Brett Nelson
Exposure
“Holy shit, it worked.” Joey held the photograph up to his face, then further away, under the light. “Victor! Victor, come here!”
He tilted it, looking for imperfections. But really, there weren’t any. Hard to even believe it came from his own hands.
“What’s up?” Victor asked. Then he saw what Joey was doing and stepped eagerly into the little room. “It worked?”
Joey held the photograph up proudly. In it, Victor stood holding an ice cream cone in front of city hall. There were a few other people in the shot and the edge of it was blurred just a little from Joey’s thumb. Victor was smiling in the photo, holding up the ice cream cone like a trophy. It had cost six dollars and seventy-five cents.
Joey handed him the photo.
“Holy shit.” Victor held it close to his face and smiled.
There was the entire rest of the film roll to work through but for the moment Joey wanted to enjoy this moment, savour it. When he’d come home with the chemical medley the internet had told him he needed, Victor had complained that it would be easier to drop the roll off at London Drugs. That they didn’t need to convert a closet of their tiny apartment into a darkroom for a hobby.
But it cost almost forty bucks(!) to develop one roll of film there and with the kit he’d bought for just twenty, he’d been able to make a setup that would last for the development of at least ten rolls. His first attempt hadn’t worked, and he’d had to sacrifice that roll as a loss. But once he’d convinced a put-out Victor to fill another, Joey had studied up on the techniques and now he was holding the fruit of all that labour.
“I told you it’d be worth it,” he said.
Victor grinned up at him. His front teeth were a little crooked, like they were all leaning away from something in his mouth. “Yeah,” he said. “Totally.”
~
They’d gotten the camera at the big flea market hall on Terminal Ave. There were lots of good deals there but they started charging entry a few years back. Five bucks, unbelievably. Joey learned that if he walked in with confidence and nodded to the guys at the entrance about half the time they’d just assume he was a vendor. Sometimes he carried a box like he was carrying it to his table.
The day they’d gotten the camera he’d paid for both their entries because he didn’t want Victor thinking he was cheap and the carry-something-in-and-nod move might not work for both of them. The camera itself was an old camera that looked like an old camera. Like something out of a movie or one of Victor’s Pinterest boards. They found it on a table amid other bits of half-working mechanical items, beneath the hanging display of raincoats, pants, boots, and work clothes. Joey was tempted to grab some new boots for work but he didn’t have the cash and he wasn’t working just then.
So they got the camera instead. For forty dollars, because Victor had gone on and on about how cute it was and how cool film photography was and how the pictures came out better and how his parents had all these photo albums and he didn’t have any because people these days only took photos on their phones.
And they’d fought the night before. Joey had kissed Victor and then touched him and Victor had pushed his hand away gently and said he was tired. Joey had said that he was always tired and Victor had said that it was because he always worked and Joey had said he was trying to find work to help out and Victor had said he knew but it had gotten really tense after that and nobody spoke for the rest of the night.
“It’s hard to know if the photo’s going to be good,” Victor said the first time he pressed the shutter, got the click. “There’s nothing to look at after.”
“That can be cool, though,” Joey said. He didn’t like the disappointment in Victor’s voice, was hoping that the camera wouldn’t be like other things he’d picked up and put down without putting much time into them. The crochet needles sitting on their windowsill; the potted plants on the balcony, overgrown with little weeds and dead shoots.
~
They had to wait for the rest of the photos to develop after that first tester. A handful of minutes to develop, then the stop bath, the fixer. Joey moved the sheets between tanks with each timer. He tried to catch a glimpse of the photos as they passed through but the darkroom was, well, dark and he couldn’t yet afford to put in the safety light that the guy at the camera shop had tried to sell him along with the development kit.
They stood in the kitchen while they waited, talking about all the things they might take pictures of in the future, now that this new world had opened up for them. Victor talked about a trip to the island. To Victoria, or Salt Spring, and the pictures they could take there. Joey nodded enthusiastically, ignoring his mind as it calculated ferry costs—twenty per person, seventy-five each way for the car—and tried to encourage him instead.
They mixed up drinks using the last of what they had in the liquor cabinet over the fridge. A bit of gin and the last can of tonic water and Victor even found a lime of dubious quality in the crisper. He got a pair of half-decent wedges out of it and he slid them onto the rims of the mismatched glasses.
“We could even go to Ucluelet.” He leaned in and kissed Joey softly, then pulled back. “Or Tofino. Tofino would be cool.”
~
When the photos were dry they sat down on the couch together, Victor in Joey’s lap, and looked through them. Some were completely underexposed, minor textures in the shadows. But others turned out. Holding the photo and seeing a physical record of their existence made Joey feel like they were living their lives through something important.
“I like this one.” Victor pinched it between two fingers before Joey could move on to the next one.
It was a picture of the two of them that someone else had taken. They were standing together at the edge of a railing near the waterfront. Joey was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. Victor was wearing a t-shirt and tiny shorts.
“Huh, that’s weird,” Joey said. He tapped the photo.
“What’s weird?”
Joey tapped again. “There’s like, something here.”
Victor frowned. “I don’t see anything.”
“Really? That little smudge there? It’s almost like a dick.”
Victor laughed. “You think so? I don’t see anything. Or like, maybe a shadow or lens flare or something.”
“No, seriously. It’s right there. Next to your hip, see? It’s like—seriously, it looks like a dick or something.”
“Maybe you’ve just got dicks on your mind again, darling.”
“Seriously? It’s right there.” Joey tapped a third time.
“I think you’re tired,” Victor said. “And you’ve had a drink—”
“Just one.”
“—and maybe you’ve inhaled some chemicals.”
“I don’t think they do that.”
Victor held his face like he was trying not to laugh and glanced one more time at the photos, shook his head. “You coming to bed?”
Joey didn’t answer. He went back to the darkroom, frowning at the photograph in his hands.
~
“See? It’s not just the one.”
Victor stared bleary-eyed across the kitchen table. He had a mug of coffee in front of him—Joey’d waited at least that long before assaulting him with what he’d learned overnight.
“The little dick is in a bunch of these.” He gestured to the pile on the table. “Everything in this pile.”
Victor picked up the pile. “So, they’ve all got little smudges?”
“They’re not smudges!”
“Maybe it’s your fingerprint on the camera.”
“It’d be on all them then, and it’s not.”
He sifted through the pile while he drank his coffee. “I really don’t see it.”
Joey put his finger to one of the exposures. “Seriously? Right there. You can’t see that?”
“I guess there could be something.”
“That’s a dick! The same as in the others.”
“Yeah, maybe. Sure.”
Victor got ready for work and left without talking more about the photos. Joey tried to put them off to the side and ignore them too. He had more job applications to fill out and needed to check if any of the temp agencies needed a painter. Even a day’s work would help at this point.
Joey had just put on his jacket and was about to head to the library when he saw the pile of photos on the kitchen table. He hesitated only for a second before grabbing them. The ones without the dick, too. He grabbed them all.
~
Victor got home from work around midnight. Joey made him a mug of tea and waited until he was settled on the couch to show him.
“Look at these,” he said.
“The photos again?” Victor groaned, slumped. “Joey.”
“No, it’s different. See these?” He handed him a stack of paper. “These are the ones I showed you this morning. I scanned them on the computer at the library and re-printed them, but I brightened them up a bit first. Look at this.” He tapped the photo, where the dick had been. It all looked overexposed now—the whites washed out to flatness, artificial brightness wrestling with shadows in the corners.
And there was the dick. Amid the brightness and the washed-out colours was the unchanged greyness of a dick. Within the context of that new background, it was almost undeniable to call it anything other than an honest-to-goodness cock, floating right next to Victor’s leg.
“That—does look a little strange.” Victor shuffled the photos, looked at a few more. “No luck getting a shift today, huh?”
“And look at these,” Joey said. He handed over the rest of the re-printed photos. The ones that hadn’t had a visible blemish the night before. “These ones also have it after I brightened them up. Take a look, seriously. Nothing until I edited them on the computer and suddenly that same dick is there.”
Victor frowned at the photos. “So did you apply to anything today?”
“Yeah,” Joey lied. “There were a couple—some places looking for a painter. I’m hoping they call tomorrow. But seriously, isn’t this weird?”
“Sure, Joe. But, like, it’s probably just the camera. What else would it be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Like, do you think it’s a ghost? A—what? A cock ghost?”
“I don’t—what? A cock ghost? Really?”
“Well?”
“No, I just—I don’t know.”
“Then what?”
“I said I don’t know.”
“It’s almost definitely the camera.” He stood and kissed Joey on the cheek. “Get some sleep. Hopefully one of the places calls tomorrow.”
~
Joey was at London Drugs by the time an employee came to the front and activated the doors at eight. He walked all the way back to the photo centre and bought a roll of film with an emergency twenty-dollar bill he had stashed in an envelope his between mattress and box-spring.
He got ISO 800, double what he’d used for the last roll, because he’d read online that the higher number would increase the sensitivity to light and pick up more objects in low light. The people on Reddit warned of graininess, but Joey was past caring about quality.
He loaded the roll of film into the camera and spent the day shooting. He burned all thirty-six exposures walking around the city, trying to get a range of images. He took more pictures of City Hall; the Skytrain station; the faded shell of the old Toys R Us; an empty bar; the tree-lined neighbourhood streets broken up by bike lanes; the construction sites where they were putting in more Skytrain stations but apparently didn’t need a painter; a bookstore with baskets out front; a white-walled grocery store that felt like a hospital.
He took pictures of everything he could think of, not bothering to adjust any of the settings he’d so carefully learned the first time they’d used it. Back when he hadn’t wanted to waste any of the film they’d spent their money on together.
He walked far—far enough that the walk home at the end of the day took hours. The transit cops were at the stop and he couldn’t sneak in, so he walked the whole way. He got home with the sun still up; Victor at work until midnight again, probably. And he went to work in the dark room.
~
“You can’t tell me you’re not seeing this, now. This pattern?”
“Did you buy a new roll of film? Jesus, Joey, we’ve got to pay rent next week.”
“Okay, but will you look at these? Seriously? You’re going to deny there’s something there?”
“These are actually pretty good.”
“Sure, but look here.”
Victor hadn’t even changed out of his scrubs yet. He squinted at the images and shrugged. “Yeah, there’s definitely something there. But like I said, it’s something wrong with the camera.”
“I completely scrubbed the lens. I made sure there were no smudges or blemishes and you can see there aren’t any scratches.”
“Couldn’t there be one on the part inside? The sensor or whatever.”
“No, it’s a dick.”
“Whose dick, Joey?”
“I don’t know!”
Victor threw up his arms and laughed. “This is so, so ridiculous.”
“It’s not.”
“I’m going to shower.” He paused, then put his fingers in Joey’s belt and pulled him closer. “You wanna come? Obsess over a different dick for a while? I’m not too tired from work this time.”
Joey pulled away. “I—sorry, I’m tired.”
“Yeah, sure. Okay.”
Joey looked through all the photos again while Victor showered. There were dicks in every single one, most of them overexposed, some to pure whiteness. Others had detail, things he’d captured only to find whatever it was that existed beyond the realm of the naked eye.
That thought was a cold hand on the back of his neck. He’d been preoccupied with proving that this thing—whatever it was—existed and hadn’t thought extensively as to what it was, where it was. What exactly it was doing following him through every picture.
“I believe you,” Victor said when he came out of the shower. He sat down at the kitchen table in just his towel, wet hair dripping onto the tile. “There’s something there. I get it. I think we should put it away and not use the camera anymore.”
“You think it’s the camera?”
“I don’t know, Joey. But whatever it is, it’s not hurting us. We can just ignore it.”
Joey picked at a frayed thread on his pants. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, sure.”
~
The guy from Marketplace didn’t want to give Joey the camera for less than fifty but he got him down to forty.
“It’s an F2.” The guy said it like it should mean something. “It’s already a huge discount.”
But Joey hadn’t said anything to that, just kept holding out the two twenties, folded together between his index and middle fingers.
“Fine,” the guy had said. “You’re robbing me, but fine.”
Joey took the camera. There weren’t any transit cops at the stop, so he got on the 99 with the crush of other people going through the backdoor to avoid paying for a ticket. He rode three stops then walked two blocks to the camera shop. The film was more expensive here, but they also hung it out in the open, rather than behind alarm-protected cases like the London Drugs.
The door jingled as Joey walked inside the cramped space. Almost every inch of wall was hung with product. There was one glass case at the front where the cameras were. An old guy in a polo shirt standing behind that.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“Yeah, I—,” Joey said, scanning the wall behind the guy. “Could I get a look at that Canon behind you? The one on the shelf?”
The guy looked back to where Joey was pointing, and Joey managed to fish a roll of ISO 200 film off one of the racks beside him and drop it into his bag.
“This one?” The guy asked, pulling down the camera.
“Yeah, that’s the one.” Joey took it and pretended to heft it, peered through the viewfinder. All the things he figured he was supposed to do when he tested out a camera.
“Yeah,” he said. “I gotta get some cash, but I’ll come back?”
The guy shrugged. Joey put the camera back on the counter and left the shop, triggered the tinkling of the door once again.
~
He took pictures of everything. Some of them were the same as the pictures he’d taken with the last roll, or close enough. He took pictures of the same place at different times of the day. He took a picture of full darkness and one angled directly at the sun. He took a self-portrait. He asked people in the street if they would stop for him. Pose. When his phone rang, the Caller ID announcing the temp agency, he let it go to voicemail.
Victor was home when Joey got there but he didn’t say anything. Joey’d been hoping that he’d pick up an extra shift to try to help pay the rent so that he’d have the place to himself, but it didn’t end up mattering because Victor didn’t say anything anyway. He just sat there on their couch watching as Joey got everything ready.
He didn’t want to find what he was looking for in these photos, didn’t want to be chased by whatever was there. As Victor had said, it could be the camera. Probably was.
Painstakingly, he went through the process. He flicked on the heater to get things to temp. The developer, the stopper, the fixer. He transferred image after image onto photo paper, careful not to knock anything over as he worked in the dark. The smell of the chemicals crawled up his nostrils
He worked carefully; he wanted no mistakes, no possible way to refute whatever it was he found when he finished the process. Dick or not. The truth. That’s all he was looking for. If there was nothing there, they could blame the camera and leave it at that. He could call the agency back, go to work, go paint someone’s fence or house or the metal parts of some machine laid out on sawhorses in a ventilated room. He could don his jumpsuit and respirator and work methodically to get something to where it was supposed to be.
And if there was a dick? If it was still there?
He waited. Slowly, achingly. It wasn’t even a long time. A handful of minutes per tub. He wanted them to dry, everything to be perfect.
Eventually, they were.
He pulled down the first batch and laid them out on the kitchen table. He felt the apprehension rise up within himself as he prepared to look, the self-preserving quality of his fear crashing down upon his need to know as he leaned over the table and sought the dick within the images. He braced his hands on either side of the table and took one last look at Victor, who hadn’t bothered to look in his direction, as if something momentous weren’t happening to them right then. Joey looked down.
And saw.
Brett Nelson works and writes on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. His fiction has been longlisted for the 2026 CBC Short Story Prize, the 2026 Camel Gilmer Prize, and published in The Malahat Review and elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in Briarpatch, Current Affairs, and elsewhere. He is the prose editor of PRISM international.
