by Doc Luben 10-2010
A redheaded woman takes a photograph of herself in the mirror. She wears a flannel shirt, black and white, and there is the sound of rain. The photo is of herself peering at herself through a camera. She thinks that she has too many freckles. She loves her red hair but does not think of it as hers. She thinks of it as the kind of hair a very beautiful redhead would have. Her lips are full and it makes her look sad, and she is sad, but does not think the two things are related.
The rain clouds have made the windows dark. She keeps the lights off in the house, she likes that it is daytime and nighttime at the same time. Seeing the photograph she thinks that it is the first time she has ever seen what she looks like; it worked because she was taking the photograph instead of being in the photograph. She could see herself instead of a copy that someone else wanted.
Now she wants to do this with other things. She wants to do the same thing to her couch, to see what the couch is really like, see what she has been missing. She wants to take a photograph of the couch showing itself to the couch, but it won’t work because the couch is not reflective, so all she can do is take a regular picture of the couch. With a lot of sweating and grunting she pushes the couch in front of the mirror, but the photograph still does not look like the truth. She sits on the couch and tries again. Now it is a picture of her sitting on a couch. The sound of rain has stopped.
She needs to get this right, now. She lies down on the couch and tries to be comfortable, tries to really be lying on the couch and not faking it, but it does not work and she does not even pick up the camera. She takes off all of her clothes and lies on the couch, trying to touch as much of the couch as she can, to bring out its full couchness. She takes a photograph. It is less a photograph of the couch than ever.
She thinks now the problem might be scale, that she is smaller than the couch so the couch can only be the background. She thinks she needs to try things smaller. It is already dangerous because there are two pictures of her looking exactly like her, and in one of them she is naked, so now there are two of her, the naked one and the first one with the flannel shirt. She folds her clothes into a tight square and leaves them behind the couch. She does not want to risk making another version of herself.
She sets her phone on her freckled belly and points her camera at the mirror, but the phone is also a camera and she already has a picture of a camera in the first picture with her. This is becoming complicated. She tries a pencil, but cannot control the frame: if her pubic hair or nipples are in the picture, then it becomes a picture of her nipples or of her pubic hair, and if it is only her skin and the object, then it is just a regular object and it is just like taking a picture.
It makes her more and more angry that objects cannot take pictures of themselves, and that their reflection is exactly the same as they are, except that you cannot touch them. She has been naked now for an hour, with the phone and the pencil and a playing card and a bottle of aspirin, and she feels cold. She doesn’t like that all of the small things are making her into background. She decides the only thing that can work is something no bigger and no smaller than she is, so she calls her ex-boyfriend.
She tells him she is naked and has a camera and needs him to come over. He is the kind of ex-boyfriend who wants to be a regular boyfriend and so she knows he will come. She sits on the couch, then lies on the couch, looks at herself in the mirror and tries to make her being on the couch as real as possible.
He knocks on the door and now she is afraid to answer, she realizes what everything looks like, and will never be able to explain fast enough what she has discovered, maybe, about how things look. She tries to think of a way to say it fast, but a minute goes by and maybe two minutes and she has not answered the door or called back to him.
The ex-boyfriend opens the door anyway because he knows what she is like. He comes to the bedroom and does not seem too surprised to find the couch there. She sees him and she feels like she is about to cry. She crawls to the arm of the couch and pulls him by his shirt and puts her body against him.
He is the same size as her and that is the main part of why she dumped him, but she was nice and did not tell him, she said it was just time and that she was going to be healthy and alone. She said it like that, like dumping him was something she was just trying, so that he would not cry too much. Now she takes off his shirt and measures her arms against him and feels her hands around his back the same as his hands around her back. She brings him down on to the couch and makes him naked and moves on top of him. She tries to be natural, tries to really be lying on him and not faking it. His penis is very hard and he is kissing her very hard and she moves herself down onto his penis, trying to take him inside of her for real, not just because he is there and she wants to feel this, but because it is really what she is doing. She tries to touch as much of him as possible, pressing her feet against his legs and her thighs against his hips and her face against his neck.
She looks in the mirror and there she is, looking just as she is supposed to look, pale and freckled and clinging. She wants to take a photograph, but the camera is on the floor and she can’t stop moving on him and she is afraid of making another version of herself. Without the camera she can’t tell what she really looks like or what she is doing, and she knows it would not help, because now he is here and he would have to have a camera, too, they would somehow have to have two cameras that are also one camera, and even then they would be fucking, it would be a picture of fucking, or two different pictures of fucking, but the fucking would be right there always in front, fucking will always be the smallest thing and everything else will always be background.
Then they are finished, and she lies on top of him, staring at herself in the mirror, with her freckled back and her lips that look sad but not the real sad. The woman in the mirror looks like she wants something, like she is angry that she did not get what she wanted. The man underneath her holds her so tight, his arms all the way around, like he is trying to be held up by her, trying not to be lying on the couch at all. She puts her fingers on the camera, but does not pick it up. She is convinced that the reflection in the mirror is the real picture of her, just like the pencil, the same object, exactly like the one out here except that it cannot be touched.
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