camera obscura

by Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

It didn’t look so far off from where they had come in, the entrance seemed closer than they had thought it would be after walking for a while into the cavern, the shuddering orange light from the small fire they had built deepening the shadows cast behind them and the dogs, the dogs who lay at their feet by the fire and hardly noticed the flames licking closer and closer to their chestnut-colored nails because it was very cold outside and the dogs were exhausted from shivering all day.

They had been walking for several days by then, it had been a long and involuntary journey before they arrived at the cavern, which didn’t from the outside look so much like a cavern as like a thin crack in the rock the length of a trailing vine, remember like in that Australian movie, Henry said, the one where all the girls in white dresses disappeared because they hadn’t had sex yet or whatever, and the rest of them laughed even though most of them had no idea what he was talking about and none of them had found much to laugh about in a while.

At least the cavern was dry, unlike the forest they had been lost in, where steady deluge had soaked them and stuck all their thinning hairs to their heads and glued their band tees to their chests slumping with middle age and sent water dripping into their eyes so that finding the right way was even more difficult with no phone charges and the compass gone haywire and now half of them with glasses fogging up from the moisture and half of them unable to look straight up because of the rain.

Bedrolls unfurled and Patagonia sweatshirts hung up to dry on makeshift laundry lines constructed with tentpoles and sticks and divided protein bars for dinner and rations for the dogs too, because it certainly wasn’t the dogs’ fault they’d gone on the stupid camping trip, the dogs would have been fine staying home and being forced to sleep under a picnic table at the occasional beer garden while the kids screamed and the parents drank, at least there were dependable meal schedules and fluffy polyester blankets, unlike this seeping mess out here, unlike this reminder that houses make up so little of the planet’s surface.

There was still some weed in Arthur’s pack and so they dragged on his one-hitter and Charlie thought it was lucky that the guy was so crunchy that he turned up his nose at gummies and vaping and only smoked flower because the vape would have died and they would have eaten gummies for the calories and been too stoned to even have hope of finding their way out and there was after all something to Arthur’s claim of smoking bringing you closer to the ancestors, at least it felt like that buzzed in the cavern with very little to quell the munchies, the ancestors didn’t snack anyway, they were paleo.

Warmth spread out from the fire and the weed smoke and they all felt cozy, in a way, like it was a boy scout sleepover, and they could all open their eyes more because their hair was drying but the high was making their lids droop halfway, and there was a little bit of romance to it all, they had to admit, all five of them, even in the middle of this shitshow, here they were together, and there was something to it, and the dogs were sleeping in a pile like they must have with the cavemen, and we’re really reaching far back into our mitochondrial DNA, shut up, Henry said, did you read some David Buss or something, and they all laughed even though no one else knew who that was.

There was no denying the aches in the pits of their stomachs, though, the hunger from far less nutrition than their soft bodies and always full bellies were used to, exhaustion from walking all day even for Joel who used a standing desk, shin splints from the hilly terrain that they all knew meant they were even more lost than they had originally thought though no one wanted to say it, but worst of all the ache of unspoken knowledge that they were potentially really fucked and might never see kids and wives and SUVs again, and as the high faded everyone rolled away from each other and faced the walls of the cavern so that no one could see anyone else cry himself to sleep.

Did you see that, Eric whispered, startling Joel awake, what the fuck, Joel said, what the fuck are you saying, go back to sleep, Charlie hissed, no wait, Arthur said, I see it over there on the wall, yeah that’s weird, it’s like a rectangle of light but it’s moving and it’s got a lot of weird colors in it, doesn’t it, did we put out the fire, we did, who’s going to look closer, not it, Eric said, I saw it in the first place, well I still don’t well I guess I do see it, Joel said, I just want to go back to sleep, Charlie said, fine fine, Henry said, I’ll check it out, don’t wake the dogs, they need to conserve their energy.

Nearly tripping over a sleeping bag in the dark but getting closer to the strange light, Henry could see it was about the size of the midrange flatscreen TV set they used to have before 4K and it looked like a projection of some kind, though that was impossible, but no more impossible than what formed in front of his eyes inside the light shape, guys, he said, this is amazing.

It was a rectangle of shifting carmine light with silhouettes of oceanic botanical forms stuck to the top edge, wavering back and forth in colors all shades of red, deep mauve, burgundy, crimson, rusted scarlet, burnt umber, it was like looking into an aquarium filled with blood and making out little vacillating plants through it, like all of their colors in normal light or water might be indigo or emerald or ochre but here in the blood tank they all were oxidized into another version of themselves struggling with how to function when their oxygen came from blood instead of water.

You have to see this, Henry said, it’s crazy, dude are you still fucked up from the bud, Charlie said, no no just look at it, Henry said, everybody just get up and look at this, and they rubbed their eyes and stumbled over to it and their jaws all dropped open, how is this possible, Eric said, did someone mount a screen on the wall in here somehow, no, Joel said, moving his hand across the image, it’s like a projection but there isn’t a projector in here, you know, Henry said, you know what it makes me think of, those engravings of camera obscura where the outside gets projected in but backwards and upside down, like Plato’s cave, you guys know that, how everyone’s stuck in the cave watching the shadows on the wall and believing they are real but they never experience reality, only these projections of it, and everyone nodded though only Arthur had a clue what he was talking about.

The thing is, Henry said, that camera obscura showed the outside world, and what I don’t fully understand is how it looks like this, I mean, it’s dark outside and these don’t really look like the trees out there and they all certainly aren’t red, right, it looks more like inside something instead of outside something, is anyone going to take a look through the crack and see if this is what things look like outside or even if the dregs of the fire are making everything in here seem reddish, ha ha, I mean, well, Eric said, it’s obviously not what’s outside so what’s the point in confirming what we already know, so why not just enjoy this show because.

It's incredible, Charlie said, how this is showing up here, how is it possible, and he sat down in front of the image to watch the trembling fronds slither back and forth in a hazy red vacuum, I know, Eric said, I just want to sit and watch it for a while, so he did, and then the other three did too, mesmerized by the flat tank of blood devoid of anything but the weedy forms and the dark red light that had just appeared on the wall like a window into an interior world, and as they all settled in front of it none of them noticed the dogs waking and whining and slinking out of the crevasse with their tails between their legs.

The floating leaves or kelp or whatever they were fluttered back and forth languidly, coquettishly, if that was possible for a plant, turning themselves this way and that as though hiding and revealing precious parts of themselves and Joel found himself thinking about going to that strip club for his brother-in-law’s bachelor party and Arthur thought about that dancer he dated in college and Eric thought about how the porn he watched was often in extreme close-up and they caught each other’s glances and shared a little laugh without having to say anything, which was better than saying it, saying what any of them were thinking about, the specifics of which didn’t matter, just the feeling of it which was both private and shared with all of them in a way they would never want to talk about on the cul-de-sac or at a Friday night poker game but here they were in this cavern and things were different here, they felt close to the bone…

…they all fell back into languor, mouths lolling open, and it was comfortable in its own way because they all remembered this feeling from those long ago days of Saturday morning cartoon hypnosis where anything was worth turning zombie for and now they saw their own kids doing it with online garbage and they all monitored screentime but secretly just wanted to hoard the feeling for themselves, the feeling of succor and release granted from an emptying and a filling, the feeling of giving oneself entirely, all of one’s insides, everything that made one a person, to something else’s spew, what church might have felt like to their more perverse grandparents, the ones from near the Carpathians, is this what Plato meant, is this really why those people didn’t leave the cave, maybe they had asked to be tied up in order to better love the shades for being shades and to better prepare for the clearing of everything out, turning them into vessels for a dark emission, being flooded with aberrant mastery such that one’s body was depleted of everything but lust for that sacred engorgement from elsewhere…

…are you there, am I here, who is this next to me, the red lights are dancing like I’m watching the veins in my own eyeballs unhitch themselves and swim past my corneas, like my eyes have turned back in my head and all they see is the empty red inside, the abyss that is my inside, that tantalizing emptiness, I am a glove of skin, I am a sheath of flesh, I am nothing anymore, I am waiting to be turned inside out and flattened, I have no organs and no self, I am a sack tethered to this floor, my mouth is open and I have no teeth, my insides are open and there is nothing inside them, I am waiting for the shadow to suffocate my breath with smoke, I am waiting for the shadow to slip in and fill me, I am waiting to disintegrate, I am waiting to be here forever, I am watching and I am waiting and I am nothing and it is what I have wanted always, to never be anything but this, I remember it deep down inside, I remember it now, I remember it all, I’ve always been here, I’ve always been here, I’ve always been here, I’ve always been nothing but this.

The sun rose on three dogs pawing at a large grey rock, impenetrable and smooth.

Photo of Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

BIO: Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece's weird fiction can be found in places like Weird Horror, Exacting Clam, Apocalypse Confidential, and others; her first novel, Poltergeist, is forthcoming with Apocalypse Confidential.