cellstories: daily mobile fiction

At the Movies

Audrey Niffenegger

It was the last night. They both knew it was the last night. The night before, lying in bed after making love, he sat up and said, “I think I’d better go now,” and she had nodded without looking at him and he got out of bed and put on his clothes and said, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” and left.

Now it was the next day and they were walking down Western Avenue beside a park she didn’t know the name of, carrying a Super-8 movie camera. It was seven o’clock in the evening, and the sky was soft and bluer in the east than in the west, which was kind of peach colored, she thought. They were going to make a movie.

The idea for making a movie had come to them a few weeks earlier; they had gone to the Music Box Theater to see the movie Dead Man and afterward he said “That was perfect,” and she said “Let’s make a movie together,” and there was something about the moment, the idea, that made it seem perfectly natural and necessary for them to make a movie even though neither of them had ever made one, so she went to a tiny camera shop on the West Side that sold obsolete equipment and she bought a small Super-8 camera which he was now carrying as they walked along the sidewalk without talking because if either of them said anything it would end up turning into a conversation about why they weren’t going to see each other any more.

Finally he said, “Do you know how to work this thing?”

“I think so,” she said. “I think you just point it and hold this button down.” The camera made a whirring sound. They looked at each other, hesitating.

“Let’s just film anything,” he said. “We’re just testing. It doesn’t matter.”

She nodded. He was right; it didn’t matter. This was a non-movie; a movie that wasn’t going to be for real. He pointed the camera at her and she looked away.

The movie is three minutes long. The first shot is unsteady. She is looking away, at something far away to the left. She turns her head and looks at the camera, looks as though she is about to cry, but doesn’t. The next shot is of a tree, a small white-barked tree with only a few leaves on it, even though it is June. Then there is a shot of grass, and then he appears at the edge of the frame, and then he does a cartwheel across the grass, kind of a half-assed cartwheel; he’s laughing, and she, holding the camera, is also laughing, the camera lurches, and then the scene shifts abruptly to her face again, and zooms in until the whole screen is filled with her lips. And then the movie ends.

When the film came back from the processor she threw it in a drawer without looking at it. She hadn’t seen him since the night they shot it. She didn’t expect to see him. It was over. She heard about him from time to time through mutual friends; he had married, had finished his dissertation and moved to Lubbock, Texas to teach philosophy. After that she didn’t hear anything more.

Ten years later, she was rummaging around in the drawer, looking for something else that she thought might be in there, when she came across the little reel of Super-8 film. She unwound a few inches of it and held it up to the window. Tiny frames of her face in profile, ten years ago. She didn’t own a projector. She rewound the film onto the reel and thought, not about him, (for she had long ago developed the habit of not thinking about him) but about a man whom she had loved before him.

This man had also married. He had met his wife-to-be while standing in line at the Music Box Theater, waiting to see Dead Man. She thought about this as she stood there holding the brown plastic reel on her palm. Then she threw the reel of film into the wastebasket, closed the drawer, and went back to what she had been doing.