WINTER 2026, SHORT STORY, 2300 WORDS
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I write this to you now, under appreciable mental malady. Forgive me. My mind and heart, and my vocabulary with them, err. The film you wanted me to develop––it is done. But the latter half of the roll was tainted by light. From red glares, to pallid frames of exposure, like blood pouring into the whiteness of hell. Hell must be pale. I know now.
But what remains visible in the developed film remains awful. Things a man should not see. You are a sick man for photographing them. I send these photos on a developed reel; you will have to scan them yourself; I cannot do it. I hate the technology that allows scanning, printing, and higher definitions. Now, I have sent them in this tube that you have undoubtedly opened, if you have opened this at all. I send you a complementary description of each photograph, since your blind brother cannot see; you can explain them to him, so he does not miss out.
Regards,
The Luddite.
The Anthology
Find twenty-four photos, most of which are tainted, or wholly under erasure.
I: The first photo is not crisp. Too shadowy, underexposed, the camera shakes; aperture cannot catch the field’s swaying hemlocks. A blue of outlines and shapes, a crude blending of light and dark. There is no contrast between light and shadow, only a deeper blue of melancholy. Elysian Fields in the shade of a poet’s ink, before the poet writes a haiku upon the gates of death.
II: A wide-shot. Inside, the field is now in focus. I see the hemlocks for once, in their pure blooms of deathly white, as buds rustle by the side (slightly blurred). Above lingers the cloudless sky of pale (almost whitish) blue. It is the same blue as a calm sea on a flat coast of unstirred sand. Below, the waves of flowers are visible as far as possible, until graininess and shadows consume the latter half of the field. By the far right corner, an elm grows, but it is mostly a shadow that leans inland. The sun must be on the other side, to the right, to the West. I guess it is mid-afternoon.
III: A closer shot of the elm. From the same direction as before, only much closer. It is in the centre of the picture. An elm, but it fits inside a box within the frame! Its lower branches droop along the side, as higher branches climb towards the sun. Tones of greens, browns, emeralds, blacks, and the purplish of aubergines in some corners. The western leaves, illumined by sun, turn almost gold; the eastern leaves, shrouded in darkness, turn blacker than pitch into the invisibility of pitch. The elm stands, little etchings along its bark-armour; riverine trenches scrap across its flesh, showing its scars from the passage of time’s flow.
IV: Close to the elm’s single leaf, rimed with some white, sticky substance; its serrated edges of jade are softened. They are of an off-hue. And they curl inward, and bits slough off here and there, as steel may be softened by acid. Although grainy, I see the damaged leaf in its totality; the foreground can only hold this leaf, despite its dying away. It sits on top of raging waters, that swell of blurriness in the background; it looks to be the grass beneath the tree, construed as mayhem.
V: A close shot of the elm’s hole. A large hole; I guess it could fit a head, or two heads. It looks, somehow, like the gaping chasm of a hungry maw. Like a leech’s sucker. The hollow of the tree is dark, as dark as the inmost depth of hell; lips of grooved bark line the side of the hole. They look distended, like fat, pregnant eels slithering over another. Cords of blubber coiling around the hole. The hole is a window into hell. I think.
VI: Inside the blackness of a well, I see some eyes glow. They are blue. Blue as lotuses, blue as the Aegean, blue as sapphires. They twinkle inside that pitch darkness; until, it seems, the whole photo is out of focus, if not for the eyes. The cameraman (is he you?) can see the eyes; he must have. For he now points his camera right at the set of eyes, and I only see the two blue dots, hovering almost, or revolving around another, inside the bleak abyss inside the elm’s mouth.
VII: It emerges. The pair of eyes, that is. They are compound eyes, upon a strange face. It is an insect’s. Likely a scarab, or a locust. I do not know. The front portion of the bug is visible. Other than that, it has the outline of the topmost portion of a carapace. The armour of a centurion. Does this thing have wings? It is brown, mostly ovoid from the front, with a pair of eyes that contains more and more pairs of eyes, ad infinitum. They glow. They glow. Cerulean seas. Banshees.
VIII: The whole body of the insect. It sits along the edge of the elm’s mouth, descending down the trunk. Through grains and spots, I still see the intricate details along the back of the bug’s armour. It has a line going down it, a black line, that bleeds out into peacock patterns: rainbow eyes, flames of every hue, layers of colour over another, like a colourful slick of oil in water, or a decadent cocktail of various painted densities. It is a scarab, or beetle-like in design. I think it is a coleopteran, if it is indeed a living specimen of insect, and not a spirit from the hellish void it emerged from. The scarab has a black mark on its back, barely visible if not studied for; it is an hourglass shape, amidst the spectral lights.
IX: More and more bugs. In this mid-shot, a few paces back from before, the elm is less in focus, and the sward around it is blurred into greenish hazes and spectral haunts of evergreen. Tendril-vines descend as fallen leaves blur into singular ropy masses of blurriness. But the bugs come. More and more. They are in the centre of the frame; if I sliced the photograph in nine boxes, it would be in the middle of them. A rule of thirds. But the bugs come. More and more. They are spilling out from the void. In focus, they look like teardrops of rainbow colours, and blue eyes sparkling in the colour of it.
X: The sun shines on them, as they spill out in their multitudes. Dozens of dozens, hundreds of hundreds, as their shiny backs are conglomerating into one immense kaleidoscope. Waves and waves. Crashing seas of every hue of paint. But the wings come, buzzing; they look like streaks of brown or grey or ash. They contrast no colour, but fill the vibrancy with specks of dullness. The hollowness of the black mouth is gone. I see only flying scarabs and light, and colours of colours, bouncing off another, making more colours!
XI: A spot of blood lines the edge of the photo: the top, right corner. Blood? I do not know. But they come. More and more in number. Until there is no way to quantify anything that is such quantity. It is featureless, unknowable, ever-shifting. The scourge, the bugs, the limitless. Scarabs flying, screeching almost, from within the photograph. Gold liquid pouring into the greenest jade, as bloody rubies mix with the bluest essence of lotus’ intoxicating wine. Velvet and silk intermix with the darkest amethyst; sparkles of silver dot the photograph, making the grains of colourness nothingness almost invisible. Bugs. Bugs. They are coming, until too much colour gives way to lack of definition, lack of contrast, lack of vibrancy.
XII: Bloody drops of see-through light. They glimmer along the edges, into some of the corners, along the outermost flat dimensions (X, Y) of the photograph. If there is a Z dimension, the light leaks dance in that space: red ghosts of vengeance. The scene is that of insectoid hell; wings pour out of opened carapaces, which are grooved and spotted with grains of sand, amidst a maelstrom of half-formed things that flow from corporeal into incorporeal, from whole into parts (and back again), as well as the chimeric amalgamation of solids, liquids, gases, and suspended particles. Scarabs fly, their wretched probosces set to suck, their damned compound eyes are leering even from the prison of this frozen image. Space and time holds still; the awakening furies, those tides of rapture, are stirring. Death is upon us.
XIII: Underneath the halos of dreaded reds and beams of scarlet, I see the hordes of bugs swarm towards the camera. Although the shot is still, I can see a mere finger begin to poke its way in the field of view; the cameraman is anxious; he knows, I think you know he knows, that he is about to die. Where did you find this camera again? I have not ventured outside since the great cataclysm, and I hope you do not bring the deathly scourge on my doorstep with this omen. Seas of a murrain, hosts of pestilence! Their awful, crude shapes are brimming across the photograph, in hues of darkness and drabness, taking away the colour of the fields––the white hemlocks, the green stems, the elm’s leaves, the emeraldine sward!
XIV: Bloody bands, myriads of furious spirits, the Satanic host of vermilion and orange and gold. They dance on top of the rest of it. A phantasmagoria. Within, or beneath them, I see the scarabs’ horrible eyes glowing in shades of blues or azures. Revenant blues. For they are now covered over with reds, making them purplish. Purplish like lavender in winter, rusting away into offer, paler hues of purple. Until pinks and other derivatives of pure red begin to take hold.
XV: Under a river of bloody surge, a flood of ichor, a deluge of death, I see the scarabs moving and moving quicker; their shapes are not shapes. They are morphing into one single shape. As an urn may only have its whole form to make it an urn, the scarabs are one thing. They are not their parts, their sectioned-off curves, their rudimentary atoms. The whole photo is the whole horde of wings and glowing eyes; it looks more like a poorly shot constellation in the night, with a low enough exposure of light, to contain some of the stars. Sparkling votive candles, beneath the blood; purples, reds, but more reds than anything. An endless sea of faceless creatures, that forms its own face, the face of decomposition. The god of decay is smiling.
XVI: A ghostly white edge glows along the eastern side. A spot of milk? Something poured onto the top of this photo? No. It is light pollution. A leak. And, within that faceless rabble host of insects, I see the definition of no single thing; only the pseudo-shapes, that seem half-tears and half-leaves, fall across most of the frame. Their motion is obvious, since the aperture and shutter speed are not set for their velocity and acceleration. Only some of the wings are frozen in time, but they are also poorly blended into the rest of the scenery; hues of black, brown, silver, white, and smatterings of purplish, fill the majority of the photo. I see, inside the hollow, two distinct dots of gold. They look like eyes. Or the reflections that eyes tend to make, inside the reflections of mirrors, or cameras. Blood-reds warp the usual opacity of the photo, creating translucent and dancing eidolons (coloured like lifeblood); they dance in refractive glory, dancing for the bloodshed of Ilion.
XVII: By the edges, the sanguine dun becomes, measure by measure, white as a sheet. The redness is dying away into a cadaver’s pale and colourless flesh; drained of blood, the photo begins to look almost stark. The raving mad things, whatever they are, drain away in their multitudes, until I see the hollow again. Draining the world of locusts, the hollowed maw of the elm is filled. He once again eats up what he spewed: the locusts, which are still there, flying across half the frame. But, on the eastern side of the frame, sunlight-beams glitter along the leaves, making them yellow and gold, as red taint gives way to the white wall that destroys most of the photo. Whiteness makes annihilation. And yet, the warring insects still bang their proverbial shields, and fly into the fray of the foreground…. If not for the hollowed elm’s sucking hole.
XVIII: Most of the photo is erased, if not for the faint shadow of a screaming mouth in the top-left corner, which brims with the life of death. Buzzing, screeching horrors, I can hear them! Their wings are blurred, their shapes are amorphous, out of focus, and yet I hear them! I hear them from beyond! The screech and whine of their songs, with the monotonous blowing clarion of the abyss. I hear it! I hear it! The sounds of cicadas, the choir of scarabs, the drone of moth-wings, the hum of a million wasps, the single tone of countless locusts flying over the Nile! My ears are bleeding at the immensity of these booming, crashing waves, waves over waves, ply over ply, of endless, deafening din!
IXX: Blank, white, deathly white, carte blanche. Sea-foam.
XX: White as hemlock’s flowers inside Elysium. I see nothing but whiteness’ infinity of colourlessness.
XXI: White as the dust of cremations; powders of lead; sugarcane beetles’ chitin.
XXII: White ash, white with the hues of purgatory, white like shit turns white, white like a scarab beetle covered in white shit.
XXIII: Asphodel, painted over with the purest paint. Seraphim wings’ feathers. The moon’s stunning whiteness in a pitch-black night, but there is no darkness here to speak of, except the darkness where the purest band of light occupies.
XXIV: Hell is a sea of pallid hemlock milk. Everything is quiet.
Dmitri Akers is an Ibaloi warrior-poet, living on an intergalactic wavelength. But he, uh, sometimes materialises on Kaurna country. His prose has appeared in Skull & Laurel, Spawn 2, and Penumbra. He founded a one-man research and development program to capture the elusive cryptid, Thomae Rugglesum Pynchonus. Lure it with jazz and bait it with pizza. Dmitri can be hired as an editor at www.prairieandzoyd.com. His Instagram posts film photography: @prairieandzoyd.