One day, Sid realized that he could see the future. It sounded absurd, even he didn't quite believe it until it had happened enough times to convince him thoroughly. He thought it was his camera. It was possessed.
He had bought the thing at a garage sale his mother had dragged him to over the summer. It was a LOMO LC-A, and he had been excited to find one that was, apparently, in perfect working condition. Or so the crochety old woman who had been sitting in a dirty lawn chair guarding the cash-box like a lion said. He didn't believe her now, because obviously, something was wrong with the camera.
The first time he had used it in September, he had taken picture of innocent things. Sid snapped shots of birds, trees, and urban degeneration. Then he had stopped by the hour photo booth and got the pictures developed. He asked the gangly teen working there where the pictures went when they were sent down the pneumatic tube. The teen said he didn't know.
Once Sid had gotten the pictures back, he was shocked to find that they were all of strange, even morbid, things, a dead dog in the street, a burning house, rain smattering on the streets, a car crash, and creepy things like that. These were obviously someone else's pictures.
So Sid marched right back to the photo booth and demanded that he get his actual pictures, all while muttering that he wasn't amused by this stupid joke, he was a serious photographer and wanted his pictures! Was that too much to ask of someone?
The teen just splayed his arms out on the counter and leaned up real close to Sid. That was closer than Sid needed to get to the kid.
"Look, little man, you're the only fuck that's been by today. Those are your pictures, and you know, you're pretty messed up, taking pictures of shit like that," he said.
"They're not mine! I took picture of birds and shit! Jesus! I'm gonna call your manager and get you fired!" Sid said loudly before storming away.
As he walked back to his house, he came across what seemed to be a stray dog. It was a golden retriever, going grey in the face. Sid checked to see if it had a collar, which it didn't. Sid petted it, since it seemed friendly. The dog started to follow him home. That made Sid feel bad, because he wasn't allowed to keep pets at his house. The landlord didn't allow it.
He tried to shoo the dog away, but it kept following him. So he just ignored it, hoping that it would, at one point, loose interest and trot away. Sid came to an intersection. He looked both ways; there were cars coming but he could make it if he ran. Just as he made it safely to he other side, he heard tires squealing and horns honking, followed by a heart breaking yelp.
Sid turned and looked; the dog had been hit by a car. The man in the car responsible looked horrified as he stepped out to go check on the poor thing. Sid was feeling pretty horrible too, the dog wouldn't have gotten hit if he had waited to cross the street, or if the thing didn't even follow him.
"Is this your dog?" the guy asked.
Sid shook his head, "I think it was a stray. It was just following me," he said.
Other cars behind them were honking, wondering why traffic wasn't moving even though the light was green. As Sid looked at the dog, he realized the scene looked familiar. He pulled the envelope containing his messed-up pictures out of his jeans pocket and looked at the first one. His stomach did a somersault.
It was a picture of the exact same golden retriever that was lying in front of him. He knew it was so because at the very upper left edge of the picture were a pair of what looked like white beetle boots. Before, he had dismissed it as part of a painted line on the street, but upon closer examination, it was, indeed, white beetle boots. Like the ones he was wearing at that very moment.
Sid bolted. The man who had hit the dog looked at him strangely, but Sid didn't care. He was far too freaked out. He ran until he arrived home, very out of breath. Then he locked himself in his room and didn't come out until his father was yelling at him that it was dinner time and he better come out and eat or he wasn't eating at all.
So he trudged his way down the stairs and into the kitchen. His father had already doled him out a plate of food, which, as always, looked unappetizing. Sid sat down at the table alone. His father was out in the living room, eating in front of the tv.
"...house fire. It is unknown what started the fire, but authorities say that the cause was electrical. No arson is suspected at the moment. Sadly, all four occupants of the house did not survive..."
Sid stiffened at the words. He thought of the other picture in the stack, the one of the burning house. Setting down his fork, he ran up to his room and got the envelope, then rifled through the pictures to find the one he wanted. Then he ran downstairs and plopped down on the couch next to his father, who merely grunted at his son's sudden appearance.
Luckily, the news was still covering the house fire. Sid looked at the picture, and then at the tv. They were eerily similar. Sid didn't want to think that they were exactly the same. Because that would mean that some weird shit was going down. Some really weird shit.
"What's that?" his father asked suddenly, startling Sid.
He hid the picture from his father's gaze. He wasn't sure if he should tell his parents just yet, for fear of them thinking that he was even crazier that usual. So Sid just shrugged and laughed and easy laugh.
"Just a picture my friend gave me," he said as he got up and slunk back to the kitchen to finish his dinner.
That night, Sid spent hours going through the pictures, cataloguing them. He found an old binder and stuck some loose-leaf paper in it. On the first page, he wrote the words "Already Happened," in neat script. He pasted the picture of the dead dog under the heading. Under the picture, he wrote the date and, to his best recollection, where he had been when it happened. Then he pasted the picture of the burning house below that, writing the date as well as where he had been (his house) and where the house was.
Sid took the rest of the pictures and pasted them on pages with titles like "People," "Animals," and "Places." He couldn't find a pattern in any of the images yet. He didn't know if he wanted to. Many of them scared him. He hoped that the two pictures were flukes, that there wasn't any sort of correlation, and none of the other images would happen. It was just some big, cosmic joke.
The next morning when he woke up for school, he absent mindedly grabbed the binder and stuffed it in his backpack. As he was out the door, his father cautioned him that he should bring an umbrella, it was going to rain. Sid shrugged it off, as the sky was perfectly clear.
He found himself occupied by the pictures. Sid was distracted all day long, thinking about the pictures and the images they contained. Even Stinky, one of the slowest kids he knew, thought that something was wrong with Sid. Sid didn't know if he wanted to try to explain things to people yet, so he shrugged his distraction off by saying he was tired, which was true, so it wasn't exactly lying.
In his very last class, Sid was gazing out the window. The sky had gown dark and the clouds looked heavy and ominous. His father had been right, not the picture, Sid told himself. He pulled out the binder again though, to look at the picture of the rain. There was hail on the pavement. Sid looked out the window again. It began to hail. Sid began to breath fast, until the teacher asked him if he was okay or if he needed to go to the nurse.
Sid said he needed to go to the nurse. Instead of going to the nurse though, he went down a squirrelled away stairwell and left the school. These were just coincidences. This meant nothing. Nothing at all.
He pulled his jacket's hood up to protect his head from the rain. As he was walking, a car moving down the street suddenly lost control and skidded right through the intersection. An SUV was going through the intersection at the same time. Sid shouted out as both collided with a horrible sound. Everything around him ground to a stand still.
Sid remembered the picture of the car crash. So he got the binder out and consulted it quickly, so it wouldn't get too wet. The cars were exactly the same, down to the make, model, colour, and even the dings and scratches. The picture happened to have one of the car's licence plates in it. Sid looked at the white car's plate. It was the same.
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This is an idea that popped into my head. Maybe there will be two or three shot.