“Okay, smile! I’m gonna take it now!”
On that Sunday afternoon, the sound of a shutter clicked in the park.
Izumi Ichimura snapped a photo of her best friends, Sayuri Niiyama and Rio Komatsu, with her brand-new phone.
Izumi had always wanted her very own phone. She never could convince her parents to buy her one while she was in elementary school, but once she was in middle school and her September birthday rolled around, she finally got one.
“Now all three of us have phones!” Sayuri said to Izumi, and showed off her phone.
“That’s so great, Izumi!” Rio smiled and held hers up as well.
“Yeah, I’m so happy! Let’s take more pictures!”
Izumi was so excited to be more like her friends that she started another photo shoot.
It was evening on the same day.
Izumi was lounging around on her bed as she scrolled through the pictures she’d taken that afternoon in the park.
In all the photos, whether they were holding up peace signs, smooshing their faces together, or even making funny faces at the camera, they all looked like the best of friends.
I wanna take a whole bunch more tomorrow with them!
Izumi smiled as she started to turn off the screen.
“Huh?”
But right then, one particular photo caught her attention. In it, the three of them were smiling in front of a swing set. The time stamp said it was 1:10 PM. Izumi stood right at the center, while Sayuri was to her right and Rio was on her left. But behind them, she saw a woman she hadn’t noticed before.
The woman was standing right next to the swings, but there was something off about her.
Izumi squinted at the photo.
Then she realized the woman was a lot skinnier than should have been possible.
She was also over six and a half feet tall, but she was thin as a twig. Her hair was very long, and she wore black clothes with a black skirt. Her face was blurry, almost as if she had no features.
“Who is that?!”
Izumi tried to remember when she’d taken the photo.
We were on the swings right before we took this one…
Izumi had been taking pictures of herself while on the swings, too.
Then we all got in front of the swings to take a picture together…
She hadn’t seen anyone around back then.
Besides, she was certain she would have noticed a slender woman over six feet tall standing right behind her.
Actually, I think I took another photo after this one, too…, she remembered.
She tapped over to the photo, but the woman wasn’t in the second one.
“What’s going on?!”
Since she’d taken one picture after the other, only ten seconds had passed between them. But the woman wasn’t anywhere to be seen in that second shot.
“How could that be…?”
A shudder ran through Izumi.
“What’s wrong?”
She suddenly heard a voice from the entrance to her room.
She looked up to see her older brother, Kenji, standing there. Through the gap in the open door, he’d noticed that Izumi was frightened.
“Kenji, look at this!”