Overexposure by C. M. Rosens

Author:C. M. Rosens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, psychological, weird fiction
Publisher: C. M. Rosens
Published: 2021-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

3.

He left one day in March, after setting fire to all the photographs of himself he could find. She was left with a photo of herself at the awards ceremony, her eyes misty and vacant as they stared through the camera and tried to conjure something she couldn’t ever fully grasp. It was only then, looking at that picture he had left on her desk at the studio, that she realised what he had done to her. She traced the dark rings under her eyes, visible underneath the makeup. Her face was too pale and the shade of foundation she had put on for the occasion no longer matched. Her eyeshadow was too heavy. Her lipstick was smudged a little on one side from the delighted kiss he’d planted on her, missing her lips in his glee.

How had she missed the signs in the mirror? She stared from the photo of herself to her reflection framed on the office wall and saw a stranger there. She hadn’t dyed her hair in a while, but the faded red was still too strong for how pale she’d become. Who was that haggard, hollow woman with the staring eyes? Charlie couldn’t remember.

She still had the photographs of Wes from their first meeting, still tucked away in her desk. He hadn’t burned those. He hadn't thought to look everywhere. She dug them out and stared at them, the only images of him that she had left, and lost time.

She had copies made. She took people back to the studio and stared at Wes’s pictures while they fucked her. She stopped taking appointments and scrolled her friends’ social media, searching for photos that tugged her eye to a corner or a space in the frame where Wes had been caught in the background. She printed out as many screenshots as she could and plastered the walls with blown up versions, until the wall itself disappeared behind the layers of paper.

“You can’t keep staring at a blank wall,” her friend Hugo said, the only one who still checked in on her. “Cha-Cha, are you listening to me?”

“It’s not blank,” Charlie said, waving at the pictures. “Can’t you see him?”

“The guy? Oh god.” Hugo saw the pictures as if for the first time. Except it was the fifth. Charlie was counting. “I didn’t even notice... that’s... that’s creepy, babe. Who... who is he?”

“Wes Porter.” His name fell from her lips, his taste just out of reach.

“I’ve met him, haven’t I? I know that name from somewhere...” He looked away, chiselled boyish face creased with concern, and she almost saw the memory of Wes leaving his head the way it slid out of her own as soon as she looked away. He was too straightforward to admit anything strange had happened, and so, as far as he was concerned, nothing had. “You can’t stay here staring at a blank wall.”

When he left, Charlie put her camera to her eye and took photograph after photograph of the wall, more layers to add to the mosaic of the invisible man.

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