Behind the Frame

Writing Challenge for Milk and Honey

The tape was labeled in my mother’s handwriting, the kind she used for grocery lists and permission slips:
“Camp 1997.”
The letters were smudged from years of handling, the ink bleeding slightly into the paper label. The sticker itself had started to curl at one corner, revealing the plastic casing beneath. It smelled faintly of the cedar chest where she kept holiday decorations, dust, mothballs, and a memory of cinnamon. The VCR gave its warm, mechanical click as it swallowed the cassette, the television screen blooming into color after a moment of static and rolling lines. I expected the usual sun-faded footage of field games and camp songs, but the opening shot surprised me. It was a picnic table. The surface was scuffed and scarred with initials carved by years of kids before us. Paper cups of orange drink sweated in the summer heat. Beyond the table, in that hazy washed-out VHS way, kids darted around the basketball court in neon shorts and scrunchies, sneakers squeaking faintly even through the low hum of the tape’s audio.

A familiar voice—probably Dad—chuckled behind the camera. “Go on, get closer. We can’t hear you back there.” The camera wobbled forward, zooming in on me at eleven years old, trying to coax a marshmallow onto a stick without tearing it. I laughed in that self-conscious way kids do when they know they’re being filmed. There was a flicker. A tiny warping in the footage, the kind that usually meant the tape needed tracking adjustment. But it was brief, barely worth noting. The image stabilized again, and in the corner of the frame, a man I didn’t recognize stood half-turned toward the camera. He wore a pale shirt and a brimmed hat, but I couldn’t make out his face—it was in shadow. I must have never noticed him before, though that wasn’t strange. People wandered in and out of the campgrounds all the time.

The footage rolled on. Someone yelled for me to hurry up; a friend popped into frame, grinning. I laughed again, looking toward the camera. Behind me, in the slightly blurred background, the man in the pale shirt stood again.

Different spot.
Same distance from me.
Same angle of his head.

The camera panned away, and he was gone.

I let the tape play without pausing, trying to drink in the little details I’d forgotten existed, the sharp click of the zoom button when Dad got overzealous, the squeal of sneakers on hot asphalt, the way the camcorder microphone caught every gust of wind as a loud, hollow whoosh. There was a shot of the arts-and-crafts tables under the pavilion, the counselors handing out jars of paste and yarn. My bunkmate Ellie—her hair in two crooked braids—leaned into the camera, sticking her tongue out before dissolving into a fit of giggles. Someone yelled, “Don’t waste the glue!” and a few kids laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world. I hadn’t thought of Ellie in years. Last I heard, she’d moved to Oregon. Maybe she had kids of her own by now. The footage skipped again, just a blink, barely enough to notice and we were in the mess hall. Plastic trays clattered, kids shouted over each other for more fries, and a counselor announced the winners of the scavenger hunt. The walls were plastered with construction-paper decorations, curling at the edges from humidity.

There, at the far end of the room, the man in the pale shirt.
Still.
Head tipped toward the camera.
His face was in shadow again, though there were fluorescent lights everywhere. I sat forward a little. It didn’t feel… important, not yet. Probably someone’s dad helping out for the week. But I didn’t remember him,and I’d been at that camp all summer.

The tape carried on: the talent show, the campfire, the shaky close-up of me burning a marshmallow completely black while pretending it was intentional. Every so often, the image would twitch, like the VCR was thinking about spitting the tape back out. Dad’s voice came from behind the camera again, soft this time, almost drowned by the fire crackle. “Go on, give us a smile.” I did. Awkward, teeth half-hidden.
From across the firepit, barely visible in the grain and static, the man in the pale shirt seemed to be smiling too.

That night, I rewound the tape.

It started again with the picnic table: the wood grain like dried riverbeds, initials carved deep enough to catch shadows, paper cups sweating orange condensation onto sun-warmed splinters. You could almost smell the heat coming off it, that baked-plastic scent of cheap vinyl tablecloths. Behind it, the basketball court shimmered in the distance. Neon shorts, white socks, the ghost of a jump shot caught mid-arc. And at the edge of the frame, a man in a pale shirt.
Still.
Watching.

The flicker came, like a breath in the tape’s throat. Then the marshmallow scene again my younger self biting it now, sugar stuck to my cheek. The man was there too, same stance, same angle of the head. A copy-and-paste human. The mess hall scene spilled onto the screen: Rows of beige plastic trays, their dull gloss reflecting the flicker of fluorescent tubes. Campers chewed with the loud enthusiasm of kids who’d been running all morning. On the wall, hand-cut letters spelled out WELCOME WEEK FOUR in faded construction paper, each “E” different, each “E” trembling slightly in the camera’s focus.

At the far end, the man again.

I told myself not to stare. I told myself to focus on the kids in the foreground, Ellie’s lopsided braid, the way my plastic fork bent when I pressed too hard into the mashed potatoes. But my eyes kept snapping back to him, like the frame was weighted on that side.

That was when I heard it — the murmur.

It was softer than the sound of trays being stacked, barely louder than the hiss of the VCR. A shape of words more than the words themselves. I rewound. Listened again.

The third time, it became clear:
Smile.

I pressed rewind again.
Smile.
Again.
Smile.
Again—
Smile. Smile. Smile. Smile.
By the seventh repetition, the word felt brittle and wrong in my head, like a hollowed-out seashell that used to mean something. The campfire scene burned across the screen, firelight licking up into the darkness. My younger self leaned into the camera with a blackened marshmallow, Dad’s laugh warm and close.

And across the fire, the man in the pale shirt. Still smiling.

The murmur returned, thicker now, like the word was swelling inside my skull.

Smile.
Smile.
Smile. Smile. Smile.
The meaning slipped from it completely, until it wasn’t even a command, just a sound the tape was making, a sound shaped like it knew me.

I paused the tape mid-frame.
The firelight froze into sharp ribbons of orange and black, the kind that make you aware VHS isn’t built for stillness. The man’s smile was harder to look at like this—static pinned it in place, exaggerated the curve of his mouth until it seemed too precise. I inched the footage forward, one click at a time. With each frame advance, the flicker of flames moved across my face, my friends’ faces, the trees. The light didn’t touch him. Not once.

I rewound. Frame by frame again.
Same result.

I adjusted the tracking, the familiar blue lines jittering up the screen before snapping back into focus. For a moment, the image warped, stretched, and in that distortion, the shadows across his face almost looked like features.

A brow.
An eye.
Something too wide where the mouth should be.

The distortion corrected itself before I could be sure.

I skipped back to the mess hall scene. Pressed pause.
There he was again, too far away for detail, but I swore the head tilt had changed since my last viewing. A little steeper. Like he was listening harder. I raised the volume. The murmur was still there. Louder now, but faint in the wrong way, as if it wasn’t recorded with the footage but layered on top of it.

Smile.
Smile.
Smile. Smile. Smile.

The repetition started to scrape something in my brain, like a spoon dragged along a ceramic plate.

Smile. Smile. Smile. Smile.
I hit rewind again.
Smile.
Rewind.
Smile.
Rewind.
Smile.

By the twelfth repeat, my eyes felt hot. The word was nothing now, just breath shaped into a sound that seemed to hang between me and the screen. Then, on the next freeze-frame, I saw it
Not in the man. Not in the shadows.
In the background, through the mess hall window, the treeline.

There was someone—something—there.
And it was wearing my face.

I didn’t remember hitting play again, but the tape had moved on. The camera was outside now, aimed at the camp’s gravel path. The sun was low, painting everything gold except the edges of the woods, where the light seemed to thin and vanish entirely.

I didn’t remember this scene.

The audio was nearly gone, just the faint hum of the VCR and a slow crunching of gravel, as though someone was walking toward the camera but never arriving. The frame stayed perfectly still. Then, at the far end of the path, the man in the pale shirt stepped into view.
He wasn’t in shadow now.
And his face—

No. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see his face.
It was that there was too much of it.

I jabbed the pause button. The image froze, but something in the corner of the frame seemed to keep moving, just enough to make my eyes doubt themselves.

I hit fast-forward.
The man blurred, his outline stretching until it almost touched the edges of the screen.

Static bloomed. The sound warped. And through it—clear now—came a voice:

“Do you remember me?”

I stopped breathing.

I rewound a few seconds. Played it again.

“Do you remember me?”
The cadence was the same every time, like a prerecorded line. But on the third replay, I noticed something: the question didn’t sound addressed to the camera.

It sounded like it was asking me.

The tape jumped, no click of the remote, no whir of the rewind. Just there one moment, gone the next.

Now it was the picnic table scene again.
The man was gone.
Everyone was gone.

Just the table.

The camera crept forward on its own, closing in on the grooves in the wood, the carved initials, the faint stains of old orange drink. The detail was too sharp for VHS, every fiber in the grain rendered in impossible clarity.

And carved into the table, where the knot in the wood had been before, were four words:

SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE

The tape clicked off.
The screen went black.

In the reflection, I thought I saw movement.
Not behind me.
In the glass itself—something leaning forward, tilting its head, trying to see me better.

Stay Weird. Love You. Mean It.

-No Apologies, Just Stories