There are pictures that make me want to write, make me want to turn one photo into ten pages. I tend to do that, for better or worse, but there’s a flash fiction story in this picture.
Look at all the details. He’s on the right side, his tie drawing the invisible line of the photographer’s Rule of Thirds. He looks tired, keeping himself awake at four in the morning with nicotine—the butts in the ashtray show this isn’t his first hour on shift and the matchbook is left untucked because he knows this won’t be his last cigarette.
Although the album came out in 1982, the cover is so slathered in the 1950s that you can taste it. The microphone is from the mid-fifties, there’s a clipboard (meaning pre-computer age) on a wall covered in old acoustic tile. He wears a tie to work even in the middle of the night (as the analog clock says), spinning a record from 1958, Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders. He’s the eponymous “nightfly” alone in his studio at the jazz station.
Even without words, we’ve got such a clearly-drawn character in this picture. There are so many branches we could take from here. Maybe he’s just a DJ. But maybe he’s announcing that an invasion force of martians are vaporizing everything in sight with their heat rays. (Oh, wait, the estate of H. G. Wells tells me that’s already been taken. My apologies.)
Maybe he’s heartbroken and works nights so he won’t be awake in the daytime to cry over his lost love. (Oh, wait, Donald Fagen already wrote that into the lyrics. My apologies.)
Okay, okay, how about this? He must get some weird calls in the middle of the night. Let’s take one of those seriously. Alien abduction? Ghost sighting? Cattle mutilation?
You pick. Take anything you want from that and write about it. Or (I hope) make up something even weirder that someone called in about. Maybe a ghost that was abducted by aliens while giving cattle mutilating tattoos and now sees religious figures in French madelines while pining away for its lost love, Daisy Buchanan Jingleheimer Schmidt.
It’s your story now. Go tell it, or feel free to leave an even crazier idea in the comments.
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