California, Undeveloped

The sun hangs over Joshua Tree like a severed head, golden and godless, watching. Opal walks between rusted stalls and tarp-fluttered tables, her boots crunching through gravel like old bones. Everything smells like sun-warmed vinyl, oranges going soft in the heat, and the ghost of gas fumes. The wind drags dust across her skin like a prayer that won’t be answered.

It’s been a year since the crash. A whole calendar cycle since her Toyota spun out on a forgotten road and folded like an insect against a Joshua tree trunk. Three other bodies went out in zipped-up bags. Opal came out screaming. Some part of her never climbed free. She walks with a limp now. She tells people it’s her hip. Really, it’s the air—it never feels like it belongs to her lungs anymore.

And then she sees it. A camera, half-swallowed by a sun-bleached sheepskin rug and a bowl of bottle caps. Old. Heavy. Military green leather case. The kind of camera you can’t buy on Etsy because it belongs to whatever version of the world existed before this one. The lens is cracked, but lovingly cleaned. No price tag. Just a hand-painted note tucked into the strap that reads:

TAKES WHAT IT WANTS.

She picks it up anyway. A voice rasps behind her like gravel in a throat: “Some things don’t capture. Some things remove.”

She turns, but the vendor isn’t looking at her. Just sorting rusted spoons into a cigar box, like time hasn’t moved for him in years. Opal fingers the cold curve of the lens. Something deep in her ribs thrums—a little like fear, a little like recognition. She smiles. “I’ll take it.”

She forgets to haggle. Doesn’t ask the price. When she gets back to her motel, the camera is already loaded. The film is unlabeled, thick, pale—like it was made to remember ghosts.

Out of habit, she steps out into the burning parking lot and snaps a photo of a woman walking by in a red tank top. Click. Whir. The camera sighs like it’s been waiting. The woman smiles at her. Then turns the corner.

The photo develops slowly. No red tank top. No woman. Just the warped asphalt. Just the open road. Just Opal.

She dreams of static that night. Crackling, infinite. Like TV snow chewing through her bones. Her motel AC breathes like a dying animal, and the ceiling fan clicks like a metronome marking time she no longer has.

When she wakes, the photo is curled like a leaf, heat-warped and chemical-sour. Still blank. Still her.

The woman in the red tank top never turns up again. She tells herself it’s nothing. People leave all the time. People turn corners and disappear into gas stations, air-conditioned diners, or into their own lives. Not everyone is meant to be remembered. That’s just how the desert works—it erases.

But when it happens again, she stops pretending.

Opal takes the camera to the Joshua Tree Saloon, shoots a photo of the bartender—just testing. He laughs, asks her if she’s a model. She says she’s nobody. The next morning, he’s gone. The bar is shuttered. Locals swear it’s been closed since COVID.

The film develops slow as rot. No man behind the bar. Just glass bottles casting long, lonely shadows. She swears she remembers him—his name was Chris or Clint or something with a C—but now, no one does.

She checks her phone. The selfie they took together is now of her alone, mid-laugh, eyes tilted like she’s waiting for someone who won’t arrive.

The motel woman tells her, over microwaved coffee:

“That camera doesn’t take memories. It takes space.”

Opal stops taking pictures for two days. She hides the camera in her trunk. Watches reruns of Jeopardy! and eats gas station oranges like communion. But she starts to feel the pressure—something like breath on the back of her neck, something like pull.

She hikes into the park at sunset. Just her, the camera, and a tourist couple holding hands in matching fleece. The sky is molten. The kind of gold that makes you believe in gods you don’t like.

Click.

She doesn’t mean to do it. The camera just… lifts. As if her hands are no longer hers. As if this is the price of survival. When she looks up, the couple is gone. Gone like “they were never there” gone. The air doesn’t ripple. No scream. No trace. Just the sound of sand resettling. Her photo? Just the rock. Just the trail. Just the sunset bleeding out.

That night she can’t breathe. Her chest is full of missing people. She calls her mother. No answer. Checks Instagram. No trace of the couple. Not even hashtags. Not even tagged locations. She takes the camera apart piece by piece, but it clicks anyway. She locks it in the motel mini fridge. It clicks anyway.

She dreams of them again—the erased ones. They line the edge of her bed like saints at a vigil. Still. Dusty. No eyes, just photo paper where their faces should be. They whisper in reverse, in tones that smudge the edge of meaning.

“You weren’t supposed to survive.”

“This isn’t your timeline.”

“You are the aperture.”

Opal wakes gasping. The camera is back on the dresser. Facing her. Its lens is open. And it’s hungry.

She checks out of the motel the next morning, but it doesn’t matter. Every place she goes—the same. Different wallpaper. Same camera. The desert is following her. No, it’s absorbing her. Replacing reality one photo at a time.

Opal drives for hours. West. North. Anywhere. Tries to flee the bleeding edges of the map. Gas stations vanish in her rearview mirror like mirages. The land forgets as fast as she remembers. At sunset, she ends up where she started. A twisted motel sign blinking VAC like it’s begging for breath. The Joshua trees wave like grief-stricken dancers. The sky is soaked in pink and orange and things she used to love.

Inside, she finds a note in her own handwriting:

“You’re doing so well. Keep going.”

It’s signed “Opal,” but the loops in the p are too perfect.

She pulls the blackout curtain closed. Strips to her underwear. Lights every candle she can find. Lines them up like teeth around the tub. A ritual of forgetting.

She sets the camera in front of the mirror. Sits across from it, cross-legged on the motel carpet, thighs tacky from sweat and fear. She chants her name. Once. Twice. Ten times. Until it feels like someone else’s.

The film develops in real time now. Click. One candle snuffs out. Click. The mirror shows her without a face. Click. She’s holding her childhood teddy bear and her own hands are wrong. Too big. Too old. The lines on her palms are new maps leading nowhere.

She blacks out.

Wakes up in the motel bathtub, fully clothed, water up to her neck, camera in her lap. The sink is full of photos she doesn’t remember taking. Every image? A version of her. Her as a mother. Her as a dead girl. Her as a housewife with smeared lipstick and a bruised lip. Her as a news report: “Photographer Missing in Mojave—Last Seen Carrying Antique Camera.”

The desert wants her to choose. Which version stays. Which version vanishes.

She screams into a towel. Wipes her face with a motel bible. Lights the last candle.

The camera hums. It’s never made sound before. Opal holds it like an infant. Or a bomb. She points it at the mirror.

“This is all my fault,” she whispers. Click. The world turns inside out.

Opal wakes up face down in the desert. Not the motel. Not the tub. Just sand, blood, and breath that won’t settle. The sky is raw—no color, just light. Her arms ache like they’ve been reaching for too long. Her mouth tastes like burnt film.

The camera is still in her hands. She never dropped it. She never could.

She stumbles forward, boots dragging through dust. Joshua trees reach out like crooked mourners. Wind pushes against her like it’s trying to stop her from remembering.

And then—

The crash site. A strip of road torn like paper. A bent guardrail. A gnarled Joshua tree still carrying scars. Her own blood in the bark. No signs, no traffic, just her.

Opal drops to her knees. The memories unspool like torn negatives.

Her hands were on the wheel. Her foot was on the gas. She looked away—just for a second—to change the radio.

They screamed.

She lived.

The others didn’t.

She’s been running ever since. Not from guilt, but from gravity.

And the camera? It’s not magic. It’s a mirror. A cursed one. One that catches you mid-sin and whispers: “If you had died, they would’ve lived.”

One by one, she’s been erasing fate’s placeholders. Every person she photographed wasn’t a random stranger. They were part of the balance. The ones who took her place. She wasn’t meant to live. She was a glitch. A survivor. An interruption in death’s choreography.

She stands at the center of the road. Camera to her chest. Hair wild in the wind.

She peels open the last frame. Her own face.

But this time—

It develops white.

No shadows.

No features.

No trace.

“This is all my fault,” she breathes, as headlights bloom in the distance like judgment.

She doesn’t move.

This time, she’s ready.