The shot was almost perfect. Just needed something, another bright color in a corner to balance the composition, or a small adjustment to the lighting.
“You ready?” Hen asked me.
Almost. I grabbed a bowl of Red Hots from the craft table and skipped quickly over to the back of the set, in front of the muslin backdrop.
“It’ll be screened in later,” Hen said.
I huffed. People were too lazy these days about their setups. Of course I could edit in another bowl of candy if I wanted. “The glow doesn’t come through right,” I said.
“You’re ok with the green screen though?” Hen gestured at the muslin.
“Oh yes of course. But objects are different,” I said. I moved the bowl over a few inches, until the light through its geometric glass refracted into triangles on the shaggy rug. I laid down so the light would fall over my face and twisted my torso so my hip peeked between my shirt and my jeans. I closed my eyes, “ready,” I said.
I heard the clicks of Hen’s phone while I wriggled and flowed. I was told the best models never stop moving. They slowly evolve from one pose into the next, like lava, molten and powerful. I imagined myself as a hot liquid metal, arching my back and smoldering.
“Good,” Hen said, “now something more active.”
I opened my eyes and looked directly into the camera, tightening my mouth into a snarl and turning to crawl, gripping the carpet’s shag in my angry claws.
“Great,” Hen said, “I think we got it.”
“Wait,” I said. “I think they’re getting bored. Let’s give them something new.” I crawled over to the bowl of Red Hots. “Look,” I said, and laid down on my back and poured them from the bowl onto my stomach. I picked one up and held it between my front teeth, snarling my lips around it and closing my eyes into a dim flutter of eyelashes.
“Oh, wow, yeah,” Hen said, she picked up her phone and I heard the clicking of her camera again.
I loved when I could impress her. She’d been doing this so long, I was lucky even to book her at all.
The market for Life Directors had blown up and therefore thinned out, and now the real ones got lost in the fray. You really had to do your research to find someone who wasn’t just any random with a phone and a website they built. There were no real qualifications, not on paper. So it wasn’t as clear as how to choose your lawyer or your doctor or even your mechanic or hairstylist. People weren’t leaving public reviews like for restaurants or schools.
You had to get involved in whisper networks. And in order to get involved in those you had to prove you were a serious part of the industry first. So it had taken me years to get here, with Hen, setting up a real shoot. I had to get it right.
“Bite down,” Hen said.
I bit into the Red Hot. I tried to show the spicy and sweetness on my face.
“Great,” said Hen. “I’ll upload later once I’ve chosen the right scenes for you. Some anomalies lately in your analytics, so might be time for a new world.”
“Got it,” I said. “I trust your sense.” I did. I’d been getting it mostly wrong for years. First with the whole boat motif disaster. Then the series where I tried the landscapes of all the settled moons. Then the failed forays into re-renaissance looks from the new guard of neural networks the gamma kids had been using. Nothing felt true, real, authentic. Plus it’s hard to tell what’ll hit. So I had to trust Hen. Or my ratings would fail and I certainly wouldn’t be booking externals.
When I got home I couldn’t do anything but obsess. I must’ve hit refresh on my site a hundred times before I finally saw it. Finally. After I’d already made my tea for the night and finished my entire, very meticulous, skincare routine. But I checked again, once more I promised myself, from my phone before I put on the sound machine and turned off the salt lamps. I sat in my bed and hit the spinny icon to make the page reload again.
There it was. A new upload from Hen.
And there I was, laid out on the shaggy carpet, covered in red candy with a look of heat and sweetness on my face. Perfect. And then I saw where Hen had put me. Where my life had been placed. Somewhere hot, tropical? Or celestial?
My heart fell. It wasn’t somewhere far or strange. Just a boring living room. With a couch behind me and houseplants and a bookshelf.
Is this what I’d hired her for? Spent all my extras? Hung all my hopes? To put me in a fucking living room. I could’ve taken this picture myself. In real life. In my actual fucking living room.
Super celebrated and coveted Life Director Henrietta Fowl, “master of the birds,” social media extraordinaire and guarantor of positive life paths had observed, carefully, all of my analytics and made this fucking call?
“…” I texted.
“Do you like it?” She texted. “Genius right?”
I called.
“What the fuck?” I said.
“You’re a brand already,” she said. “I don’t have to put you somewhere exciting.”
She couldn’t have meant my beauty. I was pretty, but not rare. “I’m nothing special,” I said.
“Not you,” said Hen. “The objects. You’re the only model taking pictures touching real things. Holding them, tasting them, swimming in them.”
“The candy,” I said. Of course other models wouldn’t touch the candy. Why taste a real Red Hot when you could have your director edit in a magical candy from another realm?
“We’ll make a fortune,” Hen said.
I closed my phone and then closed my eyes and felt safe. I’d make a fortune.
DANA JAYE CADMAN iis an Assistant Professor and Director of Creative Writing for Pace University Pleasantville, and holds an MFA from Rutgers-Newark. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Southeast Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, New England Review, PRISM international, Raleigh Review, Atlanta Review, North American Review, The Glacier Journal, Vassar Review, Pigeon Pages, Third Coast Magazine, and elsewhere. Find her on danajaye.com.
The art that appears alongside this piece is by GRANT RAUN.
