Stories from the Frame

Photographic Microfiction in which the image inspires the story

Written by Photographers Robert R. Burch and Alma L.L.M. Gemini

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Futile Necessity

The lovelocks choked the steel mesh at the center of the bridge, a weathered tangle trying to force the sides of a canyon to stay bound together for the sake of fleeting human passage. I looked past them, down into the dizzying vertigo where the river snaked through the floor. The water spent millions of years carving this divide only because it needs to go downhill. Yet here we stand on a temporary crossing, snapping brass shut and throwing the keys into the watery abyss to ensure we never unlock the commitments that really matter. It is a completely useless gesture that we absolutely have to do.

Curated Memory

Somehow it’s always easier to live in the watercolor sketch than the stormy one. The night my world changed, the reality was a violent, ink-black chaos of crashing waves and blinding spray, like a terrifying reminder of how fragile everything truly is. But as the months drifted into years, the mind performed its quiet, protective reimagining. It washed out the terrifying deep blues, smoothed the hazardous edges of the jagged rocks, and replaced the howling wind with a soft, pastel mist. We’re not archivists who remember things as they were but people who recall things as they want them to be. We polish memory until it is smooth enough to carry along. It’s not a lie, but a necessary survival tactic. The memories become a gentle, curated monument that hides the raw fury of what actually happened.

Commercial Hyperbole

When I moved my Coffee Break Fiction headquarters to the East Coast, it was supposed to make the whole writing process more efficient and productive. I visited the campus of Apex Horizon Enterprises to sort out my account registration, but their office park felt more ominous than inspiring. I sat on a bench in the quadrangle, watching a stream of middle-management types meander beneath a monstrous display of unapologetic commercialism. I had prompted their fancy new corporate AI engine for a simple graphic that could illustrate creative approaches to organization. But the AI machine instead delivered a towering but ridiculous monument to the humble paperclip. And right there on the quadrangle! The suits walked past it completely blind to the fact that the fancy new AI device that they had crafted was celebrating paperclips as a revolutionary approach to office efficiency!

The Split

He stood before the mirror, but he didn’t see just one reflection. Instead, his identity had fractured into a strange, two-layered suggestion of a persona. There was the heavy, dark silhouette of who he was right now. And then there was also a warm, golden echo—the vibrant persona he performed for the world. Looking at the fragments, he couldn't tell where the performance ended and the reality began. Were these competing truths? He had spent years perfecting the golden version, rehearsing its warmth until it felt almost real. But the dark one never needed rehearsing. It simply was. Who was the shadow and who was the man? Performance is private. Authenticity, if it exists at all, is what others see.

Afterword:  The images for The Split and for Futile Necessity were generated entirely by Robert while the other two were collaborations with Alma.

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