Empire of Light by Gregory Earls

plenty of time to reflect and get to know each other with long conversations about their hopes, dreams, disappointments and pleasures. People got married. People had babies. Some got divorced and some buried loved ones. They were there for each other through it all, and slowly, they actually began to care for each other.
    The ol’ man realized something quite special. The gift the director had given him was not a chance to shoot a masterpiece. The gift he was given was the chance to feel the warmth of kin. At long last, at the end of his career and near the end of his life, the orphan boy was finally given a family.
    The Cinematographer had never been so happy in all his years, and not a morning passed that he didn’t wake up and thank God for his new life.
    And that’s a true story.
    Then one day, as often happens on production, something went wrong. The Cinematographer’s long-time assistant began to notice that the film was being slightly over exposed. At first it was by only a quarter of a stop, but soon after it became a half stop and then finally, after a scant two weeks, the film was over exposed by one full stop. This was not like his boss at all, the ol’ man who lit by eye and always perfectly exposed his negative.
    The assistant believed the problem had to be with the equipment. So he tested the camera, the lenses and the magazines. Everything checked out fine. The assistant’s last hope was that maybe the laboratory that processed the film had made a mistake, but they checked out fine, as well. Tragically, this meant that the problem had to lie within his mentor and old friend.
    He drove his boss to the hospital where the Cinematographer discovered that he was slowly going blind. Within the year, he would be without sight.
    The old man tried to press on with filming, but he struggled, and his assistant had to take on more and more responsibilities until the inevitable happened. The Cinematographer had to relinquish his Director of Photography chair to the assistant. After borrowing a few high-powered lights, the Cinematographer left the production set, and he would never return.
    He didn’t go back to Los Angeles or retire down to Florida. He stayed in the production village, with his new family, and he began working on a very secret project. The crew would constantly press him for clues, but the cinematographer always smiled mischievously and kept mum. The old man had converted his ’63 Dodge Travco into a top secret lab, and only he had clearence to enter. That is, until one moonless night, when he finally invited his assistant into the motor home.
    Stepping into the trailer from the complete darkness of night, the assistant was temporarily blinded. The intensity of the work lights blazed like small suns, to make up for the Cinematographer’s diminishing sight.
    He then told his trusted assistant that for years he had been secretly working with a very rare and very special gas, which, when frozen, became a special medium that would allow light to enter it, but not be absorbed. It would literally stop light in its tracks and place it into a suspended animation where it would burn forever.
    The old Cinematographer had figured out how to capture light in a bottle.
    The assistant was fascinated, and the two decided that during the assistant’s free time that they would travel across the land to capture specimens of the most beautiful light they could find.
    They captured the light from the blast of a magician’s explosion, reflected off the faces of children at a birthday party.
    They captured the moonlight bouncing off the blue eyes of a Border Collie, keeping watch over his master’s heard.
    They captured the pop of flashbulbs, illuminating newlyweds after an evening ceremony in the country.
    They captured the light from a jar of fireflies, caught by two best friends during a warm summer night.
    They captured the explosion of fireworks, which lit up the town square, in a small American town on the 4th