NONFICTION
Photo Op
by Bob Brill
A photograph in the morning paper caught my attention. It showed a young woman in midair, eleven stories above the street. The photographer must have waited while she worked up the nerve to jump. He had the shot all lined up, never taking his eyes off her, just waiting for his moment. When she left the ledge he was ready. Her image immobilized on a strip of film, while still alive she continued to fall.
He had to be a pro. I pictured him racing to the newspaper office, not waiting to see or photograph her smashed body. Handing the film to the photo crew, his job done, he moved on to his next assignment. The other pros took over, rushing the image into a product, a halftone incised on a metal plate, hundreds of little black dots above a caption, the briefest mention of the event, thousands of copies printed and sent out into the streets, all before the body had cooled. Before the broken bloody remains could be swept away and the street flushed with water. Before the rubberneckers had fully dispersed. Before traffic returned to normal and passersby walked over the spot, unaware that anything had happened.
I stared at this image while I ate bacon and eggs in a city I'd never been to before, where I'd come on business and have not been back to since. I dropped the folded newspaper next to my plate, stood up, took a final sip of coffee, wiped my lips with a paper napkin. The photo lay face up on the table. I turned it over and left to do the job I was brought here to do. Like the photographer on assignment, I narrowed my focus to the task at hand. By evening I had finished my work and headed for the airport.
On the plane the image returned to haunt me. Though my brain had processed nothing but hundreds of dots on cheap newsprint, there was something that came through that could not be diminished. She was young, I think the caption said 21 or 22, with a common name, a Mary Smith sort of name, wearing plain off-the-rack clothing, jeans, sneakers, a white shirt, a light cardigan sweater, half zipped. Her eyes were open. What transfixed me in the first instant I saw the picture, what came back to me later, what kept returning over the more than thirty years that has elapsed since then, was how she held her right arm up in an instinctive gesture to shield her face from the impending blow.
Her determination to die had overcome her fear and her natural inclination to go on living and succeeded in propelling her off the ledge. But then came one last expression of the will to live, even after the point of no return had been passed. Whatever she was thinking and feeling during those last seconds she must have been intensely alive, perhaps more alive than ever, so alive that she may even have changed her mind.
Bob Brill is a retired computer programmer who is now devoting his energies to writing fiction, memoir, and poetry. He has published fiction in Nuvein Magazine, flashquake, and A Flasher's Dozen. Nine of his poems have been accepted for publication by Simply Haiku. He is now at work on a novel.
Copyright 2006, Bob Brill