Colour Burn

“I just want to rewind it, the roll’s finished, why won’t it rewind? There doesn’t even seem to be a button. Look, what’s this one? It’s got an arrow pointing backwards and everything but when I press it it doesn’t do anything.”
“The battery…”
“Is fine. I put a new one in it before we came up here. It can’t have gone flat in three days. I’ll just wait and show it to Dad. He’ll know.”

But frustration is persistent, and motivates in all the wrong ways. Ten minutes later she’s fiddling with it again, running her fingers over the contours and picking at the cracks with her fingernails. There is a click and the back flies open. The film glistens metallic in the late-afternoon sun.

We sit in a circle and it is a second before anyone reacts. A drawn out, extended second. She flips the casing closed again. Puts the camera down. Reaches for the bottle of white still icy from the shared fridge of the campground, “Dan’s” scrawled messily on the label.

“Shit.”