Big Bad Rogue

Leaked Photo

  "All of them?" The guy behind the counter asked while holding my camera.

  "Yup." I nodded and stuffed my hands into my pockets.

  "It'll take about thirty minutes." He replied before writing on a tag. "What name should I put on the order?"

  "Mia Jones." I replied, watching as he scribbled down my name. Peeling the sticker tag off the sheet, he then pressed it onto an envelope and took the SD card out of the camera. Sliding the small, plastic card into the envelope, he then handed back my camera before going into the back to hand off the envelope to someone else to print.

  Sighing, I picked up my camera and took a seat in one of the chairs lining the walls. This place took photos as well as printed them, so there was a family seated across from me, waiting for their photographer to call them back.

  They were a married couple with two children, all dressed in their Sunday best, and the kids had quite an age gap. One was playing on a DS while the other was making spit bubbles and babbling gibberish. Looking away from them, I gazed out of the wall of windows to the busy street outside. Humans were walking to and fro, tending to their lives without a clue that there were other beasts among them.

  The family went back for their pictures a few minutes after I had sat down. I then waited a good while before my name was called, and the guy at the counter was holding a thick envelope full of the photographs I had taken. Standing up, I went to the counter while grabbing my wallet from my pocket.

  "Yo, these are wicked good, you know?" He commented as he scanned the barcode on the envelope. "Are you a professional?"

  "Yes, actually." I smirked and handed him my card to pay for the pictures. When he handed it back, I put it away in my wallet and put the envelope into my backpack. "Thanks." I waved over my shoulder while leaving.

  I went to find a post office, and after getting lost a few times, I finally found one and asked for a few envelopes. Dividing up my pictures into certain stacks, I put each one into a manila envelope with bubble wrap and a stamp that said FRAGILE so that my photos wouldn't get ruined on the way to the galleries.

  I didn't send all of my pictures to the same people because some of them liked certain styles of photography more than others. The gallery in France, for example, preferred my pictures of colorful things like flowers and butterflies and birds while the one in New York liked the foxes and other wildlife more. The final two galleries took my landscape pictures, loving the scenes of the forests and waterfalls or whatever happened to be on certain pack lands.

  So, all in all, there was a gallery in France, New York, London, and the last one was in Los Angeles. I couldn't remember the names of the galleries, only the people I sent the photos to, and that was good enough since they got them through the mail. They'd pay me for the ones that went on display and a percentage from the ones that were put up for sale. Because they were my photos, I got the majority percentage of the money that came in from their sales, but they were still able to make a profit off my work, so the arrangement worked for both of us.

  Licking the envelopes to close them, I cringed at the bad taste in my mouth before giving them to the mailman to put a stamp on them and ship them out. Paying for that, I was then finally able to leave the city and hit the road again. This time, for sure, that rogue was left in my dust since I drove nonstop through the rest of the day and night until the next morning when I stopped for breakfast.

  Just wandering around the countryside from gas station to gas station, I waited about a week before going to an actual town that had enough signal for a cellphone to pick up.