What Camera Couldn’t Save (for ink well fiction prompt week "Late to the Game")

Franklin was never first at anything. Not in school. Not in luck. Not in love. He was just a man even life never waited for him. He was a man who showed up after every door had already closed, after the applause had faded, after moments of the world that had moved on.

Still, Franklin tried. He tried hard.

At twenty-seven, he finally bought his first real camera, a secondhand Canon with a cracked viewfinder, missing lens cap, and a worn sticker on the side that read: "This device captures truth."

He believed it. Franklin always needed something to believe in. When Franklin got serious in photography, every game had changed in it. It wasn't what he was expecting.

AI-generated visuals were everywhere. Brands no longer needed people, just prompts. Models were digital. Studios were pixels. Art was speed.

But Franklin, he didn’t want to chase trends. He had always wanted to capture every truth, the kind that calloused hands lived with tear ducts. The busy streets of Lagos he wandered like a man searching for something already lost. He photographed what others walked past:

The pepper seller whose fingers were burnt from years of frying.

The mechanic’s boy napping in a rusted wheelbarrow.

A girl spinning in the rain because no one told her not to dream.

His photos didn’t go viral. They didn’t get sponsors or clients. But they felt.

And then, there was Tife.

He met her at a wedding he shot for free, just trying to get by. She wore Ankara like royalty and moved like poetry. She watched him work, then said, "You don’t just shoot faces. You shoot hearts."

They began to talk. Then laugh. Then, belong.

Tife was studying abroad but came home in spells. And every time she returned, Franklin’s world shifted. Her voice was calm. Her words, kind. She always listened to every word like the world slowed down when he spoke.

Franklin didn’t just fall in love. He collapsed into it.

He told her things he hadn’t even told himself, about being overlooked, about always being too late to matter. She didn’t flinch. She held his face once and whispered, "You are not behind. You are just becoming."

But one day, she vanished. No warning. No fight. No "we need to talk." Just silence.

Her number stopped ringing. Her socials disappeared. Her light, gone.

He thought maybe her phone was stolen. Maybe she needed space. Maybe something terrible had happened.

But time passed. And the silence grew into something cruel. Where she wasn't found in weeks which turned into months, another punch to the chest on every unanswered call.

He wasn’t just left heartbroken. He was erased. Discarded like an unfinished sentence.

Franklin searched the city for echoes, went to their café, stared at old photos, listened to voice notes on repeat until the battery died. But there were no signs. No closure. No path back.

She didn't leave any room for doubt, hope, reconsideration. The house was left in ashes all for him, so burnt down.

He stopped photographing. The camera gathered dust in the corner. The world moved in colors, but he saw only grey.

To what end did one capture beauty, he pondered, when the very essence of his life's beauty had simply walked away?

Franklin walked the roads and streets like Piper the Ghost, a movie he watched when he was a kid. Joyful moments passed him. He couldn’t lift up his lens, not even for the painful ones.

The boy dancing barefoot by a club. The woman sobbing into her hijab on a bus. He saw them. But he didn’t feel them.

Until one day, an old friend tagged him in a tweet. One of Franklin’s old portraits. Captioned:

"This is the kind of photo that breaks you quietly."

That single post cracked something open. Not a flood. Just a tear.

A gallery curator reached out. They were putting together an exhibit titled "Faces of the Forgotten." They wanted his work.

Franklin hesitated. He felt undeserving. Still wounded. Still invisible.

But he remembered Tife’s words, "You are not behind. You are just becoming." He hated her for it. But he needed it.

So he submitted the photos.

The night of the exhibit, he stood in a room full of people staring into pieces of his grief. And there, in the center, her photo. The last one he ever took of her.

Sunlight kissed her cheek. She was laughing. He hadn’t seen that smile since she vanished.

A woman stopped in front of the photo, eyes wide.

"She looks like someone who left behind a story," she said.

Franklin didn’t speak. He couldn’t. His mouth wanted to smile. His heart wanted to scream.

Outside, the world still rushed. Faster. Louder. Colder.

But Franklin had found his stillness. Not success. Not healing. Just a place to stand.

Maybe he would never understand why she left. Maybe he would always be the man who arrived after everything was over.

Franklin just stood there, his surroundings filled with raw, unframed wooden moments of heartbroken pain and sad survival he captured. His broken Fuji film camera felt six hundred kilograms heavy in his hands, a foggy and dusty reflection of his own shattered state. He looked up at the bright night glowing stars. They kept shining, oblivious to his own very world, never stopping nor waiting for him. So suddenly, his lips whispered quietly,

I will waste not and want not, nor even when I am lost in the game.

Because he knew that in the innermost deep down, that there is still an aching story to be told even with a heart torn into a million pieces.

Image generated by Ai