Please Vacate the Theatre

red seats
photo by nepenthes.

Sitting in an empty theatre, he watches advertisements flash across the screen. Rita the Condo Queen Real Estate Agent; A watch/clock repair shop around the corner called The Fixery; Advertisements to rent out the theatre for corporate or private events. As he waits for the featured film he imagines himself projected up there on the screen, larger than life, his voice bellowing out of the THX speakers so that he fills the theatre.

A woman walks in. He slinks down further into his chair. She pauses at his isle, looks at him out of the corner of her eyes, then continues on to the front row, where she moves across to the middle seat and sits down. She’s blonde, her straight thin hair nearly platinum. She’s heroin-addict skinny, but her skin flawless. She wears dark maroon lipstick that makes her lips look too thin. She’s not smiling, and something about her face makes him think that it is probably painful or strenuous for her to smile. She wears a shirt with Abraham Lincoln printed on the front. On the back, his assassin.

He gets up from his chair and moves to the seat directly behind her. He does not try silence his change in seating; in fact, he pulls down each spring loaded chair as he passes down the isle like a boy running a stick along a picket fence, but she ignores him. She cranes her neck to the screen, where the movie has finally begun. Black and white film of flowers in a cemetery, time lapse, wilting. Two children, a boy and a girl, wear their Sunday best. He’s wearing a little clip on tie, and she has a sun hat. They cup their hands beneath a spigot to gather water, then carefully walk to the flowers and dump the water on its petals. Back and forth, back and forth until the children are near exhaustion but the flowers continue to whither until they finally die.

He sits so close to her that he can smell her hair, see the fine wisps on the back of her neck. He sees a childhood scar on the nape of her neck, while his fingers draw to the razor-thin ridge at the back of his own neck. Grandmother’s emerald ring; did she really twist it around on her finger intentionally? Her signature disciplinary move was to clutch the back of the necks of the two children, forcing them in whatever direction she willed them.

He leans across the seat in front of him and turns to see her face in perfect profile. Her nose has lost the little button shape of the girl and grown sharper as a woman, but the eyes are the same. He keeps watching her eyes and sees in their reflection the big screen. Over the speakers he hears the sandpaper voice of his grandmother, cursing a boy and girl. “Get in the tub, you filthy little grubs. Dirty, filthy things, you stand there. Turn on the water. No, did I tell you to turn on the hot water? Only cold water for you. You think I would use up my hot water on you two? Dirty filthy things.” A course rag, rubbing until raw, unrelenting as the sensitive skin of the children grows red, but her voice falling to silence, only the harsh choked breathing of effort, one hand clutched on a thin wrist to hold them still, the other scraping the cloth across their skin. Dirty filthy things, they stand there in the cold water and watch the other shivering, naked, dirty things. Grandmother hands grows cramped from the strain. She sits on the toilet yet still doesn’t let the children out of the tub. The two of them crouch on either end of the clawfooted cast-iron tub, facing each other, freezing water, arms wrapped around their knees, huddled.

He shakes his head free of the grating voice of his grandmother and gathers the courage to look directly at the screen, but he doesn’t want to look. He shakes his head free of her. In the reflection of the woman’s eyes he sees the screen fall dark, and she turns to look directly at him, and he wonders if she really sees a dirty, filthy thing? Did they every really outgrow those raw naked bodies? They tried to water the flowers, they worked themselves to exhaustion to keep them alive, but they still died in the end. They still felt guilty for letting the flowers die. The girl was always the stronger one, the defiant one, and now the woman held out her hand and he took it, and together they walked out of the theatre.