Photographs lacking context offer numerous possible stories, and few photographs are more mysterious than those without a known author or time period. In every print issue of Don’t Take Pictures, a writer is presented with a found vintage photograph to use as inspiration for a micro-fiction story. In doing so, the photograph is given new meaning, and the truth of the image is subject to interpretation. To coincide with our our current issue’s theme (The Fiction Issue), we are looking back at some previously published stories.
Photo courtesy of John Foster/Accidental Mysteries
She was like one of those crazy atoms herself, the famous East European lady scientist, one of those unstable atoms, electrons everywhere, her hands, the cigarette, the matchbook, the matches one after another, the toe of her shoe, the smoke she spit over her shoulder, and he’s sitting there, right there, alright, but most of him bops back at the Jazz club, where an hour ago the trumpet player fired notes into his head where they were still wailing like fire engines responding to the smoke she is blowing, waving it away with the match hand, the hand shaking that match, shake shaking, like the drummer at the club hitting that high hat, oh, he was just a blur, wasn’t he up there in the spotlight? Lit cigarette in hand, he listens as she swats the air, tapping his foot, pricking the air as that flight of notes tattoos the backs of his eyeballs, like firecrackers, like the sparks of an electrical fire, leaping circuits, jumping gaps, his brain jammed with lines, lines, points, designs, diagrams, schemata of all the abstractions concretized in that melodic line, trumpet’s tonal truth to his own artistry, his craft, his improvisation, he, like she, science-famed, magazine-touted, visionary, seer where others saw dimly otherwise, rule breaker, path finder. Caught up in a swirl of riotous international diners, fellow Energy for Peace delegates at their conference hotel, fast new friends, swept along to the JAZZ CLUB promised by handbills and chatter, there to bop, banter, and glad-hand the tedium of science away—facts, pristine and cold, double-checked, data pulverized to reveal formulae, algorithms teased into famous calculations that switched darkness into light, transformed matter into energy, yanked the sun down to the earth, changed all in an eye-twinkle—for as long as their minders allowed.
Kurt Ayau is an American fiction writer of Cape Verdean heritage. His novel, What the Shadow Told Me, co-written with David Rachels under the pseudonym Kurtis Davidson, won the Pirate's Alley/Faulkner Society Award and was published in 2005. He lives in Virginia with his wife and two daughters.
This story first appeared in Issue #10, Spring 2018