The Photographer

Recurring dreams of a young woman circling around her taking close-up photographs interrupted Emily’s sleep, night after night. Photographs of her face. Her cup of coffee. Her mobile phone. The book she was reading. She always ignored these intrusions, but in the most recent dream she looked up and snapped, “Go away!”

The young woman’s eyebrows shot up into her hairline. “Not before you pay me.”

“What?”

“I make money by taking photographs of people.”

“I didn’t ask you to do that. Now go!”

The dream kept her awake half the night. Emily got up at dawn, gathered all the files from her desk, stacked them in the back of her car, and sped to the mall. In the car park she pulled a supermarket trolley up to her car and filled it with the files. Then, looking straight ahead, she strode past crowds of shoppers, through the automatic doors, and into the mall. 

A small child waved at her. Emily waved back and the child held out her hands showing Emily her fingernails painted with bright pink nail polish. 

“Do you like this colour or this one best?” the child asked, holding up a bottle of indeterminate colour.

“Oh, definitely the pink.” Emily smiled and glanced at the mother who stared back at her, unsmiling.

“Well, I’d better be off,” Emily said to the child. “Enjoy your day.”

She pushed the trolley to the far end of the mall, relieved to see that the door to the office stood open. The office was full of people staring down at their desks and talking into their phones. 

Emily called out, “Good morning.” 

No one answered. She unloaded all her files onto the nearest empty desk. No one looked up. She waited. And waited. 

After twenty minutes of silence, the purpose of coming here, which had seemed so solid, so certain when she’d entered with her trolley, now wavered, disintegrated, and feathered into thin spirals of smoke that drifted towards the door. Emily looked once more at the files and the people in the room. Rising on tiptoe, she followed the smoke to the exit.

Driving home she noticed all the trees lining the roads were changing from Spring to Summer to Autumn to Winter. When she’d left home that morning, the trees in her garden glowed with greenery. By the time she returned, they were bare, their withered leaves lying in frost-covered heaps on the grass. 

Emily looked at the stripped trees and remembered her three children climbing them, laughing and singing. She remembered the dog leaping, and the sky so blue, and the garden full of flowers and birds, and all three children jumping down from their favourite tree when they saw her car pull up in the drive so they could run towards her with their arms wide open. 

But the youngest died two decades ago. The middle one lived in a faraway land and no longer communicated. On her children’s tree, only one leaf remained. A breeze shook it off the branch and into her hair.

Emily took the leaf and held it in her hand. She heard a shutter snap in her mind as memories locked into place. 

Not before you pay me, the photographer had said.

Emily had forgotten. Now she would have to make decisions about what to do next and hope that the rest of the photographs would finally make sense.

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