Nightwindow blackglass and the room reduced to softblue screenlight and breathsound and the small mechanical pulse of chargingwire and she lies carefulcareful because even mattressshift requires calibration and the day has left residue in thigh and bone and thought and she tells herself sleep will file the edges smooth and sleep does not arrive and instead the phone flares white in her palm suddenwake and the light carves her face from darkness and she thinks only notification only harmless and the harmless hums faint as fencewire and she unlocks and the gallery opens mouthwide.

  Festival images scroll upward thumbflick and there she is laughing midblink and there Callum midgesture and there the stage spitting lightwhite and the crowd wavebody and the ordinary documentation of joy and she feels a strange gratitude toward these images because they confirm continuity and they say you were there you were visible you were whole and she scrolls further and further and the frames blur until one does not blur but holds and the thumb hesitates and the screen steadies and the grass is too close too detailed bladeedge against lens and she recognizes the angle before she recognizes herself.

  In the image her face is turned away not posed not smiling and the ground fills most of the frame dampgreen and her hair obscures part of her cheek and there is a shadow falling across the edge of the picture longvertical not distinct but present and she searches for context and finds none that aligns and she does not remember this shutterclick this capture this angle and the absence of memory rings louder than any bassline and she zooms and zooms and the pixels fracture and the shadow elongates and becomes almost human almost and she pulls back because the closeness distorts and distance feels safer.

  She checks the timestamp and the numbers sit wrongwrong not matching her internal clock and she counts backward through the night searching for the minute and finds a blankspace where the minute should live and she taps for metadata and the data hesitates and loads and the location marker flickers slightly off the meadow slightly displaced as if the field itself had shifted coordinates and she laughs once underbreath because surely technology misfires surely signals drift and yet the laugh is brittle and small and she scrolls back to earlier images to confirm sequence and the sequence fractures and then reseals and she cannot tell if it was always thus.

  The rabbitmask does not appear directly on the screen but flickers in the reflection over the glass earshadow superimposed on her own eyes and she tilts the phone and the ear dissolves into lampglare and she tells herself coincidence coincidence and yet the shadow in the photo remains and she imagines the hand that held the device and the silence required and the stillness of her own body in that frame and the thought lands heavy and she lowers the phone and the room returns darkdark but the image persists retinal afterprint greenblack and she feels the first outward leak of something that was contained.

  She scrolls once more as if daring the gallery to rearrange and the image sits obedient and unchanged and she considers deletion and her thumb hovers above the icon and she cannot press because deletion would imply confirmation and confirmation would solidify narrative and narrative would require speech and speech would tear open the corridoridor she has kept sealed and so she locks the screen and the darkness falls and the phone rests warm against her palm like a living thing and the hum beneath her ribs shifts into a higher frequency and she understands with a clarity that chills that whatever happened no longer belongs only to her body and the grass has found another surface on which to lie.