The Last Frame

Three autumns ago, I drove with my friends to an open-air music festival at the old fairgrounds outside Millbrook. The air was crisp, the kind of cool that makes you feel alive, and we were all buzzing with excitement. Somewhere between the highway and the venue, we realized we’d forgotten a camera. So we pulled into a dusty gas station, its neon sign flickering like a dying star, and bought a pack of cheap disposables.

At the fairgrounds, we clicked away—blurry shots of us laughing, arms around shoulders, the stage lights glaring behind us. The night was filled with music and the smell of popcorn, and the chill in the air only added to the magic. After the last encore, we piled into my friend’s pickup, and the girls, giggling, posed in the truck bed under the parking lot lights. I snapped a few frames, the flash illuminating their smiles, and then we drove home, the city lights fading behind us.

Two weeks later, my friend Lena picked up the developed photos from the drugstore. I waited in the car, fiddling with the radio, when she returned with a thick envelope. She handed it to me, and I began flipping through the glossy prints. Most were the usual—the concert, silly faces, the truck bed shots. But as I reached the last photo, my breath caught.

The picture was supposed to show the four of us in the parking lot, but instead, it showed something else. Our bodies were there, frozen mid-laugh, but our faces were wrong. Their features were stretched, distorted, like melting wax, and their smiles had twisted into gaping, silent screams. In the background, behind the truck, a dark figure stood—tall, faceless, its head tilted as if examining us. And in the corner of the frame, a date stamp read: ‘SEP 14, 2027’—three years in the future.

I dropped the photo, my hands shaking. Lena looked over, her expression shifting from curiosity to horror as she picked it up. ‘What the hell is this?’ she whispered. I turned to her, but her face—for a split second—mirrored the distortion in the picture. Then she blinked, and it was gone.

We didn’t speak on the drive home. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching us, that the figure in the photo was real, and that the date was a warning. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept staring at the picture, hoping it would change, but it only seemed to grow darker, the figure closer.

The next day, I tried to call Lena, but her phone rang endlessly. When I drove to her apartment, the door was unlocked. Inside, the walls were covered with identical copies of that photo, all taped up, all with the same date scratched over and over. On her kitchen table lay a disposable camera, its counter showing ‘1’—one exposure left. And taped to the fridge was a note in Lena’s handwriting: ‘I have to go back. I have to take the last one.’

I never saw Lena again. The police found her car abandoned at the fairgrounds, the engine still running, the radio playing static. The camera was on the passenger seat, and when they developed the film, the last frame showed Lena standing alone in the empty parking lot, her face contorted in that same silent scream, and behind her, the dark figure, now closer, its hand reaching toward her shoulder.

I kept the original photo, the one from that night. It’s the last one I took, and I’ve locked it in a safety deposit box, facedown, because I can’t bear to look at it. But sometimes, in the quiet of my apartment, I hear a faint click, like a shutter closing, and I know the date is approaching again. And I wonder if, when it comes, I’ll be the one in the frame.