There's a young girl who is a bit closer than everyone else. The shoulders of her dress are puffy, and the collar is white. It's a little hard to tell, but it looks as though she was staring directly at the camera when the photo was taken.
You focus in on her alone. The first and least surprising thing you feel is fear. It might just be your own, or it could be Anuja's, or it could even be the girl's.
It feels like danger, as though you were looking at a photograph taken of a predator inching its way towards its prey.
It feels like a funeral. Like deep mourning and loneliness, like a procession you don't want to be caught up in because you don't know if it will ever end.
Then it begins to feel like suffocation, and you tear your eyes away to catch your breath.
"What is it?" Anuja asks.
"Whoever these figures are," you start to say, then pause, not wanting to frighten Anuja any more than she already is. "It's a good thing you got away from them. That you didn't let them catch up to you."
Anuja shivers. "What do we do now?"
"We have to show these to the others," you tell her. "Get their opinions."
"Addy will come up with some excuse for why it isn't real," Anuja says. "They'll say it's because my camera was damaged, or that I had a nervous breakdown and made it look like that on purpose."
"Do you really think Addy won't believe you?" you ask her.
Anuja shakes her head while staring at her photographs. "I think they don't want to believe in any of it, and that makes it even harder."
"Until recently, you didn't want to believe either," you point out.
"I still don't," she says. "But I don't have much of a choice now after what happened, do I?"
She goes back to staring at the photographs, her eyes carefully scanning each page. You realize you know exactly what she's looking for, or rather, who she looking for.
"Are you hoping that your dad is in there somewhere, or that he isn't?" you ask.
"I'm not sure. Probably that he isn't, I guess," she says.
"It wasn't foggy when he went missing," you remind her.
"Yeah. I know," she says. "Just making sure. I have to, you know? If I want to sleep tonight, or ever again for that matter, I have to be sure."
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