Picture of my neighbor, Mr. Sumpter. He’s standing in the hallway, wearing an old polyester button-up shirt, leaning to one side and putting his weight on one foot. He has his head tilted and eyes open, mouth closed. One fist is clenched.
Mr. Sumpter’s eyes didn’t glow red when I took the picture, it just looks that way now. I think it was the flash from the camera. I didn’t know then what I know now.
The hallway frames Mr. Sumpter. You can’t see where he’s looking at, but he’s looking at a blank wall. I was walking down the hallway and saw him like that. I called out to him but he didn’t say anything, so I took a picture.
#5
Face of my roommate, Bradley. He’s grinning and the color of the photograph is bleached out by the flash. His eyes are red, too. You can see that blond stubble of a goatee that he has, and the blur in the corner is his hand holding a bottle of Miller Genuine Draft. This is important because it was the only alcohol he ever drank. He wouldn’t even drink Miller Lite or Miller High Life. Just MGD.
Bradley was always a little bit weird. I took this picture at a party we had in our apartment. It got shut down a little after this because of noise complaints from my neighbors.
#6
Picture of May, caught in a half-laugh. May hated this picture the most, though I personally think she looks really cute. That thing in her hand is a bottle of beer, I think, but I don’t remember what brand she drank. Behind are the windows of the apartment Bradley and I shared. You can’t really see the view of the west side of the city that we got, though.
Yeah, the smudges and rip on one side is from my fingers handling the sides once or twice too many.
#7
Group shot. I don’t remember a lot of these faces anymore. The couple to one side, those were May’s friends. The two guys in faded computer tee shirts, those were my coworkers. Of course, May, Kyoko, and Bradley are easy to spot. I’m not in the picture because I was behind the camera. You can’t tell where this was taken, but I’m pretty sure it was in my apartment at the party.
#8
Blurred picture of Kyoko. She’s standing in the living room with one hand raised with half of her coat off. She has her head tilted and her mouth is open, but you can’t quite see that. She just got stuck that way putting on her coat. Kind of an odd time for it to hit. The blurry black cloud-looking thing is the couch that Bradley and I bought with our tax returns. It doesn’t look like a lot in the picture but it was really comfortable.
I think the picture got blurred because May was moving past me and bumped my shoulder. This was just before we took Kyoko to the hospital.
#9
Those big brick buildings are San Francisco General Hospital. You can see all the cars in the parking lot and the crowd to one side. I took this from across the street, on Potrero Avenue.
#10
Picture of inside the emergency room waiting area. You can see it was really packed. In the corner, the guy dressed in blue, that’s a security guard who got angry at me soon after this. May you can see over by the side standing over something that doesn’t look like Kyoko but is her sleeping, I think maybe just her shoulder and maybe a leg is all that’s in the picture, but she fell right asleep in the middle of the waiting area.
Over at the corner you can see a television set, note the four people watching it and one of them is just staring off into space. You can tell his head is angled just a bit differently than the others, but you have to hold the photograph up close to your face.
I think that was the last time I saw Kyoko. Nice girl. Odd sense of humor. I can’t describe how. I guess some people who learn English but don’t speak it natively, they get caught up with one word or two that just sounds interesting to them. With Kyoko it was words like “susurrus.” She’d fit it into any conversation she could. I don’t think she even half-understood what it meant. She was just fooling around.
#11
This is Bradley and May at the Jack in the Box which was down by Bernal Heights, which is pretty far south in the city without being South San Francisco. There are a lot of warehouses and stuff there. You can’t see what May’s looking out the window at but it’s just the road, I think. There might have been a McDonald’s or something across the street, I’m not sure. But it was a pretty busy road.
Behind Bradley you can sort of see a figure that looks like someone standing in that awkward position again. But I don’t remember anyone like that when we were there so the picture probably just caught someone mid-stride.
#12