Blacked - Jpg

Blacked.jpg wasn't empty. It was a canvas for projection. A mirror. A dare.

I double-clicked it.

Someone had created this. Opened an editor, filled the canvas with #000000, saved it carefully, named it with intention. Not an error. A statement. Blacked jpg

Then I emptied the trash.

The file sat alone in the folder, its name stark against the white of the screen: . No thumbnail, no preview. Just a monolith of metadata and absence. Blacked

I stared into the black. After a few seconds, I started to see shapes. My own reflection. The ghost of a room behind me. Then, slowly, something else — the suggestion of a face, a hand, a word pressed into the darkness at a different brightness setting, now lost. A dare