This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Verastahl on 2024-11-27 02:43:27+00:00.

Lots of people collect things. My Aunt Vivian used to joke that she collected people. She’d always done it since I could remember—rolling along next to me as we went on one of our outings, she would always have a Polaroid camera dangling from a strap around her neck like a 90s kid’s idea of an old-fashioned reporter. Not that I thought about it back then—she’d always had it, and she didn’t use it all the time, just when she ran across certain people. I asked her once what made her decide who to take pictures of, and at first she just gave me her beautiful, mysterious smile. She was twenty years older than me, but she looked much younger when she smiled like that.

Laughing, she held up the camera like she was going to take my picture. “I just look for those people that are extra shiny to me.” She lowered it again without snapping as her smile faded a little.

“Why don’t you take a picture of me then? Aren’t I shiny?” I had injected a bit of fake hurt into my voice—at least I thought it was fake.

Gripping the wheels of her chair, she turned and started heading across the food court where we’d just eaten lunch. “You’re plenty shiny, sure. But I already have you, don’t I?”

Running to catch up with her, I put my hands gently on the chair’s handles without really adding any push. “Sure, Viv. Sure.”

She glanced back at me with a grin. “That’s what I thought.”

She had hundreds of photos, all organized in albums by some organizational scheme that I didn’t understand. Maybe it was alphabetical—after all, she never took someone’s photo without asking permission and getting their name. The few times when I was really young that I’d suggested someone or something for her to take a picture of, she’d almost always politely refused. No pictures of squirrels or dogs or trees, and no pictures of people unless they met Vivian’s “shiny” criteria and they agreed to be taken.

Stacks and stacks of albums of strangers, some shy or awkward or even annoyed, though many were smiling, happy to oblige the pretty woman in the wheelchair that thought they were worthy of her time and film. When I was in high school they filled a bookshelf, and by the time I graduated college she’d devoted a walk-in closet to four larger shelves, all low enough that she could reach every book easily.

That ease of use was a necessity, though I didn’t figure that out until I was a bit older. I lived a few hours away by that point, and while I still saw Aunt Viv at most big holidays and birthdays, I couldn’t deny that she felt more remote now. Growing up we’d spent whole weeks together, just the two of us, and I missed that closeness, that friendship. Maybe that’s why I went to see her on the spur of the moment, thinking it would be nice to get away from my graduate work and a good surprise to visit her without a particular reason.

I had to ring her doorbell several times before I got an answer, and when I did, I let out a small, involuntary gasp before putting my bag down and crouching next to Vivian.

“What…are you sick?”

She gave me a wan smile that seemed to painfully stretch her dry, cracked lips. Those lips were too pale, but everything about her seemed pale and fragile in that moment. Everything but her eyes, that still danced with the same bright life and intelligence behind heavy, bruised-looking eyelids.

“A little, maybe. Overtired, mainly. Been working on a project I do every few months and it’s just…well, it’s taken more out of me this time than usual.”

Standing up, I grabbed my bag and walked in at her waving invitation. “Do you need to go to a doctor or something?”

She laughed, but it was strained and thin. “No, nothing like that. I’ll be right as rain soon enough.”

I’d never known Viv to lie to me, but I didn’t believe her then. Something was really wrong, and she was too stubborn or private to tell me about it. That was her right, of course, but that fact didn’t help me worry less. Giving her a smile I didn’t feel, I nodded.

“Okay, if you say so. But at least let me help with whatever you’re doing, okay? Just tell me what to do and I can do it while you rest.”

It felt like she considered my offer for a very long time. It was probably less than ten seconds, but things seemed to stretch out forever as I waited awkwardly for her to reject my help.

“Okay. I can trust you with it. Follow me.” Her expression didn’t change during this—just closed and neutral as she wheeled off toward the back of the house with me close behind. I wasn’t surprised when she led me to her picture closet, but then I saw the interior of the room.

There were twice as many shelves now, and while some were empty, the filled space had clearly been growing at an increasing rate. On the far end of the middle shelves I noticed a small stack of albums that were on a short table there. What was she doing with them?

As if reading my thoughts, she answered right away. “Pruning. I only keep photos of people while they’re alive. It’s a custom I have. When I first started, I’d have to rely on newspapers and various paid services to find out when someone in my books passed. But since the internet got big, it’s much easier.” Vivian chuckled. “Still time consuming, of course. It takes way more time as I collect more people, and the longer I do it, the more likely that people will die.” She shrugged. “Still, it must be done.”

I stared at her. Why? Why did it need to be done? It sounded boring and tedious, and what difference did it make? I wanted to ask her, but I held my tongue. For all her energy and interests, I knew that Vivian often had a hard and lonely life. So what if she wanted to have odd hobbies and attach weird rituals to them? Who did it hurt, and if it helped her, wasn’t it worth it?

“So what can I do? Take out pictures of dead people?”

She grinned at me. “No, I can do that part. You can do the research.”

I spent the next two days “pruning” with Viv—I think we removed over three hundred people from over 4,000 in the books, though at some point I lost count. When I left the next day, I wouldn’t say that Vivian looked like her old self, but she did seem more rested and relaxed. She also made me promise to visit more often, and when I said I would, I meant it.

Over the next two years I did visit more, and other than a joking comment here or there, I never really brought up how quickly her collection was growing. You might think she’d start running out of people in the area she lived, but she almost never took pictures there. Instead, she traveled all over—West Coast, East Coast, big cities and little towns no one has ever heard of. Looking up their obituaries and death certificates, I could have quickly accrued my own collection covering every state in the country. I asked her once why she never travelled abroad for any pictures, and she just smirked at me.

“Harder to get death information ouf-of-the-country.”

I’d paused at that, weighing whether it was a joke or serious. When her smirk broke into a grin, I returned it, going back to looking up if Ruby Holsek was still in the land of the living. There was the name, and checking it against the picture…yeah it looked like she died six months earlier in a car accident.

During these years I didn’t really see my other family that often. Christmas maybe, or when someone was very sick. My time was taken up by school primarily, and when I had free time for family, I usually spent it with Viv. Seeing her more often made it harder for me to notice her decline—harder, but not impossible. I wanted to ask her what was going on and if she was going to be okay, because for all the time I’d spent with her, I’d never fully understood what put her in that chair or kept her there.

In the end I couldn’t bring myself to ask her directly, worried that she’d get mad or depressed, or suddenly think I saw her as less of a person than a problem or the disease that put her in that position. So instead I went home and asked my mother.

For her part, she looked startled. She even paled a bit. “Why are you asking about this?”

I shrugged. “I’ve just been hanging out with Aunt Viv some. And I worry about her. She’s getting worse. Weaker.”

Lighting a cigarette, my mother nodded. “You always were close with her. Closer than I ever was. She was younger than me and your Uncle Andy. Not by a lot, but enough. Enough that she was the baby and we didn’t really want her around.” She fluttered her hand dismissively. “Not that we didn’t love her—we did. But to a couple of older kids she was just a pain, and when she got older she started getting sick. Everyone though she was going to die.”

My eyes widened. “Is that when she went into the wheelchair?”

She shook her head. “Not yet. That didn’t happen until she was a teenager. This thing she has…I don’t remember what they call it. But it burns you out fast. It starts with headaches and falling down more. Then one day maybe your feet are numb or your legs don’t work good any more. Before long you’re in a chair, then a bed, then you’re gone.” She glanced up at me with a guarded look. “At least that’s what they told us.

“It’s strange, hearing that your sister has a short shelf-life, like she’s a jug of milk or something. Me and Andy figured she’d be gone within a year of two, and we felt guilty for not hurting more at the idea of losing her. Again, it wasn’t that we didn’t love her. It was more like we couldn’t really see the real her past all the responsibility and expense and hassle. All the attent…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1h0u3c8/it_eats_them_all/