Diana

He has only one photo of her. She's standing in front of a Ferris wheel in a tube top making a kissy face at the camera. The picture—blurry and dreamlike, tunneled by a soft vignetting—is from a weekend they spent alone at the boardwalk a couple summers earlier, a few weeks before she left. Eyes hidden by a giant pair of sunglasses with white frames, she looks like a movie star from the forties filmed in Technicolor for the first time. He's infatuated with the way she looks in it; the shape of her lips, swollen by a snow cone, the curve of her breasts disappearing into her tube top, and the electric charge that the primary colors give off. He had used an old Diana camera he'd found at a thrift store and the unreliability of the manual plastic aperture combined with the cheap 120 film exaggerated the colors like a comic book cover; the red of her lipstick, the blue of the bow in her hair, and the yellow of her tube top radiated out of the photograph, vibrating his retinas.

All his memories of her are saturated like this when he projects them in his mind. He remembers that day at the amusement park and the way she leaned over getting into the cart of the Ferris wheel, the anxious tightening of her grip as they climbed higher and higher, and the warmth of her breathy whisper on his ear as they hit the top, completely forgetting exactly what she said on the drop down, the sudden swaying back and forth of the car as she shifted to the seat on the other side, and the punch-drunk feeling of being back on the ground, exactly where he started. The negatives of the remaining pictures were left unprinted, their monochromatic memories forever lost in an envelop in the bottom of a drawer, never to be opened again.

Alone in his apartment, he wonders how the pictures she took with her digital camera that day differ from his, what their pixels, clustered tightly in unforgiving detail, might show.

Ekleksographia:
Wave Three

May, 2010

Fiction

Justin Porter Stephens

Justin Porter Stephens is currently enrolled in the creative writing MFA program at Lesley University. His thesis is a novel about two musicians in an indie rock band trying to write the greatest love song ever written for the same girl. His work has previously appeared in Identity Theory and he maintains a blog at www.JustinPorterStephens.com.