Quay
Cliff, squinting through his dripping sweat, found that he couldn’t speak to the man in the ticket booth; he stumbled ahead, leaving Bill and Alex to handle the money. Then he veered to the left, bumping against the door of the men’s room. He pushed it open and staggered inside.
The cashier shook his head and handed the three ticket stubs to Bill. “Take care of him, guys. Jesus.”
Bill and Alex stood outside the door to the men’s door. They watched the line of people as it bunched before the ticket booth and frayed into groups drifting to different parts of the theater.
Bill handed Alex one of the three stubs.
“Should we—” Alex said, but the bathroom door opened partway. After a few seconds, Cliff came out. His face, hair, and neck glistened. He shook his head, his eyes snapping from place to place as he peered over their heads at the signs above the various entrances. Bill handed him his ticket stub, and the three of them made their way down one of the hallways and into the gloom under the dark screen.
They found seats a few rows from the back. In the rows before them, silent heads wavered above nearly all the seats.
The three sat in a row: Bill, Cliff, and Alex. New beads of sweat grew and ambled down Cliff’s face in the half-darkness. Once, he opened his mouth as if to speak, but he didn’t. Bill and Alex turned to him. His mouth hung open, frozen, and then it slowly closed.
The screen flickered, white shapes caroming. It went black, and then a narrator spoke about an upcoming movie in fragments. Text materialized on the screen occasionally, quotes from reviewers. For one long moment, the trail of a distant jet lengthened across a blue sky.
“Is this all one movie?” Bill whispered as the preview continued. “Is this—is it still the same one?”
Another preview suddenly began. People spoke in Australian accents.
Bill watched a woman’s black hair move against the mesh fabric of her headrest as she talked to someone next to her; Cliff closed his eyes and opened them but didn’t seem to focus on anything; Alex inspected the sides of his fingers and the creases on their bellies.
The theater stuttered into darkness and then light as the film began.
Letters, grouped in possible words, appeared and disappeared. Then a puppet moved around a dark room, assembling materials on a worktable. Part of a doll’s head stared upward blankly.
“Hoo,” Bill breathed.
The puppet put pieces together and took them back apart. Some of the pieces moved brokenly on their own, shaking from inch to inch on the table. At one point a red, raw piece of meat grew, twisted around itself into nothingness, and grew again, glistening on a metal tray.
“Come on,” Alex groaned.
The puppet brought its materials together a final time, and then they rose on their own, joined into another puppet, stunted and bent, with a baby doll’s face projecting before its body.
The smaller puppet left, striking out on its own, apparently. It paused and waved at its creator, still in the workshop. The larger puppet waved back. Then it sank next to the table, moving slightly, emptied.
As the film progressed, other puppets moved on stages and down streets. Now and then, the small, doll-faced puppet’s head slowly peered around a corner, looking at the others. “Go away,” Cliff whispered at it once.
Alex realized an hour later that he was clutching his seat’s armrests, and he forced himself to relax his fingers, releasing.
The screen dissolved into blankness and then darkness. The overhead lights came on, revealing the still heads of the audience. Silently, all the people rose and filed from the theater. Bill, Cliff, and Alex stood and followed. No one spoke during the slow walk down the hallway, through the lobby, and out the front door.
Outside, Alex said, “That was.”
“Uh-huh,” Bill said.
“I didn’t, did not expect.”
“No. Nope.”
A car full of teenagers roared past. One of the boys leaned out the window and yelled, “Fucking fucked-up faggot college fucks!” Others in the car laughed. The boy’s baseball cap fell off his head and landed in the intersection. “Fuck!” the boy yelled again as the car raced away.
“Man,” Cliff said. “Let’s get inside.”
“Hey,” Bill said. “You’re talking again.”
“Seriously, come on,” Cliff said. “I’ve got a bad feeling out here. We’ve got to get in.”
They walked down the street, leaving the campus, heading toward Cliff’s apartment, two blocks away. He stopped a half-block from it.
“What?” Bill said.
“Those birds,” Cliff said. “Hear them? They’re all up in those trees.”
“Oh, come on,” Bill said. He continued walking. Cliff and Alex cautiously followed.
The birds rose in a dark, sputtering mass, releasing obscene spatters as they darted obscurely against the sky.
“Goddammit!” Cliff yelled as they sprinted beneath the birds. “No one listens!”
The birds dissipated. Bill and Alex slowed to a walk, laughing, breathless.
Cliff stopped ahead of them. “Did it get on me?” he asked when they reached him.
“I don’t know,” Alex said. “Let’s all look.”
The three turned, inspecting each other.
“I think we’re all clear,” Alex said. “No, wait—there’s some on you. On the back of your hair.”
“Aw, man,” Cliff said. “Crap.” He started to raise his hand to the back of his head.
“No, don’t,” Bill said. “You’ll smear it. Just wait until you get home, and then you can take a shower. Come on, we’re basically there.”
They walked the rest of the way to Cliff’s apartment. He worried his key in the lock, kicking the bottom of the door. It swung open, and they went inside.
“Just—sit around—T.V., whatever,” Cliff said, trotting down the hallway. He went into his room, came out with a wad of clean clothes, and locked himself in the bathroom.
In the shower, he rinsed the bird shit from his hair. He washed it, rinsed the soap out, and then he washed it again. He washed his face and then his body twice, as well. Looking down at his legs, he noticed that his muscles were strained. They seemed to be growing leaner, shrinking away like the piece of raw meat in the film. He closed his eyes and rinsed off. As he dried himself, he looked up at the ceiling. He struggled into the clean clothes. Then he kicked the dirty clothes into the corner and went back into the living room. Bill and Alex sat on the sofa, staring at the television.
“The fuck are you watching?” he asked them. “Is that Mr. Rourke?”
“Star Trek,” Alex said. “It’s the guy who played him, yeah, before he became Mr. Rourke.”
“Does he really look as orange as that? Nothing looks right right now.”
“Right right now,” Bill laughed.
The telephone rang. Cliff groaned, found the handset on the table, and then lifted it slowly. He pressed the talk button.
“Cliff?” Shelly said. “Is that you? Are you home?”
Cliff opened his mouth, but he didn’t say anything.
“Are you there?” Shelly asked. “I hear you there. You better say something.”
“I’m here!” Cliff gasped. “I’m here.”
“Why did you just sit there without saying anything?”
“I was—there was something in my mouth.”
“Oh. Can I come over? I have something I need to talk to you about.”
“Uff. Can it be tomorrow?”
“What’s going on? Do you have someone there with you?”
“No! I’m just—I have to leave, is all. I’ve got that—that study group.”
“On a Friday night?”
“Uh, yeah—that’s when the others wanted to meet.”
“Huh. Well. You call me tomorrow.”
“Okay. I will. Call you. Bye.”
“Goodbye.”
Cliff pressed the off button and crammed the phone in the cradle.
“Shit!” he said.
“What’s wrong?” Bill asked.
“Shelly. She was all—she could tell I was fucked up or whatever. I wasn’t making any sense.”
“You sounded okay,” Alex said.
“She could tell. She’s going to be pissed. I never should have done this.”
Bill held his two palms up, like a hostage negotiating with a gunman. “Look, just calm down. Sit down and wait a little while, an hour or two, and then you’ll feel better.”
Cliff paced a few steps one way and back. Then he flung his hands listlessly to his sides and sat in the easy chair next to the sofa. Bill and Alex sat back down. They all turned to the television.
They watched Ricardo Montalbán struggling with Captain Kirk. Cliff kept shaking his head as the two men scuffled on the screen.
There was a knock on the door. Cliff yanked his finger to his lips. He and Bill and Alex sat, looking at each other.
“Cliff!” Shelly yelled outside the door. She pounded on it, and then she yelled again. “Cliff! I know you’re in there! I can hear the stupid television! I already know you were lying about the study group. If you don’t open up, I’ll know you’ve got someone in there with you.” She kicked the bottom of the door. “You do, don’t you? You went out with your idiot friends and met some slut in a bar and you brought her home and lied to me about the whole goddamn thing!” She stopped speaking as she leaned into her kicks, shaking the door in its frame.
Cliff, Bill, and Alex looked at each other, wide-eyed. Cliff’s finger was still glued to his lips. He sat with one leg planted against the floor to keep the easy chair from rocking. He held his breath, hiding as the door continued to shake and Shelly started shouting again. She finally stopped, and he let his breath out and his hand fall. He and Bill and Alex didn’t speak. They looked away from each other. From the television, a man screamed, but Cliff didn’t turn his head to see who it was. He kept staring at the leg of the sofa, breathing as slowly as he could.
Kenneth Gulotta writes fiction and poetry while earning a living as a technical writer. He has an MA in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Tulane University. He lives in New Orleans with his wife and stepson. His work has been published in seems, THAT, Soundings East, and Litro Online, and he has a story upcoming in Dunes Review.