Negatives

It is the picture of the bride and groom in black and white that holds Juliet’s attention. She stares at it in the art museum, her eyes wandering over the scene again and again. She chooses it over the pictures of the Tattooed Lady, the Human Pincushion, the shirtless midget smoking in his bed with a half bottle of brandy on the bed stand. The groom in his wool suit presses the bride in her fluffy, white gown against the hotel lobby wall. The wallpaper is cheap. The doorjambs are chipped and broken. The groom presses the bride in this narrow, cheap hallway, his lips jamming against the side of her face. Her eyes are wide, pure white like the tulle veil that attaches to her stylish black hair. Her eyes are made up with perfectly lacquered eyelashes and kohl eyeliner.

The portrait reminds Juliet of the cardboard box left behind the dumpster near her brownstone apartment on Franklin Avenue. It had a company’s logo on the side – something about freshness and fruit written in cheery, orange ink. She didn’t think it had been there too long because the sides weren’t rain soaked from the drizzly, gray rain of autumn. Sitting on her radiator, she spied the box from her third story window that looked over the alley, and the metal dumpster filled with her neighbor’s trash. She knew their trash but never their names.

The box looked out of place. It wasn’t the first or the last of the month. She couldn’t see the familiar torn armchairs or broken television sets left behind by renters escaping to another part of the city. The urge to look inside forced her to run barefoot down three flights of stairs lined in cheap apartment carpet that scratched the soles of her feet. She stood on the damp disorder of the alley without fear of broken glass or sharp stones. Juliet thumbed through stacks of magazines neatly placed in the fruit box – Popular Mechanics, Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle. She pulled each one out and laid them out in the center of the alley like a quilt. All the address labels had been torn off. Underneath a National Geographic from the 1970s, she saw a magazine with a black and white cover. It looked like a Russian Futurist painting with a large black square lined in white. It was untitled.

She pulled back the cover. The spine was weak, suffering from the spidery lines and creases of wear. Pictures were lined up like film from the old photo booths at the mall - a succession of black and white snapshots, one on top of another. She saw a van, some men, a street not unlike the one she lived on with parking meters and paper bags balled up into the gutter. She thumbed through the pages, watching the strips come to life like a film or the flip animation books she used to play with as a kid. Men. A conversion van. Meters. Bricks. A woman. A woman being grabbed by the men. A struggle. An empty warehouse. A naked woman tied with ropes that hung from a rafter. A naked woman with burns on her wrists from struggling to break free. Suspended above the dusty floor, her weight pressed down towards the ground like an exclamation mark. Her mouth was covered in thick slices of duct tape that reflected the heavy, overhead shop lights. It was the bound woman’s eyes that burned their image onto Juliet’s memory. Her eyes that looked to the left, towards the steel barred door. Her eyes wide and stark white, but colored with fear.

Standing in the museum, Juliet sees the black and white photos perfectly framed and hung at eye level. Little squares lined up just like in a photo booth. And at the end of the strip, hung up in corner, is the bride in white whose eyes mirror the anonymous girl staring at the coldness of a barred, metal door.