Aperture
Some crimes have witnesses. Some witnesses have excuses.
This piece of flash fiction is part of a shared writing prompt. The theme was: “You saw something you were not supposed to see. You said nothing.” The genre was dark academia.
If you wish to participate in this prompt, feel free to do so and to tag me in a Note sharing your post! I’d be happy to read you.
New England, 1976.
First weeks smell rancid. The rank of sweat on collars. The bite of ink on too-eager fingers. Rain-swollen wool coats drooping from the spine of chairs. I am new, and I sit alone—as most newcomers do. The library is tangy with life, all of it eddying around clusters of acquaintances, speaking of old summers, of faded books, of distant classes.
My cheek on my palm, I watch. I was told I was observant once, and I took it as an excuse to dissect others. I take a perverse pleasure in inventing full lives in the span of a second. A simple smile becomes a lifelong infatuation. A manly palm slamming between shoulder blades becomes a torrid exchange behind closed doors.
But when I glimpse him, it isn’t conclusions I extract, but rather…
Questions.
My cheek leaves my palm.
He moves to a lonesome backpack whose owner—a girl—has long disappeared between the shelves. He doesn’t hesitate. He unzips the leather, pulls a bundle of sheets from its depths that he fans on the table before photographing them with his Minox.
One by one, the aperture devours all in obliging clicks. It takes long. Too long.
Still, there is no pink stitching his cheeks.
No urgency in the wrist.
And when he is done, he erases the traces of his crime before exiting the library.
I say nothing. The girl is a stranger. It isn’t my place to do so.
Not even when she comes back with a book in tow.
I will come to know him as Elliot.
And her, as Victoria.
Elliot recites Baudelaire in French. He does so by standing on a chair in the middle of lit class, a hand on his chest, his black hair slicing at his jaw like an offended comma. His voice thunders—a sharp baritone—and he knows not the fever of shame or the fear of ridicule.
He smiles at all times. It’s like the rain was never cheeky with him. He smokes where it is forbidden to do so. He aces everything he touches.
Victoria is not as loud. She lives a metronomic life. Chess club, debate club, theatre, archery. She collects hobbies like coins, and it is clear she has no need for her family wealth.
Her and Elliot live out of it. Peripheral privilege that graces them only in theory never in practice—Elliot wears faded corduroy pants and Victoria’s books are used despite her driving a Bentley around.
They have seductive quirks. The kind you will remember fondly long after you stopped witnessing them.
I meet Elliot when I misquote Camus. He has the kindness not to correct me in public. But he “thought I’d like to know”. Victoria comes second, asking me to join them for lunch.
By October, we are inseparable.
We argue about everything. Movies, books, philosophy, teachings, school papers. Elliot and Victoria listen to me. They dissect me in return.
And there is no madness sweeter than being understood.
We go everywhere together: the book shop, the cinema, the library. We speak even when silence is enforced on us; we cannot stop pouring ourselves out as if we are the banquet and the world deeply hungry for each sliver of our psyche.
One night, we fall asleep together. A skewed triangle of limbs on Elliot’s carpet. And when we wake, when the turntable has turned black with artifacts, we laugh it off, chasing the morning’s indigo with old whiskey and a debate on Sartre.
The teachers have come to loop us in the same group. Our names are almost synonymous.
I spend Christmas at Elliot’s.
We fly to meet Victoria over New Year.
I don’t think about the moment in the library.
February comes. It weeps white snowdrops on tired grass. Then March with its bone-biting rains. In April, Victoria forgets her lines during the play rehearsal. She retreats into her room and doesn’t come out all day. Elliot laughs it off. We smoke Winstons behind the law faculty. We drink beer. And when Elliot’s French lilts easy from the chest, he grabs my arm, then tugs me upstairs to Victoria’s room.
He knocks. She answers with a fuss. Telling us someone submitted the same thesis on identity as construction, that the paper she has been working on for months—her best work—has been written in vain.
Elliot is devastated on her behalf. He threatens the whole school, curses like the saints don’t listen. He comforts Victoria who cries at the foot of her bed. He holds her through the storm. He squeezes her hand, saying that she will get there again.
I say nothing.
I observe.
Knowingly.
It was just notes. Ideas. And ideas, I tell myself, belong to anyone. I don’t bring up the subject with Elliot. I certainly don’t tell Victoria about the glimpse I stole of him in the library. It has to be a misunderstanding.
It has to be my tendency to fill in the gaps, to color in the blanks.
But a week later, Victoria withdraws from the honors program. She takes a leave of absence. Elliot takes care of everything—her lease, her affairs, her goodbyes.
And she is gone.
I don’t avoid Elliot. I fall deeper into his orbit. I buy my own packs of Winstons. We go to the cinema to strip the movie down to its innermost lies. One night, we drink liquor in a deserted amphitheatre. Elliot climbs onto the teacher’s desk in his drunken brazenness, and he says something about people curating different versions of themselves for different audiences. He argues no authentic self exists outside of performance.
And I still in my seat.
He recites sentences that I know aren’t his own.
Tests conclusions that I know were Victoria’s.
I don’t ask him about the photographs he took.
It is not my place to do so.
May peaks before Victoria comes back. By then the campus is poisoned by the spice of lilacs, the bite of trawling ivy. Bicycles grow from people’s loins. Summer looms heavy once again. The exams and thesis defenses along with it.
Elliot welcomes her as if nothing happened. Our friendship, I am convinced, will outlast the school break’s long absence.
Victoria is quieter, but steadier. Rebuilt. She tells us she is working on something else, a different angle. Elliot smiles. He pats the blanket stretched on the grass and she sits. He asks questions about her new thesis. Victoria’s argument is shaky, incomplete. But Elliot congratulates her on the new angle. He deceives in the breeze. Nudges her closer to him like a proud big brother. He gives her new arguments.
She thanks him for the new angle.
And I realize that it was never about the paper. He didn’t just take her work, he kiss-fed her blunted ideas.
I smoke my guilt by pulling on my cigarette harder.
The exams come. They go. We drink ourselves stupid in Elliot’s room, the heat dwelling in pleats and hidden places. The sun falls without getting back up. The air is brown in the room when Victoria asks us about our thesis defense. Elliot is particularly flighty.
So am I.
Victoria, on the other hand, recounts her arguments, she dissects them into a pulp to calm her nerves.
She defends a precarious point.
And Elliot corrects her on it.
Silence falls like a blade.
Victoria frowns.
She says nothing.
Neither do I.
Elliot refills her glass.
When she rises to open a window, he looks at me.
And he winks.
Author Notes
This piece is about complacency, the seduction of belonging and performance as identity. The narrator chooses passivity over action, and this decision is pivotal. By seeking acceptance over intellectual integrity, the narrator allows Elliot’s crime to happen and determine both his academic future and Victoria’s. I think there is an unsettling horror to seeing it all unfold. Silence becomes the murder weapon, acceptance, its corpse. And identity becomes closely tied to the performance of friendship.
I hope the lessons of this piece stay with you. Thank you so much for reading me to the end. Much love to you.
If the fiction brought you here, the essays will show you why I write it. Sharp introspection, unguarded moments, the kind of writing that's easier to publish than to keep inside.
© 2026 C.C. Harlow. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission of the author.
The psychological tension here is immaculate. You’ve drawn such a sharp contrast between Elliot’s overt, loud performative nature (standing on chairs to recite Baudelaire) and the narrator’s quiet, voyeuristic passivity. The tragic irony is that while Elliot steals Victoria's work, he is simultaneously spoon-feeding it back to her to keep her dependent on his 'intellectual rescue.' It highlights how beautifully and terrifyingly you constructed this 'skewed triangle' of friendship.
cece, i missed reading you! reading your dark and eerily seductive prose is working wonders on my european honeymoon (for anyone reading this comment; cece is best read while on a foresty train path or drinking red wine! i’ve got proof!)
this reminded me of aporia’s end in which the main character’s ability to keenly observe others, which should ideally be a gift, becomes a curse when paired with inaction and inertia. i became quickly frustrated when she didn’t say anything, but i thought the set-up was brilliant. i particularly think there’s a war on brilliant women going on (people stealing ideas from women is nothing new), and some men are finding it harder to step up to the plate, and elliot’s jealousy, resentment and inability to be authentic is clearly represented through his actions. combined with the main character, it made me think of three types of people: accomplishers (victoria), performers who resent accomplishers (elliot), and the audience of the performers (main character). your pen always depicts real life in a way that is sinister and grounding at the same time, and this is why i enjoy reading your fiction so much! as well as your vivid prose of course.
a great read!!!