Every Picture Tells A Story

She stood at the bottom of the stairs in a New York movie theatre, pensively reflecting on the dark past story of her life and how it had all come to this. Waiting in the wings whilst her story was being played out on the silver screen. She had never realized that the young man she had briefly met at some downtown bar six months previously, whom she had opened up to after one Margarita too many, would turn it into a Hollywood movie.

Brad was upstairs visiting the men's room. He had already been gone over ten minutes. Probably there was a queue, she told herself. She just wanted to leave. She couldn't stand much more of hearing her own all too familiar tale of woe coming over the theatre sound system. She wondered if Brad had noticed who the lead actress of the film was based upon. Perhaps he had and it made him feel uncomfortable, maybe even put him off her for good. She carried her shame with a deep sense of remorse. It clung to her as if it was a second skin. And yet, what happened was not her fault, it was all because...

"Oh, what's the use, what's the point?" she thought to herself. "If I cannot forgive myself how can I expect others to forgive me?" She heard a soft, muffled cough coming from the row of seats closest to her. She wondered if the people watching could know it was her story they were watching so intently. Then she told herself what a ridiculous idea it was to think that such people could see right through a perfect stranger. And anyway, nobody's perfect, maybe they had a hidden past even darker than hers.

The middle-aged man whose face the auditorium light fell upon could be a bank robber or a murderer even for all she knew. The simple facts of the matter were that, like everybody else, she had one or two skeletons in the closet. Who was to say whether hers or theirs were the worst? And anyway, who were they to judge her? They weren't there when what happened happened. They had no right to think or say anything.

Sometimes, to protect herself she told herself that she wasn't there, it wasn't her. She told that to herself so many times that even she began to believe her own lies. Yet she was there, and she knew that like she knew her own mother. It was a part and parcel of her past life, indelibly embedded not only in her memory but in every sinew of her being.

In the subdued light of the auditorium, she could, if she chose, hide in the shadows. But that would mean exposing herself to the flickering light on the big screen. It was bad enough that she was stuck waiting in the full light of the lobby at the bottom of the stairs. But at least the audience had their backs to her. They might think that she has already left, not realizing that she is standing waiting, right behind them. How little did they realize that the life of the person who they were absorbed by on the screen, was very much in their presence, no more than a few feet away.

"Oh come on Brad, where are you? How could you leave me waiting like this? The queue can't be that long. The men's queue always goes down faster than the ladies." she thought.

Then again the thought that he had simply walked out of the theatre and right out of her life forever came back to haunt her. "When will this torment end?" she mused.

As she stood lost deep in thought, the flickering images on the big screen froze. It was an image of a woman in a movie theatre auditorium, standing leaning against a lobby wall, at the bottom of a flight of stairs. At the top of the real stairs, there was the sound of footsteps as a shadow of an unseen man loomed down into the gloom, his outstretched hand holding what looked like a gun with a silencer, pointing straight at the woman, lost deep in thought…

***

On the far side of the auditorium, a young man had been admiring the woman leaning back against the lobby wall undetected. She looked a lot like the woman in the film on screen. The likeness was so uncanny, it could easily have been the exact same woman. He'd been watching her story unfold and could clearly see that she had passed a very hard time. The real woman looked resigned as she leaned back, defeated even. She was obviously deep in thought, no doubt troubled by something unexpressed.

He wanted to go over and put his arms around her, to tell her that whatever she had done, everything was going to be okay. At one point he had stared at the woman so intensely that he could have sworn she had noticed. Either it was wishful thinking or the woman had actually returned him a sweet smile. Or perhaps it was for the older man who sat near him. Then she dropped her eyes and raised her hand to her face, to stroke her chin in a pensive manner.

He had seen her earlier with another man who partway through the film suddenly disappeared up the lobby stairs. Then, just as the film froze with a screenshot of a shadowy gunman at the top of a flight of stairs, aiming what looked like a gun straight at the woman at the bottom of the stairs, the man looked across the real auditorium and saw what looked like a shadow of a real man aiming a gun down the stairs.

The young man suddenly had the thought that what was happening on screen was a premonition of what was about to happen in real life. If that was true, the man had only seconds to save her life. As he jumped from his seat to run across the dimly lit auditorium he set his eyes on her, and she set hers on him. Her expression screamed, "Help me!" His expression screamed back at her "Get down!" Suddenly a shot rang out and it was hard to tell if it was a shot from the action on the screen or a shot in real life. The woman in the lobby fell to the ground in perfect unison with the woman on the screen…