. Wagonwheel slipped into the devil's advocate role, gradually. Yeah they're pretty nice eggs, but they're a little wet aren't they? Eventually Jane stopped looking at or talking to Wagonwheel at all.

Finished, Bob stared down through the shallow lake of oil and at the wreath of bluebirds staring back up at him.

"Where did you find these at?"

"The others were dirty."

Six o'clock Bob would have laughed and played the forgiving parent. Eight twenty three Bob just wanted to know.

"I really want to know where you got these from."

It took almost a minute for her suspicion to fade, replaced by the excitement of showing an adult something they didn't already know. She slid off her chair one foot at the time and led him into the parlor.

The drawers were still open, and all around its corner of the room were piled smoke colored packets and photo albums with old flaking leather covers. What was left of the set of dishes was another spare plate and a matching set of teacups, with saucers, still half wrapped in tissue paper. Bob could make out a roughly Jane shaped clear spot in the middle of it all, and once Jane was certain that Bob wasn't angry with their, she fit herself back into it again. She unwrapped and held up the delicate porcelain items for him to see, but when she noticed that he was more interested in the photographs and scattered baubles she shifted focus and started unwinding the string bindings on the packets and pulling out fistfuls of glossy cards. She did her best to get him involved.

"Who is this?"

A fat baby in a nautical outfit sat in front of a painted shoreline backdrop, it's body tilted like a bad drawing.

"It's you."

Jane smiled at the picture and then looked up and back at him. "Boy I looked stupid."

"Yeah."

She rotated it to the back and then held up another. A young man with two much hair and a chin that was little more than a smooth bump, reclining in a wicker chair. He was drowning in a sweatshirt and trying to contain a tabby kitten in his arms.

"Is that me?"

Wagonwheel was watching them from over the arm of the couch.

"I think so." Bob took it and passed it over to him. "I found you, but Jane wouldn't let me name you."

Wagonwheel held it so close to his face that Bob could no longer read his expression. He handed it back, stonefaced.

"Not anymore." And he disappeared into the kitchen.

It was late morning by this point and Bob was starting to feel his agency creep back in. Every minute he felt another year older than Jane. He started to shift things from the floor to his far hand and back into the drawer, without making it obvious to Jane, until there were hardly any more packets left lying around and they had settled into a less hyperactive process of holding and reminiscing. They had tucked away a glass mallard when Bob reached for a bright cardboard box a little bigger than his hand. He wedged a fingernail under the lid and pulled out the cardboard braces, flipping open the top. Inside were two old disposable cameras, side-by-side. He removed one from the box and held it up for Jane to see.

"It looks like a toy." She said.

"It sort of is."

Through the spyhole he saw Jane's dark, vague face, fisheyed.

He took it away from his eye and checked the counter on the top of it. It was past zero. He tried winding it and it wouldn't budge.

"It's out of pictures." He put it back in the box and lifted the other out. The counter on that one was between six and five. "Here we go." He wound it until it stopped, then held the camera up. Jane's face snapped into a predatory, broad smile. There was a plastic click. She reached over and spun the camera around in his hands.

"Do we get to see the picture now? Does it come out?"

"It doesn't work like that. We'd have to take it into town and get it developed." He put it back in the box.

"Oh."

"Maybe I'll get them both developed the next time I'm out there."

He set the box aside.

They had the rest of the stuff put away by lunch, and the two of them went back into the kitchen to make sandwiches, still running in a conversation about time and how the colors of plastic change. Jane made comments towards odd things around the kitchen that she had never thought to ask about but found the moment more opportune than any before. With only crust left on the plates, there was a pleasantly exhausted silence.

Jane got up and walked up the stairs after a while. Bob put the rest of their plates away and washed about half of them. He warmed up a pot of coffee that was sitting on the stove and sat down at the kitchen table to enjoy a small cup of it, listening to the rain on the kitchen shutters and the trickling spout outside the back door. The cup steamed. The caffeine made him a little elated, but anxious, and he rose up from the chair and started pacing the kitchen slowly, musically, one hand knuckling the handle of the cup and the other slightly curled in his pajama pants pocket. When the kitchen ran out of floorspace, he swayed into the parlor.

He had loosely planned on starting a fire, but he slid over to grab a log and spotted the small box lying on the coffee table. He sat down at the couch and pulled the lid open again, removing the camera with the spare shots.

He didn't bother looking through the viewfinder, he tipped it around in his hands and examined the cardboard shell and the texture of the winding mechanism. Then he started raising it to eye level. Almost everything in the unlit parlor was too dark to see through the foggy lens. The only clear target was the rainsoaked light coming in through the window over the armchair, and through the lens it looks like stained glass.

He set the cup down and took the camera into one fist. In the kitchen he stepped into his boots without tying them, threw on a long overcoat and opened the door to the treble of the drizzle outside and plunked out onto the back steps. The first picture he took was from the second step. It was a shot of the backyard, wet and misty as it was, with the crooked tree on one side of the frame and the edge of the shed on the other. Jane's bike was in the foreground and the stone pasture wall beyond it.

He wound it and stepped down into the rain.

The second shot was of the garage door and a large slice of the driveway, puddles included. It wasn't until afterwards that he noticed how much paint was flaking off the front of it, but in a romantic spin on it he said that no true image of it would have left something like that out. He had to keep the camera palmed up to prevent it getting too wet. The third picture was taken off to the side of the shed, of the sad face of his old truck, crying rust. The fourth was a his late wife's car, just as smothered with weeds. He thought he was out, but he wound it down again and saw through the moisture bubbled counter that he still had one shot left. There was the determination to make it count, and despite the rain picking up, he wandered all over the yard and the pasture behind it. He was out there so long that his fingers chilled and the constant patter of the rain on his hood turned into a kind of auditory blindness that disconnected him from himself. When the elements were finally getting to him he was halfway up hill and closer to the treeline that he was to the house anymore. He couldn't feel the camera in his hands. The last shot was lazy, but he had to get it over with. It was aimed uphill, at the combined smear of the shiny yellow grass and the shiny orange leaves beyond them, and the white sky above it all. The camera went into one of his pockets and he turned around for home.

And there were the footprints. They were slightly smaller than his own and they hugged the track of his own on its way up the hill and through the mud. At a grassy patch a little before him they had circled around twice and merged into his.