A flash. It fills the corner of his left eye. It's similar to the flash of a camera. Except it feels wrong. He doesn't like to be photographed. The flash, it's instantaneous. It's a pinprick, and then it's all around him, and then it's gone. All at the speed of three hundred million meters per second. He feels light headed from the flash. It has left a bad taste in his mouth and undiscovered colors in his eyes. Is this what it is like to be captured on film? He didn't even hear the click of the shutter. No one told him to smile, to turn, to say cheese. He hopes, at least, that the photo isn't blurry. He had been casting a spell when that unseen someone had taken the picture. He laughs at himself, and though he is sure he laughs out loud he does not hear his voice. Of course, silly, it's a wizard photo. They don't get blurry. They move. Casting a spell. He had been casting a spell. At that man … that man … that man with the … the beard. He blinks and searches for the man. But a mottled gray has crept into his vision, malicious, darkest around the edges of his irises. Like a frame. Like the frame on his father's dresser that holds onto the image of a young woman long gone, a woman he has stared at on that dresser for hours, whose smile he has carefully pinned to the film strip of his memory. The gray in his eyes soaks up the light—green and red and yellow and purple and white above him, disappear into the gray sponge—above him—he is below, sunken down, head on the ground. He can feel a surface beneath him. Cold. He opens his mouth to speak to the colors and cry out, but the gray twists around his tongue. He needs to ask the photographer about that camera. How had it reached out and with its tendril of light taken him into its depths? He isn't on that surface, he realizes. He is the surface. He is a negative in a dark room, imbued upon a moment, weightless. The gray swallows the last hint of light, and he is alone in the blackness. A woman's voice, soft and somehow familiar, brushes against him like a summer wind. My love, she whispers, and he hears the smile around her words, it's time to develop the photo.