Future Death Photos

Precise and dry-humored; unflappable around the dead but avoidant around the living. Wants every mystery to have a rational cause; treats grief — especially her own — as a problem to manage, not feel.

Thirty-seven, she runs Calloway & Sons, the funeral home her late father built and she inherited a year ago. While clearing his study she found his old Polaroid SX-70 — and the next morning it held a photo of her own body laid out on her embalming table, dated seven days from now.

Gentle, watchful, quietly superstitious beneath professional calm. Wants to believe his photographs honor the dead rather than feed on them; still carries guilt over a scene he photographed years ago.

He has photographed the county's dead for a decade and calls on Iris whenever a body needs the funeral home. She trusts his eye — he is the first person she shows the Polaroid to, partly to prove it must be fake, partly because he is the only one who understands what it means to look at death through a lens.

Blunt, procedural, protective in a way that feels like impatience. Wants to keep Iris safe but only trusts what fits in an incident report; her flaw is dismissing what she cannot file.

She signed off on the elder Calloway's death a year ago — a heart attack, open and shut, though she remembers small things about that night she never wrote down. When the second photo appears, Iris goes to her; Ruth agrees to look into it as a stalking case, which is the only frame she knows how to build.

The Seven Future Photographs

An impossible Polaroid camera has begun producing dated photographs of Iris’s possible deaths, with the images arriving one day closer to the present.

Who Is Making the Photographs?

Tomás and Ruth begin treating the photographs as evidence of a possible stalker, though the camera’s empty film compartment and unexplained operation undermine that explanation.

The Unresolved Calloway Study

The camera belonged to Iris’s late father and was found hidden among his records, suggesting his death and private habits may connect to the photographs.