The Theater

It was dark in the cinemas, but that's not really the right word. Cinema is like the meaning of industry, or a building complex. It brings to mind grey chairs, set in rows on dull blue carpeting with those little flakes of colour, as though someone had shaken sprinkles out onto the blue in an attempt to lighten it, but all it really does is make the blue seem more dull, more grey, more industrialised. Lastly, a massive screen at one end of the room, infront of all those rows of grey, generic chairs, and voila, there is a cinema. Moderately well lit, impersonal, lifeless, just one of a million.

This wasn't a cinema, it was a theater. This had scarlet carpeting, maroon chairs, set in rows, but curved towards the 'stage', where the screen sat, taking up the entire front of the room. There was an upper balcony, where more seats were set, above the lower rows, sectioned into four. There was beige painted murals carved into the woodwork of the ceiling, curtains covered the walls, and the walkways were lit with small lights. This was something alive, built from an era when you went and sat in those cramped rows to see a play, when movies where half an hour long, silent, and something of a treat. When the very act of going to the theater was a social occasion, not a spur of the moment decision. It wasn't well lit, it didn't have generic bulbs set into the walls, the ceiling, no, it had rectangular boxes to mimic the holders of a torch in a medieval castle, giving a murky, shadowed light at best.

A lone individual walks into this atmosphere, the murky, old-seeming lighting, blue jeans, sneakers, and a white t-shirt that says 'your village called, they want their idiot back', a backpack over one shoulder. She -- definitely a she, with breasts pressing against the white cotton, and the curve of her hips within the jeans -- scans the seating before turning and leaving, ascending the stairs to that upper balcony, to see what it felt like sitting where the 'upper crust' would have sat. She sat, leant back in the chair, listening to the imitation classical music with a few lyrics thrown in here and there, not particularly interesting ones, that came from everywhere, and nowhere in particular. It was dark, close, almost claustrophobic or comforting, enough to encourage a doze, and it was empty, from her brief scanning gaze.

She starts to drift off, the soft music, not very riveting, lulling her into dozing, leaving her ignorant -- she's just an average person after all -- and deaf to the soft brush of fabric against the soft felt of one of the seats, the quite whump of a footstep, followed by a couple others as a darker shadow in the murky, isolated lighting moves down the row. Sleep, so soft, soothing, and close, beckons seductively.

A soft thing startles her out of the beckoning arms of sleep, at first, she is unaware of what it was that changed, and she frowns for a few moments, before sitting up, still not seeing the shadow almost at her back. Ah, now she realises what it was that disturbed her, the music was no longer playing. Strange, the previews hadn't started. It was as though for those few seconds, the world had stopped.

She was still confused when a leatherclad hand reaches around from behind the seat, closing over her mouth, another braced against the side of her head, and the soft leather of the cowhide covered hand slides off of her mouth, grips her jaw, she has time for a shrill scream, building to the crescendo but never getting there, cut off abruptly with the harsh crackling of her neck being broken. She is left to slump against the chair, head resettled, staring eyes closed.

Not so empty after all.