Monarch by Candice Wuehle

Author:Candice Wuehle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2022-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

It was December 30, the eve of the eve of the end of the century. The already deep snow had developed a finger-thick layer of ice overnight, and Kevin’s shitty old Honda didn’t have four-wheel drive, so I was at work alone for the first time.

On Christmas Day and for four days after, the shop had been closed. In my time off I had taken hundreds of self-portraits that I was desperate to develop, but there was also a backlog of holiday photos that needed to be taken care of. I estimated that if I got the first batch of the customers’ film in the baths before 8:00 a.m., I would have at least an hour to work on my own pictures before Kevin got into the store.

He had developed an irritating habit of checking on me while I was in the darkroom. He claimed to be worried the chemicals were making me ill. “Still alive, Jessica?” he would call through the wall as he flicked the red lights on and off.

To save time, I broke protocol and skipped over dusting the counters and counting the cash in the register and instead picked up the envelopes of film that had been pushed through the store’s overnight drop-slot while we were closed. There were about thirty rolls. Half of them were from the same customer: D. Dave Harris.

I flipped the red light to indicate to Kevin that I was developing film if he happened to come in and step through the cylinder that connected the shop to the darkroom—I loved stepping into the round black room and sliding the circular door shut behind me; for a moment, there was complete, untouchable darkness, a gate between the white and red worlds—and started mixing the developer in the big plastic tubs we used.

Once the chemicals began to mix, I pulled out the old beer bottle opener Mr. Brewbaker used to unhinge canisters of film, removed the lids from the canisters, carefully cut off the plastic spindles affixed to the negatives, and started loading them into reels. Next, I took the first reel through the agitation process. I enjoyed the procedure of taking the film through various chemical solutions, shaking it carefully as if it were an explosive martini, and then washing the tape in a rush of running water. By the time I hung the negatives to dry and harden on the old clothespins we kept permanently attached to wires crisscrossing the darkroom, I entered a kind of meditative state. I didn’t arrive back in my body until I flipped on the negative viewer—a four-by-four table made of light—and checked the tiny images for imperfections.

At first, I thought there was something wrong with the Harris film. The negatives were too dark, as if they had been shot much too close. I leaned closer to the film.

I had never seen anything like these photos, except in my own self-portraits. They looked like multiple frames had been melded together—like the film had gotten too hot in the camera and melted—so that pieces of different bodies were overlaid in each frame.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.