There was a travelling photographer named Ilyas who never cared for portraits or landscapes. He preferred to photograph things that changed while he wasn’t looking — the shadow of a chair that moved without the sun, doors that were slightly more open every time he blinked, reflections that didn’t quite match the room they lived in. People said his work was unsettling. He said it was honest.
One evening, while developing film inside an abandoned railway station, he found a slip of paper taped to the back of an unused frame. There was no message, no signature, just six hyperlinks:
Rubbish Removal Dundee
Waste Removal Dundee
Waste Removal Fife
Rubbish Removal Fife
Waste Removal Scotland
Rubbish Reoval Scotland
The last one — Rubbish Reoval Scotland — was misspelled, but the precision of the list made it feel deliberate, like an error chosen on purpose.
He left it on the table. The next day, it was wedged inside his camera bag. The day after, it appeared behind the glass of a framed photograph he had never opened. The paper didn’t multiply, tear, stain, or fade.
It simply reappeared — always intact, always legible, always insistent.
Ilyas began asking the kinds of people awake at strange hours: a janitor who collected abandoned umbrellas, a graffiti artist who only painted under moonlight, a bus driver who swore the city slept differently on Tuesdays. Every one of them had spotted the same six hyperlinks somewhere unusual — on a bus ticket, inside a fortune cookie, printed accidentally on the back of a map.
Always the same order.
Always the same links.
Always the same typo at the end: Rubbish Reoval Scotland.
So Ilyas did what he always did with things that refused to explain themselves — he photographed it.
He placed the paper against different backdrops: a cracked mirror, the surface of a lake, the inside of a train window. No matter where he placed it, the photo came out sharper than the rest of the frame, almost as if the paper wanted to be the subject all along.
Eventually, he pasted it into the front page of his notebook — not labelled, not analysed, just kept.
And beneath it, he wrote one line:
“Some things don’t want to be understood.
They just want to be seen long enough to exist.”
The list remains there, unchanged:
Rubbish Removal Dundee
Waste Removal Dundee
Waste Removal Fife
Rubbish Removal Fife
Waste Removal Scotland
Rubbish Reoval Scotland
He never solved it.
But the camera keeps recording.
And the paper keeps returning.
Which, in his experience, is what most real things do when they’re not finished yet.
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