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It’s a shoddy thing, this headstone they stumble across. One single, wide plank of wood nailed into unblemished earth. No grave, no bodies presumably. But there’s etchings in the oak. With a gloved hand, Glenn grazes the face of the monument, brushing away the grime. He expects a name, a title, a trace of humanity. He receieves something else.
Here lie the spirits of those we had to burn.
Maggie startles him, appearing suddenly like a wraith at his shoulder. She hums and Glenn knows she’s in a contemplative, quiet mood today. “Well, Daddy always said a graveyard’s the home of spirits."
Glenn laughs. Spirits are lucky to have a home, he thinks: he’s been stumbling all over the place to find his. The moment passes, though, and it isn’t until they’re inside the adjacent building — a cramped shack, poorly assembled — that he thinks to reel back his statement.
Maggie works on sliding the boxes out from under the bed in the corner of the room as he approaches a slim, dark-wood desk. It looks hand-crafted, one of its legs shorter than the other, and something about that makes Glenn’s heart seize for just a moment. He pulls open a drawer tentatively as if a walker might leap out of it, all gnashing teeth and grabbing nails. Nothing like that happens.
Mints. Glasses case. Smashed camera.
He brushes all else aside and lifts up the camera, winding its twine strap around his fingers — another thing born from another man’s hands, probably. Fur-like dust lines its every flat surface and fills every dip and crevice. Glenn’s never seen this camera before, but it feels familiar in his hands. The weight of it is like a memory. And it strikes him.
Maybe he has a home too.
At the farm, he felt an intruder in someone else’s comfort. Even as he began to spend more time in the Greene living room than Dale’s RV, there was still a gulf between him and them. He was a stranger still. Yet not even in the field with the rest of them was home; all that talk from Lori and Carol and anyone else — “We could make something here. It could be home.” — just didn’t feel right to him. Felt like two odd pieces not quite clicking together, uneven and strange. But when Maggie told him she loved him, it was as if her words shaved those two pieces down near perfectly. She planted the seeds.
At the prison, he and Maggie often made a haphazard bed on the watchtower after long nights. They tucked themselves under a blanket — all bulk and messy lumps, crocheted by Carol with whatever scraps of yarn anyone kind enough could scavenge for her — and they used their rolled-up jackets as pillowcases, tucking the teeth of the zippers underneath so as not to catch them against their faces. They had no purpose until they did and suddenly there was a garden and people to provide for and they could have made something there too. But it still wouldn’t have been home.
Neither of those places could have been home, Glenn realises. They had it’s bones, its muscles and tendons, but none of the heart.
It wasn’t until that camera that he’d known where the heart was. Only four slices of film were scattered next to it when he’d found it and that was far too much responsibility. He’d asked Michonne to be on the lookout but not to go out of her way — Daryl too — but they never found any. So after weeks of deliberation, he decided on one rule: shoot only the important stuff. And this was the important stuff:
- Maggie drowsily suspended between sleep and consciousness, one curious eye cracked open and scrutinising the camera.
- Maggie replanting a tomato vine on a soggy, grey day, swiping one muddied finger across her equally muddy face.
- Maggie in a tank top laying on the ground. The exposed skin of her back melts into hot concrete. One of her hands is thrown over her eyes as the sun and the shade war for territory on her skin.
- Maggie with her hair splayed out on the pillow. Her tired eyes are lively despite, and she’s grinning and she’s pretty — she’s so pretty. Her skin is bare and clean and tanned. She gleams against the dark and yellowish lanternlight of the cell.
And there were things he could have captured, but didn’t:
- Maggie half-bending over, hands clutching at her knees for stability, toned arms and grimy shirt splattered with black blood and flecks of guts.
- Maggie lodging her knife into the eye of a walker through a square cavity in the fence. Her teeth are bared in a near-snarl. She could bite back.
- Maggie swarming an armed group with only stained riot gear and a gun, yelling and screaming and terrified and thrilled in quick succession.
- Maggie blurry at the edges, the shape of her hair like water and her face screwed up all hanging above him, bearing down like a bird or an axe. She’s breathless and something wet is dripping onto the camera and her lips can barely form around the words ‘breathe, breathe’.
And Glenn wasn’t trying to lie to himself, wasn’t pretending like things were normal. He knew then and be still knows now that they aren’t a young, fresh-faced couple with a house on a mortgage and a beautiful garden in a world where the dead stay dead and the living stay living unless they have to go. No, Glenn’s never been the type to deceieve.
He knows now. He was only making sure he would always remember home.
He’s not a photographer by any means, though he did take a free class on it in college. (It took him thirty minutes to sidle away after it became apparent he was the only one there with legitimately no experience — why sign up for a beginner’s class when you’re already talking about composition and colour theory?) But he knows well enough that you’re not supposed to capture the average and the everyday. Why waste film on a walker when he could march right down to the gates and see about twenty drooling and moaning, all stacked up and waiting for their next meal?
Instead, according to experts, you have to take pictures of the unique, the compelling, the extraordinary. The people and the places and the moments that make you feel good; the ones you might never see again, the ones you might miss if you never saw again. And that’s kind of like home, isn’t it?
Glenn doesn’t want to have a forever reminder that Maggie is alive in this world where being alive puts you at risk every single day. That weight already rests against him, and he’s learned to live with it not by making his peace but burying it deep. He gets through by holding onto snatches of joy and comfort and seizing them wherever he can find them, scrambling around wildly for them at times, like when he used to drop his Pokemon cards as a boy and he had to scutter about on the floor to pick them all back up again. A picture of Maggie streaked with blood is like a hand reaching into the place where all his anger is coiled, all his misery, all his this is so unfair I just want her to be safe and okay and without a gun and a knife and blood and guts for one day, just give her one fucking day please. A hand reaching in and tugging it all free, an unending and bloody dam.
So snapshots of Maggie tucked up in happiness are much more worthy of that film; fleeting moments of normality, a reminder that not every moment spent alive on this hell of an earth is violent and terrifying, even if it should be. A reminder that Glenn has a home. Like a bird finally coming to repose at its habitat, he’s made a home in Maggie.