Untold Stories

A Story by Alex S. Foley

In a single frame of film, what are the stories of those captured in it forever?

It was a single frame cut from some old forgotten film laying in the drawer of the old man’s desk. I came across it as I worked to clean his house out after his death. I slipped it into my shirt pocket without even thinking about it and pulled out another drawer to look for anything worth saving.

I had completely forgotten about it by the time I got home so it was a bit of a surprise as I pulled it from my pocket. I sat down with it after a quick shower and studied it, I’m not really sure why, there was just something so simple about it. It was like a stolen moment from another time when things seemed so much simpler.

Finally, I dug around looking for a way to see more details, to get a better looked at the people trapped forever in a single moment. I ended up with an old magnifying glass I had picked up when I had been into building models. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the place was Grand Central Station in New York.

The people were what drew me in, not the two in the center, everybody would focus on them, but those around them. The ones that most people would see as just background and props for the story of those two in the middle. I poured myself a drink and sat there wondering what the story of those others in the picture was, would anybody ever tell their story.

I put that single frame of film in an envelope and that into a box. Someday after I’m dead and gone somebody will be cleaning out this place and come across it. Maybe then they will write a story about the people in the image, maybe even somebody besides the central two, but I’m just an old junk collector and not some writer.