Vignette City 33.

*** ‘Vignette City’ is an ongoing project of daily writing and urban photography ***

There are too many photos on my phone. My phone is all locked up now. I can’t do anything with it because I am out of storage. I know it is because of the photos because everything was fine this morning, but then I went out on a house-call and the lady said that the place was haunted, but they all say that.

I started burning my sage and I put the crystals out, but then I saw one of them. It looked like a little girl in a grimy white dress.

“Hey there,” I said very slowly as I very slowly pulled my phone out and thumbed open the camera, “How are you doing there sweetheart?”

And I snapped a whole blast of pictures of her, but she was gone in the blink of an eye.

“Did you say something?” The lady asked, coming back into the room.

“Nope,” I said, because the thing is that if her place really is haunted then it is way out of my league. So I did my thing and said my mantras and then after the lady paid me I said I was going to be out of town for awhile so if a follow-up was needed she’d have to call somebody else.

I was halfway home before I looked down at my photo on the passenger seat and I saw the little girl’s face pressed right up against the screen. I could see her blinking and watching me.

And that freaked the shit out of me.

I flipped the phone over until I found street parking outside my place. I cut the engine and I very delicately lifted up the phone, but she was gone. Just my regular lock screen. So real quick I unlocked it and went into my photos and there she was. There were about a dozen pictures of her there in the lady’s house, but she was moving in all of them, moving in unison in each of them; she was looking at me again.

I selected them all super fast with the tip of my finger, and then deleted them all.

Just for good measure I went into my deleted folder and deleted them all again.

But I was crawling into bed just now, I plugged my phone in and I switched off the lights and I was just drifting off when I noticed the grimy white rectangle of light flickering on my ceiling. Very slowly I picked up the phone and I very carefully tilted the screen toward me and there she was again, watching me from inside the screen.

“I deleted you!” I yelled at her.

But she didn’t say anything. She just watched me.

When she finally disappeared somewhere behind the time and date on the lock screen I went back in and double checked, but yeah, the photos were gone. But then I went and looked at the memory in my phone and the photo library is taking up almost all the room on my phone. I can’t even do anything with it. Nothing will open, nothing will run. It’s like the whole phone is dead now, with just that awful little ghost girl wandering around inside it now.


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