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Start your story with someone who has lost everything but finds solace in photography.

Posted in Dramatic on Jul 5, 2024

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✍️ 63 stories

She Owed Nothing to Ghosts.

Winner of Contest #258 🏆

 The sun was harsh today. Through the lens, the scene was black and white, harsh shadows and stark highlights. Emma adjusted the aperture to be as small as it would go, cutting out much of the glare. The relative darkness restored faint traces of flavour to the frame, revealing the detail that the sunlight had tried to hide.A family stood huddled together, centred in a flat, if competent, composition. A man, with a bright smile and dark eyes, leaning close over his children, a pair that shared his expression. Behind them stretched a vas...

122 likes 99 comments 99
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Fifteen Faces

Submitted to Contest #258

The poster was torn and tattered. It was time to make the rounds again, pulling down the old, weathered flyers and replacing them with crisp new images. Perhaps changing from black and white to color would bring the photos to life, reminding the public that they are still out there.  More than just faces on poles, they are children desperately needing to be found and brought home. The prospect of this new project brought me a small degree of comfort. Doing something, anything, was better than doing nothing at all. Thirty ...

33 likes 20 comments 20
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Picture Perfect

Submitted to Contest #258

I don’t really like the color orange. but a quick scroll through the photos I’d taken of the bright, beautiful wildflowers confirmed what I thought-I’m getting pretty good at this. I’m not really photogenic, and I’d never been interested in photography. I once faked a fever, stealing the thermometer, warming it in water and presenting it to Mom to skip Spring Picture Day. Of course, she sniffed out my chicanery and sent me to school in the ugliest orange and lime dress, which she loved and I detested. Somehow, I took the best photo...

22 likes 5 comments 5
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Countdown to Impact

Shortlisted for Contest #258 ⭐️

The plane hums steadily, a familiar and comforting vibration that thrums through the metal hull. I sit near the open door, and the world beyond sprawls out—a plain of blues and greens. Below, the earth fans out like some vast, intricate map. I lean out a bit, my heart already quickening up with this feeling of thrill that never really goes away no matter how many jumps I've done.  It is sweet, electric; a pulse in my veins. There is something rather magical about this view of the world from high up, a bird's-eye view that can connect th...

22 likes 6 comments 6
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A New World

Submitted to Contest #258

Evan spent a lot of time thinking about nothing. He learned that the mathematical concept of nothing, zero, hadn't existed from the beginning. Why would one need to account for zero cows or zero eggs? Yet he found that nothing could seize his mind with tremendous force, occupying his every thought for hours on end. As it would turn out, Evan found that a void wasn't nothing after all, and absence could be felt just as powerfully as any presence he'd ever experienced. Evan shuddered, letting the vibrations knock tears free from his trembling ...

21 likes 11 comments 11
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Flashes of Light

Shortlisted for Contest #258 ⭐️

On a July day in 1877, the Sea of Cortez began to boil. Heat swelling from the sun beating on the water for over a year would begin to drift up and mold and sculpt it into a cloud. This rising, energized water would grow in fury, as the heat increased and so did the population of possessed sea water, the droplets began to bump, and grind and smack against each other. As this rowdy brawl, we refer to as a cloud became more agitated, it grew hotter, not even realizing that it was being blown and directed by the wind. All this to say, my f...

19 likes 8 comments 8
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The Way Life Should Have Been

Submitted to Contest #258

The Way Life Should Have Been “Anything you can imagine is real.”  - Pablo Picasso Henry’s night ended in the usual fashion. Turn off a movie he had little interest in, struggle to get out of his recliner, shuffle across the worn linoleum kitchen floor, and slowly make his way down the rickety wood stairs to the basement rec room he never got around to finishing. It was Henry’s time, a therapeutic dose of melancholy minutes to enjoy life the way the Creator must have intended. He had installed paneling on just o...

19 likes 3 comments 3
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Time to face the music

Submitted to Contest #258

Grant struggled to fight back the tears as he looked at a faded picture of him and his two boys. They were posing in front of a Christmas tree, surround by open presents. His oldest son, Grant junior, was ten. He was holding a new bike with a smile as bright as the North Star. He always reminded Grant of himself when he was that age. Smooth caramel colored skin and dark brown eyes that were mysterious. The younger son, Robert, name after Grant’s father, was also smiling even though he was missing his front teeth. Robert resembled his mother,...

15 likes 6 comments 6
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Decompression

Submitted to Contest #258

I was a science teacher for four years at a charter school in Philadelphia during the late 2000s. As I look back on it I feel like the job was a complete failure, because I never was able to control the classroom. I envied other teachers who seemed to be having a better time in their careers. One “old head” of a math teacher on the first floor had scores of snapshots of his students covering his whiteboard, along with birthday wishes. Another teacher took her students skiing, and another was the school’s lacrosse coa...

13 likes 1 comment 1
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Molded Metamorphosis

Submitted to Contest #258

I did not mean to self-sabotage. I did not intend to cleanse my life of everything that is good. I did not realize you don’t feel the same, but I guess I am to blame. You are still here, but I am not. The reflections that stare back at me through the mirror lack the density of character that I once had. I keep looking to find a resemblance of the girl I once was, but she is nowhere to be found. Just a jaded, less likely version of myself that I don't recognize. As I examine myself, a strange sensation cascades through my body, a weirdne...

13 likes 4 comments 4
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My Little Cafe

Submitted to Contest #258

Life is so unpredictable I sometimes wonder how people can take it so seriously. You might think it’s supposed to go one way but then one day, without any warning, someone will walk into it and it suddenly becomes very different. In other words, you can’t control who walks through that door. For better or for worse; someone always enters and changes it. What you really think of them doesn’t even matter because that’s life and from that moment forward your thoughts and beliefs will never be quite the same. There was a moment like that which h...

12 likes 1 comment 1
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Please Don't Go

Submitted to Contest #258

It’s a Thursday and in its Thursdayness it is grey and unremarked. The daily annotation deconstructs the flow of time, a swamping of cheap custard over the artistry of a pâtissier. The point is drowned out. Meaning is washed away, and few will ever go in search of its bloated corpse. Dan wends his weary way home. Drops his work bag in the porch. That bag haunts his life. Its position as a sentry is a badly thought out mistake. He’s reminded of the work he hasn’t completed each and every time he passes through the front door. That bag stains ...

12 likes 7 comments 7
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A Jamaican Life

Submitted to Contest #258

Nothing. No furniture. No plants. No dishes. So, this is what you get for falling in love and trusting. She had left for work and he took advantage and left with everything. She was more than a thousand miles away from family and, despite the severity of the situation, she didn’t want to bother them with her problems. In the coming days, she would find out the extent of his betrail but, for now, she sat on the floor and cried.  “Sis, I’m either stating the obvious or being incredibly rude, but you look awful.” Blair looked at Trish and ...

11 likes 6 comments 6
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Framing Solace

Submitted to Contest #258

Jackson Kane had lost everything. The fire had taken his home, reducing it to ash in a matter of hours. He watched, numb, as the flames devoured his life. His wife, Emily, and daughter, Sophie, had been the first to go in a tragic accident years before. The fire was just the final blow, stripping him of the last remnants of his former world.Jackson drifted through the days like a ghost, barely acknowledging the pitying glances of the townspeople or the whispered conversations that ceased when he entered a room. He rented a small, dingy apart...

11 likes 3 comments 3
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A Family Out of Focus

Submitted to Contest #258

*Trigger warning: Familial loss, mental health. Marla wakes up today much as she does every morning: sobbing and pawing at the damp sheets, screaming for someone, anyone, to save her children. Talk to them a few minutes longer after soccer practice. Invite them to ice cream a mile in the other direction. Pull them from the car before Mac can pop in that old Steely Dan CD and pull onto the highway. Stop the driver, out of his mind on coke, from plowing into the car in the first place.  But of course no one is here to answer her cries, no...

10 likes 4 comments 4
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