An Invisible Sign of My Own by Aimee Bender

Author:Aimee Bender [Bender, Aimee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80447-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

16

That one boyfriend had a darkroom where he developed the photos he took of rooftops and scaffolding and the occasional one of me naked. I’d sat with him, and once, in the middle of developing pictures, he’d lifted off my shirt and started in on me, two people in the darkest room, smelling of fixer. The black air in the darkroom was way too big for me, I found the darkness to be like a huge black ocean, so in a moment when my arm was free, I flipped on the light and ruined all his photographs. Hey! he said, hey! Jumping back, he dipped his fingers in the fixer tub and lifted up the wrecked image. And there it was, my torso, bleaching out with the light, just dark spots in the center of my breasts, a dark spot of belly button, and then a sheet of white. Look at that, I said to him, it’s me.

When I entered the theater, I stalled for a few minutes, going to the bathroom, looking at the candy, reading a review about the movie I was about to see, which said it was action-packed. Finally I walked in, straight down the aisle.

There had been five years of audiences in here since I’d last stepped inside, sixty months of people weeping and laughing at the pictures on the screen, putting hands down each other’s pants, or heads on shoulders, or nothing at all—straight up and separate. The room looked pretty much exactly the same. I found Benjamin Smith smack in the middle as promised and took the seat next to him. He turned and his face lit bright when he saw I was there and I felt so good at that I stood, left, flustered, not sure where to go, deciding to buy popcorn. By the time I was back, butter flavoring already seeping over everything, the previews had started and it was dark. I hadn’t remembered how loud movie theaters were. I felt like I was inside someone’s big loud brain. I passed the popcorn over to him, and twice our hands met in the popcorn bowl and I almost mistook his finger for a piece of popcorn and grabbed too hard and he whispered: Mona, that’s my thumb, and I laughed out loud.

He had his arm on the armrest and I put mine on by accident and when I felt his there I moved mine away as fast as I could. He moved his away too. The armrest remained unused for the rest of the movie.

The movie began, grand and booming, and it was about two men who were expert bank robbers. When they robbed their last bank, the job that would make them safe forevermore from money problems, they were caught and sent to jail. There was a scene or two with them in jail, talking about stuff; they didn’t seem so bad after all. What happened next was that the city discovered an evil serial killer in its midst

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.