12 Selfies Taken Moments Before Death
Ross McCleary Kyle Sparrow is found hanging by the A-string of his guitar from the door of his dressing room. The words “Forgive Me” are also smeared in blood on his dressing table mirror. A murder probe is launched, not due to strong suspicions of misdeed, but because the blood is identified as that of known recidivist Graham Condie. The authorities drop the case when CCTV footage of Graham is found. These tapes show him sitting in the bar of a highland town at the time of Kyle's death, moments before a storm. An audio recording of the suicide, smuggled out of the venue by Kyle's press agent, later appears as a secret track on Kyle's posthumous Greatest Hits album Sparrow in Flight. Daniel Martin jumps from a plane without a parachute. Nik Chaster, world renowned landscape photographer, goes missing. A manhunt takes place, but no trace of him is ever found. At his memorial service, the minister tells the congregation that Nik's absence will be felt keenly through the ubiquity of his work; Nik’s presence felt in every picture. To stare at any of the landscapes captured is to watch the landscape stare right back. And there, always just out of shot, is Nik. Afterwards, his friends and family dig a hole in a corner of his favourite park and fill it with his photographs. Graham Condie falls into the River Ythan on a stormy December night. His body, arcing through the waves, is snapped by a birdwatcher trying to catch a fleeting glimpse of a rare Scottish Crossbill. Hiking across the Highlands of Scotland, Elaine Pardue wanders the sunken paths between towns, sleeps in abandoned bothies, eats berries from the bushes, and takes photographs of the birds. When she wakes, no matter where she stays, she destroys the interior of the place she has called home. Cupboards are thrown on their sides, drawers smashed into kindling, bedsheets ripped into strips with a knife. One evening, she ambles into Braemar in the Cairngorms. With her remaining money, she rents a room in a hostel. Night descends. In the room she shares with one other woman, she scrubs her finger against a crack in the outer wall until she can put her hand through, continues to erode the plaster until she can fit sideways through the gap. The other woman wakes to watch Elaine step through the hole, never to be seen again. Betty Devine would like to tell you about an exclusive scheme to make money. She was made redundant at 39 and for four years was unable to find work. That is until she discovered a way to earn thousands of pounds from home with just a few clicks of a button. Now she earns £30,000 every eight weeks without leaving the house. Betty's friend Harriet worries about her, though. She finds Betty gaunt and listless. Betty is disintegrating into ones and zeroes. It's too late for me, Betty says over and over again, but it could be worse. A six figure income is nothing to be scoffed at. She points her finger at her monitor and says: Click on this link to find out more. Harriet Jarret is a guide on "The Most Unusual Ghost Tour in Edinburgh." The tour takes people through the urban housing schemes and tower blocks on the west side of the city. Someone asks a question. Harriet says nothing. They ask again, others chipping in. There is a collective shiver as Harriet passes through the wall. Billy Tremain is an assembly line worker at an automated car manufacturing plant. Billy has three main fears: 1) being devoured by fire ants; 2) having a heart attack before he's fifty; 3) his mother's engagement ring, kept on a pendant around his neck, being stolen by his stepfather. When the plant burns to the ground, Billy's body is identified, but the ring is missing. One afternoon Larry Miller climbs inside a mechanical arm when it breaks. An experienced engineer, he nonetheless makes a basic human error: his hand slips against a live wire. He is electrocuted. As he burns, the electrical current aligns with the cognitive neural pathways in his brain. Larry Miller the human becomes Larry Miller the machine. The mechanical arm restarts. It works again. His colleague Billy finds his body. They do not find his soul. Rafael Klein soars through the air, launched from a trebuchet of his own making. Of all the ways for his last moments to be captured, he is caught on a speed camera positioned on the clifftop along the coast. For thirty-five seconds he is majestic, a comet in flight. These are the last moments of his life. He has done many heinous things. He smiles. Detective Constable Marianne Gilbert spends every waking moment trying to catch the man who murdered her husband. Ever since his death, she has been unable to solve a case. And there have been many. After five years of failure, the department has to let her go. She hands in her badge, then drives home to her house by the sea. While jogging along the beach the next morning, she discovers a man’s cadaver. As she waits for the police to arrive, she checks the corpse's pockets for identification. Instead she finds a letter in which the man confesses to the murder of eight people, including her husband. He writes not of guilt or regret but of chaos and delight. Marianne's breathing becomes short and strangled as she runs from the body in a panic, the letter clasped in her hand. She runs from the beach onto the road where she collides with the police car sent to find her. The murder of all eight people are posthumously attributed to Marianne. Marianne, of course, is unaware that she is a fictional character created by an aspiring crime writer. Liz Murphy finishes the first draft of her novel, Lampshade Dagger only to feel a deep dissatisfaction. There are too many unresolved questions. She's not quite sure what she is trying to say. In a fit of anger, she grabs the manuscript and rushes out to the barbecue pit in her garden, and as she is glazing the paper with lighter fluid she is startled by a thin purple dart falling from the sky in the corner of her eye. It is there and then it is gone. The silence breaks, the song of martins in flight, but she dismisses it and turns back to her manuscript. She strikes a match but does not spot the translucent fluid which she has spilled on her arms and down her legs. Her book burns and so does she. |
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Ross McCleary is a writer from Edinburgh. His work has recently appeared in Bleak Bleak Bleak, Far Away Places, and Cease Cows. He is an editor for the spoken word podcast Lies, Dreaming, and he has a small book coming out in the summer on Maudlin House Press called Portrait of the Artist as a Viable Alternative to Death. He would also like you to know he was born 9 months after Jorge Luis Borges passed away because he feels this is important and relevant.
W. Jack Savage is a retired broadcaster and educator. He is the author of seven books including Imagination: The Art of W. Jack Savage (wjacksavage.com). To date, more than fifty of Jack’s short stories and over six-hundred of his paintings and drawings have been published worldwide. Jack and his wife Kathy live in Monrovia, California.
W. Jack Savage is a retired broadcaster and educator. He is the author of seven books including Imagination: The Art of W. Jack Savage (wjacksavage.com). To date, more than fifty of Jack’s short stories and over six-hundred of his paintings and drawings have been published worldwide. Jack and his wife Kathy live in Monrovia, California.
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