Authors: Gregory Earls
Empire of Light (40 page)
It was an image that never strayed far from her mind, however, she had never hallucinated it before.
Yet there it was, her mom’s delicate hand, shaped with rays of wispy light, had extended away from the picture and reached out to her.
Lucia took a single step back in fear.
The hand halted and slowly patted at the air
. Stay calm, Lucia. Everything is okay.
Lucia instantly recognized the gesture, having seen it hundreds of times from her mom, like the time the neighbor’s dog startled her, or the time she motioned Lucia to lay quietly under her father’s jeweler’s desk and saved her life.
Lucia stood as quiet as a lamb.
She watched in awe as the hand dissolved into a fine mist, photons sparkling within it like lightning bugs flickering through a fog. The radiant mist encircled Lucia like an impish dusty devil, and tickled her in the very same spots her father attacked whenever he playfully roused his little girl from an afternoon catnap.
Lucia laughed so hard, and was so ecstatic, she hardly noticed that the small twister had begun to lift her up from the ground, cocooning her within a shell made of diaphanous strands of light.
Within the shell Lucia found a warm dark glow, accompanied by a serene harmonic hum, which caused the little girl to drift into a peaceful state. The harmonics began to shift, ever so slightly with time into the deep familiar tone of a single voice.
Dad,
she thinks to herself.
Lucia drifted into a serene daze, serenaded by the harmonic lullaby.
Suddenly, the shell’s glow shifted to an angry blood red, startling Lucia awake. But the aggression dissipated quickly, as the shell transformed into a sparking brilliant white sheet, stitched with rays of starlight.
The supple sheet of light engulfed her like cotton swaddling. Luminous waves undulated through the sheet and caressed her tiny body. It cuddled her, soothingly rocking her before tenderly depositing her onto the breakfast nook bench and whisking back into the picture where the wheat stalks magically rolled with a gentle breeze.
FLASH!
Lucia is stunned back to life by the sudden explosion of light.
However, where most people would rub at their eyes, attempting to rid themselves of the annoying fiber optic cobwebs and spots, Lucia was instead amused by the temporary light show currently ablaze upon her retinas. And it was right then that Lucia realized that the perpetual wonder of the world around had returned to her, all at once. Reborn was the Lucia of everlasting summer vacation and fairy tales.
Like a magician’s puff of smoke, which dissipates to reveal the prestige moment, the cloud of fiber optic webs slowly melted away from her vision and revealed the vintage Brownie camera, it’s mystic eye aimed at her face.
On its side was affixed a slip of glittering paper, patterned like a snowflake, from a pad Jason found amongst Lucia’s trinkets.
Upon it, the man in the yellow tie scribbled a brief note of good-bye.
Enjoy the miracles, kid. Merry Christmas.
Lucia’s eyes darted about the Mess Hall, hoping to find the man in the yellow tie, but he was long gone. Instead, in his place, she discovered a young goateed man. He sat next to her and stared up at the photograph with a quizzical look upon his face.
“Sorry to intrude,” he said to the little girl “But for the life of me I can’t figure why a picture of my trailer would be hangin’ on this blasted wall.”
Lucia stared at the man in wonder, as he stared in wonder upon the photograph.
Without warning, Lucia sprang up on the bench, startling the goateed man. She took a hold of the loupe draped upon her chest and examined the legendary breakfast nook photograph.
She peered deeply into the window and then gasped.
To her astonishment, embedded in the photograph and sitting next to Jason, Lucia saw the man currently keeping company with her.
In the photo, his hair was silvered and his skin wrinkled with character, but there was no doubt that it was him, down to the very same tweed suit and thin brown tie.
“That’s your trailer!” exclaimed Lucia.
“You’re darn right it is. A 1963 Dodge Travco Motor Home. Same damn shade of Venetian red.I bought it just this morning from a shady salesman right down the street. The wife almost killed me. Was supposed to be pickin’ up a spankin’ brand new mini van, but this old girl,” he said pointing at the photograph, “she spoke to me. And now I walk in here to find the exact same model, hanging in an orphanage Mess Hall, of all places. Damndest thing.” The young man mused.
Lucia turned to him to see if he was okay, only to find him fixated on the Brownie camera. He slowly rested his hand gently on top of it.
“Damndest thing, indeed,” he whispered to himself.
Lucia sat next to the man and slid the camera in front of him.
“Have you seen this camera before?”
“Yes,” he said softly. “But never while I was awake.”
The man was now even more confused than ever. He had been experiencing a perpetual
déjà vu
ever since entering the old orphanage, just five minutes ago for the very first time in his life. As his beautiful wife chatted with the Father about the possibilities of adopting a child, the man was driven to wander the halls, bemused.
The camera that rested beneath his hand was one that had appeared to him many times, within a mysterious recurring dream, ever since he was a little boy. He became so fixated with the image of it that he had become a collector of Brownies. His basement was a virtual museum of the vintage camera, with all shapes and colors represented.
However, this camera was the exact one from his dream, down to the chipped green art deco faceplate.
“This is a 1930 vintage Eastman Kodak Number 2 Beau Brownie Camera. It’s as basic a camera as you can get. It’s a simple light box. You feed it light. It returns the favor by miraculously capturing a moment in time. As far as I’m concerned, your camera here is one in a million. One in a million.”
“There you are,” exclaimed the man’s wife, entering the room in a huff. “Well, who is this beautiful young girl I caught you with, this time,” she joked as she joined the two of them at the table.
“I’m Lucia.”
“Hi Lucia. I’m Mary, and this dapper gentleman, who is bad at introducing others, as well as himself, is my husband, Max.”
The clouds above the orphanage broke for the third and final time that day, just before nightfall.
In doing so, the clouds had allowed the ethereal light of Magic Hour to cascade into the room.
The enchanted light flowed into the nook and illuminated the three of them with a charmed quixotic glow.
“Well, look at that,” said Mary beaming. “Look how nice we all look together.”
Lucia followed Mary’s gaze to the photograph. At first she saw nothing that she hadn’t seen before. However, she then noticed the reflection of light.
There, reflected within the lucid glass, she saw herself, bookended by the handsome couple. The three of them sat together as if posing for a family portrait.
To Lucia, it looked perfect.
“
Oh, my.”
It was the kind of image that mothers preserve in photo albums, a remembrance frozen in time. Yet this was not a static memory, but a vibrant forecast of thrills to come. It was at that very moment, as the couple stared at the reflected Magic Hour light, that they decided that Lucia very much needed to be the spark for a new family. They adopted her, but fast.
And as Max migrated from film to film, he brought along his new family, housed close to him within his cozy old motor home. Together they traveled across the beautiful landscape of North America, capturing beautiful moments of humanity and goodwill along the way.
And soon (you’d be surprised just how soon) the family outgrew their beloved trailer. So they built a splendid house, filled to the brim with brothers, sisters, love and the chaos that came with a large family.
“Careful what you wish for,” Lucia would often joke.
Her new house was tucked away within a lush green forest and faced true west, so that every evening the home would be bathed with the enchanted light of Magic Hour.
The Brownie camera had expended its last gasp of magic while healing the heart of the little girl. So the box of light instead relied solely upon the magic within Lucia, herself. She would grow up to become a fine woman and a photographer of prominence, creating images that would touch all who chose to gaze upon them.
The Breakfast Nook Photograph had deftly returned to Lucia what the stranger had bluntly stolen from her, long ago, on that windy day in September. When the little girl eventually left our world, after a long blessed life, her children and her children’s children surrounded her bed. Her fingers rested upon the Jeweler’s Loupe, strung about a handmade silver necklace, which laid upon her chest, right above her fragile heart.
On the morning her family laid the photographer to rest, her eldest son marveled at how from the day she had found her new parents, until the day she died, Lucia never allowed a day to pass where she didn’t take a snapshot with her vintage Eastman Kodak Number 2 Beau Brownie Camera.
And with that, Lucia, whose name was Latin for light, was swept up into Heaven, but fast, leaving a trail of gold dust in her wake.
And that’s a true story.
About the Author
When Gregory Earls isn’t eating at Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles, he pays the bills by taking up space at 20th Century Fox in the Feature Post Production Department. He’s a proud graduate of Norfolk State University and the American Film Institute, where he studied cinematography. He's an award-winning director who has amassed a reel of short films, music videos, and (yes) a wedding video or two. Steadfastly butchering the Italian language since 2002, he hopes to someday master the language just enough to inform his in-laws how much he loves their daughter, Stefania, who was born and raised in Milan, Italy. Gregory currently resides in Venice, California where he goes giddy every time he spots that dude who roller skates and plays the electric guitar at the same time. During football season, he can be found at the Stovepiper Lounge, a Cleveland Browns bar in the Valley where he roots for the greatest football team in the history of Cleveland.
Table of Contents
3 Stay Out of the Business, Kid
4 I Liked Cleveland Better Anyway
6 Cleveland is a Chiaroscuro City
7 Trying Not to Kill French People
8 The Cinematographer, the Box of Light, & Magic Hour
14 Feed the Box of Light & See Miracles
15 It’s the Best Painting EVER
16 I Want My Damn Picture Back
18 First You See Napoli, and Then You Die
19 How the Hell Did I Get Here?
20 What’s Italian for “Felony?”
24 Everything’s Going to Be Okay