Arista’s hands are steady. They have to be. She has to be. The citizens of Ilford know her sleek black and white movements as she captures the city with the click of a button. Depending on what she loads into her camera—film or bullets—Arista will watch over her city through a glass lens waiting to capture a devastating portrait or stop evil in its tracks. The city she had been promised is falling apart and she won’t be another casualty to its destruction.
That night Arista went exploring the woods while her parents slept. She wanted to experience the same beauty beneath the starlight canopy of the forest that she had during the day behind the camera. Earl and Laurie slept soundly in their tent while Arista scurried through the trees. The more she labored through the thick entrails of the woods, the more she grew tired. She curled up in the nearest curve of a winding tree and closed her eyes to the world. She awoke in the morning with a start, worried that her parents might have packed up and left without her. Her tiny feet hurried through the trees as the sounds of the forest became a steady rhythm that failed to soothe her worries. She ran through the forest, tripping on low branches, scraping her pale skin on thorny bushes, and eventually stumbled back into the now empty clearing. During the night, evil had set fire to the campsite. Oil paints mixed with the dry leaf-covered ground and quickly scorched the van and its inhabitants. The tent fell away to ash and Laurie and Earl were melted in the flames. This was one image Arista needn’t capture with a camera.
Arista was found covered in dirt and muck, having spent three days wondering the lonely forest, holding nothing but her camera. Cops and firemen placed her parents’ singed bodies in bags like black holes. They put the rest of the families belongings in large boxes labeled “EVIDENCE” and carried on with their lives. Arista was taken into the nearby city of Ilford. She had never seen such a busy place and the loud streets and people provided a momentary distraction from her pain. At the police station, she was passed around until ending up on the desk of Detective Richards. He put her in an oversized IPD shirt and gave her a matching coffee mug of hot chocolate. Richards was kind to her, but she was one of twenty open cases on his desk and hers was the least of his worries. Arista’s hadn’t been the only family lost in the night. Richards had Arista’s first roll of film developed, officially for evidentiary purposes, but truly because he hoped the pictures of her parents might provide some sort of small comfort.
Child services placed her with a nice family out in the suburbs of Ilford. Their manicured lawn had two perfectly spaced pine trees on either side of the walkway leading toward the door. The red door opened into a modestly furnished home inhabited by modestly dressed people. They wore khakis on a daily basis except on Friday, which was for jeans, and Sunday, which was for church clothes. The Fosters had two children, a dog, and a cat. The dog and cat never fought, so the children followed suit. They welcomed Arista into their home and provided her with a pair of khakis and a blue polo. Mrs. Foster enrolled Arista in the local public school and packed her a brown bag lunch of PB&J, sliced carrots soaked in pepper juice, a granny smith apple, and two chocolate chip cookies.
While Arista slept at night in her twin sized bed, snug beneath the plaid comforter, Mrs. Foster would sneak into her bed room and watch Arista sleep, her small chest rising and falling with each breath. Mrs. Foster let the kids sleep in on Saturdays, but she would sneak into their rooms in the mornings, just as the sun was rising behind the house, and silently hold her hand up to their small mouths, waiting for their warm breath to pass through her fingers. The Fosters claimed Arista as their own, but she never truly fit in. Her eyes always seemed a little more serious, her brow always a little more furrowed, but her khakis just as crisp as the others. Nonetheless, she wore the clothes Mom bought for her (she started calling her “Mom” a year after moving in) and even attended Sunday services at the Unitarian church down the street. And, as Arista grew older, Mrs. Foster returned the kindness by buying her black jeans rather than the clean khakis.
Arista quickly found her niche in the art department at school. The other Foster children participated in History fair and wrote for the school newspaper, but Arista was most comfortable behind the camera. She survived the tortures of middle and high school beneath the warm, comforting glow of the red-lit darkroom. In the chemical filled trays she brought to life photos of abandoned houses and weathered towns where things were simply left to age on their own. After high school, Arista planned to move into downtown Ilford to attend a liberal arts university. She would study Marketing and Photography (a compromise with her mom, creativity coupled with security).
The day she moved away from the glistening suburbs was cold and wet. Mrs. Foster couldn’t stop blubbering and eventually resorted to blowing her nose into her husbands teal polo. She had made Arista a care package complete with gold-toed socks, deodorant rocks and snack bars. Arista didn’t want to let her mom see her cry; she didn’t want to have to blow her nose on anyone’s polo. She wanted nothing more than to live in a bustling city, but she would miss her mom and the comfort of the suburbs more than anything. Now she would have three photos in her collection of prized possessions: Earl, Laurie, and Mom.
“Promise me you will call every night? Let us know that you make it home safe?” Mrs. Foster pleaded.
“Yes, Mom. I promise.”
“And always keep cash with you, just in case. And take your vitamins. And also, eat enough protein. You know, you are looking a little thin.”
“Okay, mom, I will.”
“I love you, Arista. I am so glad to call you my own.”
“I love you, too.”
Creativity cost $40,000 a year so Arista got a job in a nearby coffee shop. Within the four walls of the coffee shop, smiling regulars enjoyed hot cups of privilege with their baked-fresh-everyday-scones; but on the streets outside, no one could afford their privilege. During her breaks, Arista would walk around downtown with her camera, freezing on film moments of destitution and hunger, desperation and need. On the nights she closed the shop, she took the leftover pastries and passed them out along the walk home to solemn yet grateful faces. After her walks of charity, she went straight to the darkroom to develop the day’s film where the deterioration of Ilford materialized every night beneath the red lights. It appeared in black and white on fiber paper. It was washed for fifteen minutes before being hung to dry. After it dried, Arista laid it amongst the other images of corrosion.
“Mom?” Arista blubbered into the phone. She was using her last few quarters on the phone booth.
“Arista, honey? What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing like I thought it would be. The city is so cold. When I see people here, there is nothing behind their eyes.”
“Where we live, people aren’t suffering. We did pretty good for ourselves, but in the cities, everyone is so worried about their own problems, they can’t even see people dying in the streets.”
“I know, it just hurts to see everything fading.”
“Then bring life back to the city.”
In high school, Arista had fallen in love with the idea of the city. She imagined nights walking beneath the glass skyscrapers, her heels lightly clicking along the pavement. She wouldn’t mind the daytime hurry of the streets or the ebb and flow of traffic; she wanted to feel the pulse of those around her. She had heard stories of homeless who offered wandering tourists advice on which parking meters were free past seven p.m., and men giving flowers to bright-faced girls on the arms of serious-faced boys, complimenting the lady, then asking the gentleman for a donation, and most of all, the museums whose wall hangings changed with the seasons, a constant influx of creation and beauty. Instead of the glow she had imagined, Arista was greeted by fading life and slowly dimming lights. The homeless wandered the streets muttering paranoia under their breath. The bright-faced girls clutched tightly to the arms of those boys, letting fear drip from their fingertips onto the coats of the men they hoped might protect them.
Arista wanted to mend the city with her camera. She would rid the streets of those stifling the people who held a belief in the power of passion and creation, giving the city a change to breath a new life. Through her lens she would watch the vultures preying on the unassuming street artists and casual photographers, with one swift point of her index finger she would release the shutter and halt the threat with a stealth shot from her camera. Though she had stayed true to her first camera all these years, she needed something faster. Arista remembered a boy from her childhood who lived in the city that could build her a new camera, something quiet, quick and accurate.
In middle school Arista met Peter. He wore thick-framed glasses and stuttered when he talked about science. It was his favorite subject. Unlike the other kids, Arista didn’t make fun of his stutter and enjoyed listening to him ramble on about the periodic table and the discovery of new elements. Peter was able to see past the horrendous khakis Arista was encouraged to wear and admired her for her unwavering creativity and wit.
“Its am-ma-ma-mazing how many new elements are discovered every year.” Peter said.
“Huh, I had no idea. Like what?”
“Well, last year they discovered t-t-t-two new elements that decay and t-t-t-turn into other elements. Awesome, right?”
“Yeah, awesome.”
“Before I d-d-die, I want to discover a n-n-new element. What do you want to do?”
“Take pictures that will save the world."
Peter spent his spare time building gadgets and doing science experiments in the dank garage he turned into a private laboratory. His most valued invention was a water bottle that refilled itself using a complex system of external tubing and gathering of moisture from the air. In seventh grade he won the science fair with the water bottle and was sent to a magnet school where he was able to further his interests in science and technology. When he moved, Arista and Peter kept in touch via postal service. His letters were usually written on graph paper in neat, calculated print while hers were scribbled hurriedly on torn sheets from her sketchpad. After high school (from which he graduated two years early), Peter moved into the city where he opened a shop that specialized in repairing rare gadgets and gizmos.
She appeared in the doorway of his overstuffed shop on 8th Avenue the next day. Computer parts littered the floor and entangled wiring seemed to creep like vines from every corner. Hunched over a metal table toward the back, Peter quietly cursed the gadget he was attempting to work into submission with a Phillips head.
“Hello stranger.” She whispered behind him. He jumped at the warmth of her words on his ear and fumbled the screwdriver-impaled toy, letting it clamor on the metal surface.
“Arista! What are you doing here?” No stutter.
“I came to ask a huge favor. I was wondering if you could build me a camera.”
“Ha! Really? Is that all? Of course, what kind do you want? Manual? Digital? Large format?”
“Manual.”
“Okay, what kind? What size film do you want use?”
“Bullets.”
“What? What is that? Some new brand? That’s a weird name. Is it 35 or 120 film?”
“I want to shoot more than just film. I want the camera to shoot bullets. Remember when I told you I wanted to save the world with my photos? Well, now you can help me.”
She explained to Peter her plan. She wanted to liberate the citizens of Ilford from the savage streets. The only thing she could do, the only thing she was good at: aiming.
“You do realize that if anyone sees you with a camera, you will be put on a watch list? It will be impossible for you to actually do anything to stop the bad guys because they are the ones watching you.”
“I have to at least try.”
Peter halted all other projects and spent the next week fervently sculpting a 35 mm camera that would save the city. The lens and coordinating aperture would serve as the barrel where bullets are loaded in the chamber as if gently loading a new roll of film. The advance reel cocked the gun and the shutter release was the trigger. Now all she needed were targets. This wasn’t exactly what her mom had in mind when she told her to bring life to the city, but Arista would do the best she could.
