Photograph. October 22, 01:31 P.M. Fingers in concrete:
The picture is lit with a flash. Washed-out gray concrete. Sharp shadows pointing to the left. The toe of a single out-of-place boot is visible on the right side of the frame—a stray object intruding on an otherwise stark scene.
And set in the middle of the photograph: fingers, protruding from the concrete floor. They sprout out of the ground like thick-stemmed plants, only different—not pushing out displaced dirt, instead reaching up from a perfectly smooth unblemished surface. The surface cuts below the knuckle on all the fingers save the pinkie; the pinkie’s knuckle is bisected neatly in two. And only the tip of the thumb is visible, little more than a thumbnail, sending up a glimmer of reflected light.
The angle is low; the camera is perched about a foot off the ground. And even though it is not a macro shot, the image is close and clear—razor-sharp details, blown up larger than life. The flesh on the fingers looks ghostly pale in the glare of the flash, and the ragged, dirty edges of the fingernails are all visible. The knuckles have been scraped raw, dotted with tiny tags of gray-white skin, ripped up to reveal a glimpse of rosy pink beneath. It is not a bad scrape, just the result of unintended friction, the kind of wound you’d get wrestling an unwieldy box through a narrow doorway.
It is a desolate shot. Gray and lonely.