Death of a Projectionist
He worked the Genesis, the Starlite, the Mystic, spying through his porthole into the velveteen. We were just kids waiting below, supplicants praying to his altar of night. He was our projectionist. On screen he showed us men made of meat and light and desire, Dean and Brando, libidos slithering through our jeans. We studied the blades of their faces, the cock of their jaws, the ways they sharpened themselves against the dullness of the world. Sometimes we heard him like a ghost in the beams, whispering dream, my boys, dream. What he could do with sprockets and gears, motors and mirrors, to amplify the throb, the percuss of blood through our nerves. We thrummed like machines. They found him trapped in that stark box, all chattering brass and burning bulbs, days after his breathing stopped. We waited in the undreamt dark. There would be others to flick the switch, cast their beams. It wasn’t the films but the projection we wanted, shadows growing on the walls, darkness ripening on the screen. We saw what we would become. In the coming years our muscles would swell and turn, hair sprout from our bodies like fur. The projectionist was gone but we would endure, tranced in the crackle, the burn, the enormous spool unfurling, something dangerous and unrewindable in our bones.
Ryan Griffith’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Peatsmoke, Flash Frog, The Cincinnati Review, Maudlin House, Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions, Best Microfiction, and elsewhere. He runs a multimedia narrative installation in San Diego called Relics of the Hypnotist War.
