There was warm, gentle sunlight shining in through the window as the sound of shuffling paper and the soft clicking of strands of tape being pulled from and snapped off of its container filled the room. The surroundings were quite bare barring a small table, an ordinary printer, a laptop computer, and a very large and very messy pile of photographs which were scattered about the room’s hardwood floor. A thin, curvy woman with curly orange hair dressed in a fluffy pink turtleneck sweater and jeans stood on a step stool and hung one of the photographs on the wall with tape. This was Elise Harding, and this was her workspace, and how she spent the large majority of her evenings. “Urgh…Still so many more…” She said, stepping off of the stool and giving a gloomy look to the disorganized scattering of photographs around her. She stretched out her arms out to her side, tossed back her auburn hair behind her shoulders, and sighed. “Well, I’ll continue after lunch, I guess…” She continued aloud, walking out of her home’s spare bedroom that had been turned into the base for her ‘project’.
Elise caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror that hung on a wall in her hallway on the way to the kitchen, and paused. “Jeez, when did I last sleep?” She whispered to herself, tracing the circles around her dark brown eyes. She had a pale complexion with many freckles, and stood at a proud 5‘2”. To a stranger, she would probably resemble a fairy or a Scottish princess from some fairy tale. Elise made her way into her kitchen and grabbed a fork from her silverware drawer, along with a container of leftover garden salad she’d made earlier in the week and sat at her small, round glass table, resting her head on her free hand as she took the lid off of the container and began to eat. “Sleep isn’t necessary anyway…At least not yet.”
The truth was that Elise had fallen asleep on her floor several times, though she never liked to admit it. The way that she spent countless hours printing photos, tearing tape, and putting them up on the wall was scarily methodical. She’d sleep in that spare room, eat there, and sometimes even miss days of work due to the deep focus she goes into when performing these tasks. “Elise, We’re going out to the bar later! Come with us!” her coworkers would say, or, “Elise, We need to find you a man, let’s go party tonight!” Still, every time, she would decline, just saying she needed to catch up on work, or get to bed early. She wasn’t entirely untruthful, it’s just that ‘work’ meant hanging photographs rather than managing accounting spreadsheets for her office job. Regardless, it earned her a reputation of either a layabout or a shut-in, making others think she was just incredibly lazy or simply hated going outside.
For weeks at a time, hanging photographs occupied almost all of Elise Harding’s consciousness, only finding halfhearted breaks within the monotony that helped her establish that she was still alive and, for the most part, healthy to the average observer. The photographs that Elise dedicated so much time to were also an anomaly. There was no discernible pattern among the many hundreds that littered the floor and walls of her spare room. The people within them were always different, as were the places. Some seemed to be quite recent, while others seemed incredibly aged or worn. The only static factor within the seemingly endless mountain of work was that Elise herself was in all of them - every single, last photograph. Sometimes with other people, sometimes just in the foreground of a remarkable area, like a delicate, decorative flower placed on the plate of an elaborately and magnificently cooked meal. Whatever the setting was, Elise Harding was always there.
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