Cameraman didn t expect to see5/17/2023 I wrote a flash fiction piece about a cameraman filming an old man eating a cactus, and although the cactus eater doesn’t bleed, the cameraman does. There was something I couldn’t exactly put into words, so I started writing a story. Something was bugging me about the whole story-making process, on a personal and industry-wide level. I was also writing a now-deleted novel from the point-of-view of a Salvadoran woman in the 1970s. At the time, I also worked at a Walmart and was rediscovering my love of daytime public access in the breakroom during my lunch hour. I had a film gig (under-the-table work in set design) for something that I thought was very melodramatic but which I then learned was extremely autobiographical. HT: Where did you get the idea for this story? SD: There were a lot of smaller ideas that knotted up and turned into the first draft of this story a few years ago. So step right up, ladies and gents, boys and girls, and get ready to behold strange sights that will amaze and entertain you, in Stanley Delgado’s “Camera Man”! Q&A by Hannah Tinti This short story will make you laugh, sigh, and gasp-right until the final pages. My favorite stories are stories about storytelling, and “Camera Man” examines this theme fully with both heart and humor, questioning whose voices get to be heard, whose voices are silenced, and where to find the truth in the ever-blurring line between fact and fiction. ![]() ![]() The guests on Milagros are boiled down to their tabloid elements (Psychic Woman, Headless Man) in order to draw viewers and ratings, but once our Camera Man focuses his personal lens on each subject, the carnival sideshow tent is pulled back, revealing extraordinary life stories full of displacement, loss, struggle, and survival. Our new issue, “Camera Man” by Stanley Delgado, follows a grieving cameraman as he travels through different neighborhoods of Los Angeles, filming sensational tales for a Spanish-language television show. His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. Stanley Delgado is a graduate of New York University’s MFA program. “You two are a long way from home.” Stanley Delgado “My mother’s from El Salvador.” For some reason I said it present-tense, like she hadn’t died six months before. He had a big grin and a golden tooth under his mustache wet with saliva. They shook hands and Headless Man turned to me and said, “You are the only Latino here?” When the AD arrived, I introduced him to Headless Man as the assistant director, and the AD said, “Hola, señor”-our show was entirely in Spanish but that was all he knew. Headless Man was not headless-he had a head, just one that dangled from his neck halfway down his pectorals and made his face upside down-but that was my task: Make him look headless, at least for the commercial teasers of the show. This neighborhood would say to whoever was watching our show within a 120 mile radius: This could be happening down your street. His house was in this quiet stretch of South Central Los Angeles filled with rows of crooked palm trees under stupid and easy sunshine. You may find something truly creepy lying in the background of your favorite selfie… 15.My first job of the season was to make a man headless. You could even just go through the camera roll on your smartphone. If you have a box of old photos, you may want to go through them. This makes things even more creepy knowing that there was a strange creature present when the photo was taken, and they had no knowledge of it. These photos are taken everyday, and it’s usually not realized until the person who took the pictures looks through them after the fact. ![]() A picture of a little girl’s birthday party features a very angry demon lurking in the background. ![]() These photos feature some things you wouldn’t expect. Some of these pictures date back to when cameras were first invented, and some are taken with the latest smartphone. This is even more true with the increase of the ability to take a photo anywhere, anytime. This is a more common phenomenon than people may think. What if the pictures taken have strange things lurking in the background. Pictures are taken everyday to capture people’s memories of special events.
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