009 - scapula

Wendy Montiz is a superhero. A vast majority of people will never know, because her power isn't obvious on the outside. And many people, if they ever found out about her power would probably be disappointed. Wendy's power is the ability to see the complete history of any inanimate object with a simple touch.

Wendy finds herself often at auctions. It's rare to find a place with so many objects that have disjointed histories. Wendy used to take to wandering antique shops, but the only thing that she ended up discovering was that many "antiques" are anything but, and their histories only include recently rolling off some factory fabrication line.

But at the auctions she found that the objects that were on the block had histories that were anything but boring. Today, she was wandering around a random estate auction. Not even having to use her superpower, she could tell that the former possessors of these objects were very upper-class, and seemed to live a nice life. Tons of big, boring chests and dressers were seemingly never ending, piled up on messes of mirrors and expensive tableware.

Wendy was usually bored by these kind of things. They didn't have character. Rummaging through the piles, all of the sudden, hidden deep down she spied upon a camera. The camera looked uncomfortable amidst everything else that seemed to be designed to hold either food, clothes or jewelry.

Wendy's hand touched on the camera, and in an instant, she saw what it had seen. Wendy felt the camera's pain as it revisited its past. The camera was a veteran. People were usually considered veterans, but this camera had been there too, and had documented it all. Worst of all, people's memories are designed to fade away after time, but this camera had seen a million permanent images of the permanently disfigured. Wounds heal, but this camera could not see that, all it saw was the burns, the blood, and the bodies. The lens could not forget, the lens could not heal, locked in an attic for all those years after the war, there was nothing else for it.

Wendy paid $1,021.00 for the camera. It was more than she had wanted to spend, but apparently it was a collectible camera that was worth much. Wendy could not bear to see it go to yet another collector. The uncomfortable camera doesn't sit in an attic anymore, instead Wendy uses it to photograph the sun, trees, and clouds. Slowly but surely, the lens is beginning to forget. And when she senses, she feels a glimmer of hope.