A Box of Photographs - Satu

In front of you there is a box. You open it. Inside it, photographs. Some held together in packs, others, singular. Some labelled, others not. On the underside of the box's lid, it says, 'Indonesia, September 2012'. A long time ago. You wonder, for a moment, if digital cameras had been invented by then. Surely they had? Yes, they had. Perhaps these photos had been printed out, although you can't imagine why. Perhaps they were taken on an old fashioned camera, with film, like you'd seen in museums sometimes. Flipping through, you see that these are the holiday photos of a young couple. You don't know who they are. They'd be dead by now, in any case. 

You take the photos carefully out of the box, and see that each pack of photographs has been labelled with a single word, in some strange tongue. Tujuh. Duabelas. Sepuluh. You read them into your phone and the search engine tells you they are Indonesian numbers. It lists them in order. So you arrange the photographs  accordingly, and begin to study them, slowly, laying them out one after the other on the table. Trying to piece some kind of story together. Some of the photos are strange. Inexplicable, even. You can't work out why they were taken. Or sometimes, how they were taken. Who took them. It seems like, rather than being ordinary holiday photos, these are fragments of someone's memory. Which might become possible in the next few years, scientists have said. But back then, it certainly wasn't. 

-x-

Photograph #1

A photograph of an aeroplane window. Taken from the inside, looking out. If the window was elsewhere located, there might have been a view of tiny fields and houses, of the land being left behind. Or of clouds, bulging, billowing, catching the breeze and refracting soft sunlight like clean white sheets hung to dry on a bright spring day. But there are no clouds in the photograph, nor can you see the earth below. This is because the window in the picture is above the wing. It cuts clean across the composition, obstructing the view and leaving only a small, obscure polygon of clear blue sky.

Photograph #2

In this photograph, the aeroplane window is still visible. You assume that it is the same window, but this is, in reality, impossible to discern. This is because the window is now closed; the plastic blind drawn down. A rather drear subject; one perhaps unworthy of photography. The window, however, is not the principal subject of this photo. In the foreground is a young woman. She is lying down, stretched across three seats, her feet jutting out towards the aisle. She is wearing black, loose fitting trousers, with an abstract white print, like bleach stains, or the lights cast through windows onto walls by cars passing in the night. A mint green hooded jumper. Thick beige socks. She has long hair, dark blonde at the roots and golden in the middle, but almost platinum at the tips. It falls in a mess across her face. Her mouth remains visible. Pulled into a slight smile; if she is asleep, as she appears to be, she is content. The lighting is soft and beige, like her socks. 

Photograph # 3

This is a photograph of a large Koi carp. Ivory and violent orange, almost red. Its head emerging from dark water, its mouth open in a big wide 'O'. The photograph has captured the movement of the water around it, displaced by its gaping mouth; spots of brilliant white reflect off droplets and the ripples. The kind of light made not by the sun, but by neon strip lights. The kind you might find, for instance, at an airport terminal.