Jason thought the happiest day of his life was when Shirley's agent agreed to let him photograph her. She was a professional model and also a contortionist. The first time Jason saw her portfolio on an online listing, his imagination filled with the possibilities.
Two weeks later, Jason thought the happiest day of his life was when Shirley and her boyfriend Jack came to his studio. She was a wonderful model. Her features could weave light and shadow. He had bought a dress for the shoot, and it folded and draped in just the way he envisioned it.
Shirley wasn't amazingly beautiful, but she could shape her body into the bizarre forms that filled Jason's imagination. Jason had waited all his life for the opportunity to capture on film some of his darkest, and, to Jason, most beautiful ideas, and now they were here, in his camera, on his disk, backed up four times so that he wouldn't lose them. He paid Shirley twice what they agreed on.
Jason thought the next day was the happiest day of his life when he went through the image files. He didn't know which one to work on first. They were all so wonderful. They looked like someone else had taken them, someone infinitely more capable and visionary than he. He worked on the images, cropping them and adjusting the color balance, fading some to gray, enhancing the color in others.
The happiest day of Jason's life (at least so far) was when he talked to his friend's aunt Carla and got her to agree to let him hang some of his photos in her restaurant for a share of any sales that resulted.
The next day, Jason arrived with his photos, each one carefully printed and lovingly framed.
Carla was the first person aside from Jason to see his masterworks in their finished form.
"Good Lord," Carla shouted, "get that ugly mess out of my business! I think I'm going to be sick!"
Jason saw the images as Carla saw them, and that was the saddest day of Jason's life.
This work by Timothy H. Ruppel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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