He slips in quiet as a silverfish, right after opening credits, a few seats over. No showy Whew! like the matinee is sold out, like it isn’t empty in here but for the usual few lunch-baggers and running commenters and dozing users in the balcony. The movie’s a dark one. A Place In the Sun. One last revival before they turn the palace into a Jehovah’s Witness assembly hall. I’ve seen it already on T.V., but I came anyway, to forget things for a while. The regular who tipped me pennies for not refilling his bread. The adjunct who trashed my photo-romanas too chiaroscuro. Another bounced rent check from the roommate I never see. Another guilt letter from mom. The latecomer stinks of unfiltereds, the chalk of a complimentary Swiss Miss, an unpinnable sourness. A few scenes in, Monty-the-jittery-striver hits on clueless-factory-girl-Shelley in a movie theater. I hear a throat cleared, a cup of cocoa dropped, the bat-squeak of a seat, low burp of a zipper. Never look at them, Anna from Screenwriting warned me once. Always bring a movie buddy, her breath sticky-sweet like Raisinets, my favorite until a concession kid called them shellacked rat turds one time. I lean away, into the bony armrest. I refuse to change seats. I’ll mechanize the periphery instead. Turn it into the spinning blades of the ristorante kitchen’s fan. Or subway tunnel lights clipping past. Or, if I’m desperate, mom’s whirligig on the lawn at home. The one I stomped on before I got on the bus to Union Station eighteen months ago. The one I should have gone back and duct taped and staked again in the coneflower bed, left spinning under the big sky I once thought was so smothering. Maybe Anna was wrong. Maybe if I turn and look right at him, he’ll run out of here. But it’s hard to look right at things, isn’t it? My landlord hitting his kid. The sweet bus boy’s limp from AIDS. The watery-pink borscht at Leshko’s. Anna’s thin back turned to me when I asked her to be my movie buddy. She’d love this part, I bet. Monty and clueless-socialize-Liz on a veranda under a milky, day-for-night moon. The way he kisses the palms of her hands. Or maybe like me, she’d feel bad for jilted-abandoned-factory-girl-Shelley who can’t even say pregnant in 1951. He’s a seat away now, going at it but getting nowhere, his breath a crypt. The sooty, painted sky presses down. The peeling, dull-eyed pharaohs watch powerless. Monty pays with his life for killing Shelley, poor Shelley, the fool, the idiot, but she really wasn’t, was she? And Monty’s not the tragic hero at all, is he? I love this—when mutability happens, old plots turned new after some years, but his knuckles graze my thigh in the same old story, and I won’t move this time, I won’t. It’s the last movie in my only palace and there’s a rip in the screen I never noticed before, small but enough to fall into, right where Liz’s tear quivers, filled with the brightest light like a reverse projection. And his hand lingers, yes, but I’m already on the other side with her—Anna—the two of us spinning like whirligigs in an open field, and we’re gazing right at it, a place in the sun, our widescreen arms outstretched until The End.
Eileen Frankel Tomarchio lives with her family in a small NJ town, where she’s worked as a librarian for 17 years. Her writing appears in Baltimore Review, Passages North, Tahoma Literary Review, The Penn Review, Atticus Review, Okay Donkey, Chestnut Review, The Forge, trampset, and elsewhere. Her work is included in the Best Small Fictions 2023 anthology. She holds an MFA from NYU Film.