The Missing Face
He always had the craziest stories.
The five of us met at a bar and got into the habit of drinking together once every fortnight. Not drunk-out-of-our-minds kind, but just enough to curse freely at everything and everyone in our lives. Never shared any real names.
A business consultant, a PhD doctoral candidate, a mid-level corporate employee, a professional photographer and a freelance writer walked into a bar … sike! Nothing happened, they just talked.
One day, this crazy-story dude, whom we called Jerry because he called his boss Tom, presented to us a unique problem of his.
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“I don’t know why it happens … but it does, and it freaks me out, so I’ve stopped trying to check if it works anymore.” He paused, took a sip of his beer, and continued, “When I take selfies, I am never there in those pictures.” He essentially whispered the words. “I can see myself on the screen right before I click, and then in the saved picture, nothing — just the background.”
Only the lightweight amongst us gasped — Banana. Nicknamed so for various reasons, but we don’t need to get into that here. Banana had sneaked a long sip from my drink tonight and could not keep it straight since. The well-read, scholarly idiot.
The rest of us rolled our eyes. Jerry challenged us to check it for ourselves. So sure, we whipped out our phones, took a photo of him. There he was, flushed, looking stupid, on each of our screens.
Then he took selfies on our phones. We checked again. No sign of his grinning face anywhere. Just the backdrop of the bar. We could not believe it! We kept swiping between the photos over and over again. Not even a strand of his hair on the ones he snapped.
“Hey, take one from your phone again,” Jasmine said suddenly. She got off her chair and told him to wait before he pressed the button. She tilted his wrist a little, held his phone steady and gave the signal to go ahead. Click!
His skeptical face, finally, made it on there!
