The picture show

There was a time when he would say to her, with tenderness reverberating from the lowest notes of his voice, "You make me only want to be nice to you." This, with his palm cupped around her cheek, calluses gently pressing into her skin. The roughness felt completely masculine, and consequently she felt feminine. He would push his hand back into her curls, so like his. "You're so pretty," he'd murmur. The simplicity of it promised its sincerity.

These scenes haunt her - they've become like short films that flicker to life at random in some automated cinema in her memory. The lights only come up and the screen only dims when she catches cruel whispers, words from sentences she doesn't want to hear the ends of. There's a sadistic little girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead there in the darkness with her. The darkness, black as pitch, obscures the child from view, but she knows the girl's sitting in the front row. "But you can be replaced so easily," the girl points out, her intonation maddeningly innocent.

The picture starts to skip and repeat on itself, the film doubling up in the spools of the projector. "You're so- You're so- You're so," he begins to repeat idiotically on the screen. His hand freezes mid-caress, strands of hair tangled between his fingers. The beginnings of her smile, so full warm and full of love, cease to curve upward past half-mast. Finally, the mechanism in the projector breaks and she's plunged back into the darkness of the theatre.

But only momentarily. Then the lights come up. The little girl is gone. But she sits alone, staring at the blank screen.