CC 63: The Photos of the Future

Before he strangled himself in his jail cell like a tool, John Carroll asked me to do something.  He wanted me to go out to his house and pick up a shoebox that he kept in the shed out back.

            ‘But I don’t know where you live,’ I said to him.

            ‘I’ll give you the address.’

            ‘What’s in the box?’

            ‘My photos.’

            ‘Photos?  The family photos?’

            ‘The photos of the future.’

I recalled him showing me a photo album once that contained pictures sent to him from the future.  Photos of his future days.  He was a head-the-ball, but I always just went with it.

            ‘Okay, is that all you want?’

            ‘No, and The Terminator DVD, remember.’

 His cottage in Ardee was a manky keep straight out of Evil Dead.  I’m glad I didn’t have to go in.  I just went around the back, and crossed through a prickly toadstooled thicket to his shed, the door of which was lying open.  Inside I saw all kinds of things, but none of those things were corpses or torture chambers, as was projected by the current talk of the town.  Rusty old BMX bikes, previously-thought extinct games consoles, flattened cardboard boxes for snack food companies that went bust in the eighties – that’s all I saw.  I imagined a TV presenter visiting this foul shack for a nostalgia documentary.  I would have watched that documentary.  I saw the shoebox sitting on top of what looked like a wrecked HI-FI system.  There were no shoes to be found, but the photos inside the box sure did smell like feet.  I’m not sure whose feet, but it didn’t matter.  There were photos of John standing beside trees and hedges and churches.  He was always by himself.  No family members, or friends, appeared, but someone had to have taken the pictures at least, as he was always standing some distance away from the camera.  So there was someone out there somewhere in John Carroll’s life.  He wasn’t completely alone.  I wondered where that person was now.  Maybe it was their feet.  He didn’t look that much older than the age he was now, so I was even more puzzled why he believed the pictures showed him in the future. 

By the time I got back to the barracks with his shoebox of photos, John Carroll was already gone.  Dead as a doornail.  He left me with the shoebox of photos; maybe that was his intention all along.  I took it home and put it above one of the cabinets in the kitchen.  Then I watched The Terminator. 

 From there and onwards, everytime I went into the kitchen and spotted that shoebox on top of the cabinet, it pleased me knowing that John Carroll was in there, living in a future only the man himself could see.