Polaroid

 Going through my dead grandma’s attic, I found an old instant camera that instantly prints out the picture after you take it. Wondering if it worked, I took a picture of the lamp next to me. After I took the picture, it instantly began printing out of the front. I was spooked as I looked at the picture that had printed. The picture showed the lamp on the ground, broken, when it was clearly still on the table, in perfect condition. 

Still baffled how the camera had done that a minute later, I jumped as the wind violently jerked the small attic window open. As I jumped, I kicked out the legs of the table, the lamp was resting on. I stared at the lamp on the ground. Then at the picture. It was a perfect match. 

I spent the rest of the afternoon obsessing over the camera and its amazing ability. Most of the time things would remain unmoved in the picture, since nothing would happen to it in the one minute time span. But whenever something did end up moving, the camera predicted correctly. 

I turned on the old television. I took a picture of it with my camera. As it printed out, I realised it showed the TV turned off and the room completely dark. After about forty seconds, nothing happened, which left me upset. But approximately one minute after the picture printed, the TV as well as the lights shut off. I yelled down to my grandfather what had happened. My grandfather said the power had gone out. 

I looked out the window. The trees were blowing everywhere. Wondering if any of them would break and hit the house, I leaned out the window and took a picture of the trees. 

As it printed out, I was horrified. The trees were all still in place, but the outline of a corpse could be seen on the ground. I walked over to the window to see if the outline was already there. Perhaps it wasn’t actually a corpse but just the bushes. As I went to look out the window, I stepped on an old toy car and fell through the window head first.

Falling through the air, I did half of a front flip, and I landed on my legs. I felt a sharp pain shoot up on my legs. I began writhing on the ground. After a few minutes, the pain had become less intense as I was overcome with relief. I was not dead. The picture merely showed my alive body, on the ground. 

After walking inside and extreme explanations to my grandfather, my mom had come to pick him up. At home, I kept the camera a secret, obsessing over it in my room, but not even mentioning it to the closet of my friends. I soon realised the more I used it, the further in the future it would predict. 

15 at the time I found it in his grandmothers attic, I was now 18, and the camera could now predict days in the future. After graduating high school, I moved to New York city to make my fortune. 

I realised that at the end of every week, the large TV screen at Times Square would show the weekly lottery numbers. I simply took a picture of the giant TV square three days before the numbers were picked, looked at the numbers displayed in the photograph, went to the drugstore and bought that ticket. Three days later I was a quarter million dollars richer. 

To avoid any suspicion of winning the lottery twice, I moved to Chicago. They also showed their weekly lottery winners on a large TV screen in the middle of the city. After winning their lottery, I continued my habit of moving from city to city in order to win their local lotteries. 

After winning fourteen local lotteries, my camera could now see weeks in the future. The national lottery was coming up and I was going to make sure that I would win.

Sixteen days before, the number was to be picked, I turned on the tv, took a picture of it and the camera printed out a picture showing the number that had been picked.

I went to the grocery store and asked the man behind the counter for the number. The man told me that I must have been here an hour ago, because someone at the store had just picked that number. Depressed, I began to trudge off before the man behind the counter yelled to me and pointed at a man checking out, telling me that was the man who had bought the ticket. 

I stared at the man and he was soon done checking out. He walked out the doors of the grocery store and into the parking lot. I watched the man get into his car and as soon as the man shut the door, I raced to my own car, started it, and began to follow the, and who had bought the ticket. 

I followed the man for twenty minutes, until he reached his home. The man got out if his car, and walked into his house. As he closed the door, I slowly drove past until I reached a local bakery parking lot. I parked at the bakery, the jogged back to the man’s house. 

It was 6:00 then. I planned to wait until ten to break into the man’s house. I had my flashlight, and a pocket knife handy, in case the robbery went wrong.

I spent the four hours creeping from window to window, trying to see where the man had put the ticket. After four hours had past and I still couldn’t find the location of the ticket, I decided to just look for it inside. 

When I was creeping around the house, I had noticed that the man’s kitchen window was left open. I snuck up to the window, and had used his pocket knife to cut open the screen. When I finished cutting it, I climbed through the window, and into the house. 

I tuned on the flashlight and began looking for the ticket. I searched throughout the kitchen table, in the man’s dining room and in the open bedroom. Soon overcome with rage that I could not find the ticket, I searched harder and harder. 

Then, I heard footsteps coming from the man’s bedroom. Fearing that the man would find me, I hid under the bed in the empty room. I listened as the man walked in the room, looked around, and walked back out. 

I waited until I was sure the man was asleep, then got out from under the bed, and began searching again. I quickly became angry that I could not find it. I marched into the man’s room, ran up to his bed where he was lying asleep and screamed in his face, “Where is the ticket?”

The man woke up screaming. “Where is the ticket?”, I repeated. The man, still screaming, asked him, what ticket. “4236-9306-0015”, I said. The man looked confused so I shouted, “The lottery ticket.” The man was still screaming when he pulled it out of his pocket and gave it to me.

I began to walk away when I became angry again. He had taken my ticket, the ticket that was supposed to be mine. Why would I let him run free, risking getting caught. 

I turned back around, towards him. His screams that had just began to die down began starting again. “You took my ticket”, I whispered to him. “MINE”, I screamed as I pulled out the pocket knife. I tore the knife open and stabbed it into his eye. Blood shot out from his eye, and I stabbed it again and again. 

Then, ready to end his life, I brought the knife up to his throat, and dragged it across, slitting his throat. I realised that I had gotten blood all over me. I was about to take a shower in his shower before I realised that the police could get my fingerprints if I did. Instead, I crawled back out of the window. 

As I began walking back to the car, I heard sirens and I realised how loud I had been. I began sprinting back to my car. I was about half a mile away and the police cars were approaching quickly. As I was almost back to my car, I started thinking about what I had just done. I had taken a human being’s life, for money. But it was my money. But he had gotten it first. But I… A police car pulled up in front of me. The officer could get out of his car, I fainted. 

I woke up in a cell. I was being convicted of murder. I didn’t bother hiring a lawyer, since I stood no chance in court. They gave me their lawyer, and he convoked the, that I was insane. But I wasn’t. 

So I ended up in an insane asylum. They didn’t have much there but they did have Tv’s. So I could see that the winning lottery number was not, in fact 4236-9306-0015, but was 5930-0288-9672. The camera had lied about the winning number. IT LIED. Then, when I thought back, I realised the camera was trying to kill me. Showing me the corpse on the ground that made fall out the windup, telling me the wrong number. 

YOU LIED. YOU KILLED ME. YOU KILLED HIM. I’LL KILL YOU.”

The guard at the insane asylum finished reading then depth suicide note, then looked back at the corpse hanging from his shoelaces that he had tied around his neck. He had to be careful of who he put on suicide watch, he thought to himself.