Amber Godwin never watched her brother shower. Right off the bat, I want to get that straight. This is not a story of
perverted incestual pleasure. It is merely a cautionary tale about buying
cursed electronics... or something.
Fresh out of tenth grade, Amber stepped off school property, not to return for months. Like all young people who have been thrust into vacation without any idea of how to pass the time, she immediately felt the familiar tendrils of boredom and laziness encircling her mind and limbs, respectively.
She shrugged them off and remembered her plan. The Plan. Months ago, maybe as far back as February, she had planned on spending her summer taking pictures. All her friends had photos coating their lockers, webpages, and rooms. Amber had her share, but she had the photography bug. But first logical step to taking multitudes of pictures was to secure ownership of a digital camera. No problem, she got a nice small one, slightly used. It was haunted, possessed, thirsted for blood and all that jazz, (also had a wicked sense of humour), but these qualities somehow never came up during the transaction. $20 later, she was well on her way to shutterbugging.
By July 12 Amber was knee-deep in various pictures. They were the usual teenage-girl-style subjects: "me", "me + my friends", "my doggie, AWWW!" and the like. Occasionally she would find pictures that she couldn't remember taking. Most of the time they were pictures of empty sky, the floor, walls, or blurred faces, and she assumed she had either taken them accidentally or her brother had been using her camera. As the summer steadily plodded along, the mysterious pictures appeared more frequently, and she got increasingly suspicious.
Chris Godwin, Amber's little brother, had not been touching the camera like she was suspecting, but after being wrongfully chided for using it, ideas wriggled their way into his head. He picked it up gingerly, looked both ways, and smiled.
"All riiight, time to have some fun," he said to himself, and with that remark, he was gone. Most of the following evening was spent getting captured on film, and Chris enjoyed it despite his sloppy and amateurish skills.
After taking a particularly unfocused shot of an old man, Chris was going through the gallery, eying his sister's pictures and wishing he was better at photography. He pressed the 'Previous' button, and the image that appeared was shocking and disgusting enough to contort his face into a misshapen mass of wrinkles and gagging. Displayed on the tiny screen was a miniature version of his naked self, but he could not unearth any satisfying reason. A previously unseen revelation slowly leaked into his mind: this was his sister's camera! Chris pulled his arms back and let the camera fall onto the soft lawn. He felt an uncomfortably bile-like taste in his mouth as he stared down at the little nude pixel boy. A wave of shudders arrived and passed over him. Rather, the shudders arrived, hung around for a while, and changed the subject whenever the issue of leaving was brought up.
Twitching furiously and still shaking, Chris sat on Amber's bed impatiently awaiting his sister's return. The camera with its abhorrent images sat innocently next to him. He was very upset. After discovering lewd pictures of himself, he had gone up to his sister's room to... well, to do something. He didn't know. In any case, she was not there, but her computer was on and what was on the computer screen sparked a similar reaction: a very poorly photoshopped JPEG of a showering Chris Godwin washing a showering Amber Godwin. This was too much. The first picture was too much, but Amber's nauseating desktop wallpaper was too much to the power of 10. There would be hell to pay.
Amber strolled leisurely into her room swinging a bag of new clothes, and noticed her uncomfortable-looking brother first, and the incestual desktop next. Putting what she assumed was two and two together, she leapt at her sick brother, repeatedly shrieking "WHAT DID YOU DO? YOU PERVERT!" Chris responded with "IT WASN'T ME, YOU DID IT, YOU TWISTED FREAK!"
As all this went on, the camera thought "Hee hee hee. Humans and their emotions. They never take the time to figure out a situation. Nobody can own me." With that, the camera burst its lense forward and catapulted itself out the window, off to destroy the rest of the unfortunate world. The Godwins' argument escalated, with much widening of the eyes and gestures to the computer screen, which for some reason was still on. As the camera kept extending and withdrawing it's lense, it gradually made its way down the street, back to the pawn shop, back onto the shelf, for the next budding photographer with a corruptible family.
This was written when I decided I would Show You Fear In a Handful Of Text.