Avoid the Red Circle of Curiosity or Get Soap in Your Eye

I have a habit of checking the notifications on my various social media sites before getting up in the morning. I had one Pinterest notification this morning and opened the app thinking it would be a picture of a cute animal or the latest idea for inventive Christmas table decorations. Before I could open the notification, the Pinterest algorithm thought it would be nice to lay a trap for me on the front page. It was a black and white picture of a man standing beside a chair. At his feet was a big red circle. My better judgment said don’t click. The caption read, ‘People In the 1800’s Did This With Dead Bodies’. The man in the picture looked alive, or so I thought. There was definitely something on the floor behind his feet. I squint, but I can’t identify the thing on the floor. My journey through Victorian postmortem photography takes a morbid turn. The thing in the red circle is a contraption to hold the dead up in a posed position while the photographer snaps pics of them, usually with their eyes open, and sometimes with their living relatives standing around them.

I will admit I do like interesting cemetery monuments, and I do have Pinterest boards with photographs I took of said monuments, but what would make Pinterest think I wanted to see posed dead people?

As a writer, I have a vivid imagination. The characters from my books are real and in living color in my mind. This morning, after taking the red-circle bait, I had morbid black and white characters in my mind, staring at me with lifeless, open eyes as I stepped into the shower. For sanity’s sake, sometimes you have to keep one eye open in the shower even though there may be the sting of soap in it. Take my advice and don’t get sucked into the red circle of curiosity–especially before a shower.