Screening

There's an open air screening of a film just below my building. I'm not sure what they're showing but it sounds overwrought and old-fashioned, one of those kitschy period dramas harking back to a time when women were women and men wore leotards. Strains of rousing orchestral music waft to my window. I can't make out the dialog from up here, but I can hear the sound of the voices - the plaintive cry of the distressed damsel, the snarl of the villain, the jaunty bravado of the hero. They tell me all I need to know.

It's a thin crowd out there. Fifteen, maybe twenty people. I wonder if they see me watching them. I stare down at them as they sit engrossed in their film, the light from the screen making their faces flicker like pale moths. It's like looking down into a cathedral, or like shining a flashlight into a very dark well, the beam of it dancing over a school of very small fish.