Frame 0847

Mindy Carpenter knew the exact moment a shoot became right, and most of the time she could not have told you how she knew.

She was at the monitor in the back room with the lights off, scrubbing through the selects from the week's clean-label shoot, and the room had that specific Friday-evening quality where the building had mostly emptied and the work that remained was the good work, the quiet work, the part where you found out whether the thing you'd planned had actually happened. She was the creative director. The visual identity of everything the Munchies division made lived in her eye, and her eye was right often enough that people had mostly stopped arguing with her, which she experienced as both a victory and, on her lonelier days, a kind of solitude. To be right that often was to be left alone with the deciding.

She scrubbed. There - frame 0847, the product on the marble with the window light raking across it sidelong, the way she'd fought the gaffer for an hour to get. The light had done what it was supposed to do. Not beautiful, exactly; beautiful was the word clients used. The word Mindy used was right. The light had done its job. The frame told the truth about the product, which was the only thing a food image had to do and the thing ninety percent of food images failed at, prettying the thing up until it lied. This one didn't lie. She marked it.

Her phone lit up on the desk beside the keyboard.

She looked at it. She did not pick it up right away - she let it sit, face up, the notification banner across the top, and something passed across her face in the dark that the monitor light caught and that no one was there to see. It was not a long thing. A second, maybe two. The kind of micro-beat an audience would almost miss, would only catch on a second watching, the held breath of a person reading something she'd been waiting for and dreading in the same measure. Then she turned the phone face down, and she went back to the selects.

This was the part Mindy did not show anyone, would not show anyone, was actively engineering her whole week to not show anyone: that there was something outside the office, something shifting in her life in a way she hadn't named even to herself yet, and that it had begun, in small ways she was fighting to keep small, to follow her into the room. A missed detail on Tuesday she'd caught before anyone else did. A shorter temper on Wednesday she'd swallowed. And now a phone, face down on the desk, on a Friday night, with the selects still rolling.

She finished the marks. The work was good. The work was, as always, the one place she could still make come out right, and there was a comfort in that and also a danger, because a person who can only fix the fixable thing will pour herself into the fixable thing until there's nothing left for the rest.

She shut the monitor down. The room went fully dark. She picked up the phone without looking at the screen and put it in her bag, and on her way out she told herself, in the private voice everyone keeps for the lies they need, that it was a good week and everything was fine.

It was a good week. The first half of the sentence was true. She let it carry the weight of the second half, and she locked the building, and she drove home through the Dallas dark with the radio off.

This entry is part of The Marfa Munchies, a daily fiction podcast from The Marfa Strategy.

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