I go to the theater to remind myself how to sit still for a long period of time. My therapist said I was skirting the process of individuation. She suggested something passive like breathing. or blinking. getting robbed. I settled on an afternoon matinee featuring a documentary about poverty, life during a heatwave in the city. some script written about soft decay by a man with no debt. I prefer the hum of the refrigerator and the muffled canned laughter of failing sitcoms playing in my mother’s room. But I go to the theater. for therapy.
It’s mostly empty except for a woman openly coughing in her purse and the typical staph species that swarm my bare legs. I sit in the nosebleed seats at the front, where I can feel it all, head back and hair splayed across the seats. I sit by the aisle in case I need to escape. The documentary is called Children of the Summer Streets. The promotional poster features a girl in a purple tank top, turned slightly away from the camera, cradling a black kitten. Both dirty, matted, specks of filth washed across flesh and fur. sunsetting warm in the background. Mayfield Parrish colors.
You have to be aware of the armrest in the movie theater. I like to keep my popcorn hand, my good hand, either in the bag or in the air at all times. Hundreds of thousands of colonies of fecal matter reside on the chair and can infest open lesions in the skin. I touch nothing communal with my good hand. The theater is contaminated by the public that sat before you. My therapist once said, “Most people don’t expect stool organisms on public property, but a certain kind of person does.” Since then, I have expected them.
The light from the projector cuts through the air, flooding the dark room, dust undulating in the beam like pollen. The harsh crimson damask of the seat cradles my ass. I cross and uncross my legs, immune response drawing water from wet insides that I will never see or touch myself. I am a host to many penetrating bodies.
The cinema is a condition. It asks for nothing but gets thousands of particle of Sweat, bacteria. you pay with attention. the theater couldn’t care less. I keep my popcorn hand, my good hand, in the air or in the bag. I cross and uncross my legs.
Onscreen, the dirty sister of the summer street in the purple tank top lays beside her sleeping brother of the summer street. The children are worn down from the life in A hot apartment in a hot city, their bodies too close to the steaming ground. Dreaming of carpet cleaner. there is not enough money for sheets and pillows. resting their heads on scabbed arms. Curled in a fetal position. Mom, offscreen, on the couch, sleeping on her side next to approx five cans of budweiser (week night.)
Sister watches an insect crawl up through the matted carpet and onto her brother. The roach maps the boy’s face, finding the cheekbone, then brow, and settling on the lip. The girl watches it with the intensity of someone about to become a vessel. She does not blink.
The boy dreams of a room like the one they sleep in. We watch his dream on screen. Death sits on their mother’s shoulders. Her mouth moves but makes no sound. Her lap overflows with black liquid, the smell of stale alcohol and copper. Death sings a quiet song soft through her bones. A drop falls onto the boy’s lip. It’s thick. He understands that he must welcome mother’s bile because that’s what nature intends. When we reject the body of the mother, we follow down a path toward the wrath of God.
I wipe away tears. Horrified, I realise the finger in my tear duct is the same that rested on the dirty arm of the movie theater seat. Flagellates penetrate the membrane of the eye and ingest blood through its cytostome, digesting it quickly. The small orgy of consumption gives way to infectious feces, and the incubation period begins.
The sound of my angry stomach disrupts the quiet harmony of the empty theater. One million spores of mold share my seat, inviting the wetness, grabbing at the seams of my short dress. Rubbing my legs together involuntarily, feeling the relief building in me and I watch the screen intently, I do not notice the microscopic tears forming on the underside of my thighs from the friction of the seat. I grind and open my legs, checking to see if I’m real.
Sister feels her bones expanding beneath sunk ribs, writhing on the hard floor. her eyes on brother. The roach zig zags across his top lip, little legs tap across the front teeth, threatening them with its wrath. And in one small gasp, the roach disappears into his mouth, into the black void, and sister learns how it feels to be thrilled. The horror in her chest gallops like a horse, pounding her rib cage so hard it feels like she’s going to break apart. She imagines the ripe little black pear sliding down her brother’s esophagus, dropping into the warm pit of his stomach, black void within a black void, opening up to nothing. She thinks of nothing, she can sense it for the very first time and welcomes the ever-expanding peace of it all. Her mouth is stretched in a smile, or a scream, we can’t tell. She feels everything. She is everything all at once, and the roach does not exit the mouth.
The contract that we form with the earth and all of the small bodies on it is negated by the law of nature. We are animal and host. We are to be returned to the earth. Our bodies run its course of pleasure and pain. That is the law.
Brother will never know this happened. He has no reaction. She will keep the secret of the void within her for the rest of her life.
I neither notice my good hand first grazing the chair, nor do I notice the short chains of rod shaped cells attaching themselves to the fleshy parts of my fingers. I eat popcorn with my good hand. I do not feel the invasion of harmful bacteria enter my mouth and slide down my throat. The bacteria enters my digestive tract and colonizes in my colon, throwing off the delicate balance of intestinal flora. I am fucked from the inside out by unseen bodies.
The woman coughing into her purse comes back from the restroom smelling like xyxlazine rot, nursing a festering hole in her thigh. typical street adventures. All of the things I learned to fear. What classroom is this. I want to leave. I want to drop out of this school of fear. I want to move. I can’t. I sit there, still as a mountain, a switch flipping inside of my head. No amount of therapy, ritual, purity, nothing can protect us from the wrath. Canned laughter. The bad hand. I open my spiracles, oxygenating muscle, the armor of my flesh whirring, headless, calling out for mother. The earth sings quietly like a refrigerator. I am not untouched, everywhere. There is no good hand.
I sit still for a long period of time.