The Concavity cabinet and the Clipperton legend
just a couple overexposed meters of Clipperton, head down and hunched on a low orange bleacher, bony-shouldered, in no shirt and untied Nikes, his Gothic-scripted case in his lap, his elbows on his knees and his hands spidered across both cheeks, staring down between his feet and trying not to smile as a withered-toddler-sized and forward-listing Mario stands beside him, supported by his portable police lock, holding a light-meter and something else too halated to make out on the tape, open very wide for a homodontic laugh at something funny Clipperton has apparently just let slip.
Context
The only footage of the late Eric Clipperton that exists, on one of Himself's lens-test cartridges. Everybody else treats Clipperton with "stiffly conspicuous nonrecognition"; eight-year-old Mario — withered-toddler-sized, listing on his police lock, homodont teeth open in a laugh — is his only even remote friend. Mario's body drawn in full clinical detail in the same breath as the tenderest human contact in the legend: the deformed kid is the one who treats the untouchable like he exists.