by Tim Marquitz
“That’s when he hit you, isn’t?” Milena asked, knowing from experience.
“I had never been struck as a woman. Alfanso didn’t even have the courtesy to open his hand. I was a very petite in those days. I had no chance.” Nonni Marie paused to pour herself a drink and then continued. “When he returned, I had righted the table and set the candles. My mother had visited and talked to me as I am talking to you. And afterwards, I knew exactly how to handle Alfanso. I decided to prepare his favorite meal; chicken à la Florentine with spinach salad. Yes, your husband also enjoys this meal. It is why I brought all of the ingredients to my kitchen.”
“I’m not going back to him, Nonni Marie!” Milena protested. “I can’t! Maybe the women of your generation could let something like that happen, but I can’t.”
Nonni Marie raised her finger to silence her granddaughter and then continued the lesson. “The first thing you must do is find the proper ingredients. Look for dark green, fresh leaves. Always avoid yellow, wilted, bruised, or mushy leaves. Yes, this batch is a little mushy, but that’s why you make certain that you wash the leaves. Otherwise, you risk accidently infecting your guests with Escherichia coli. Very nasty. A painful way to die.”
The old woman started chopping the spinach. “Did you wash that beforehand?” Milena asked.
Nonni Marie smiled and continued. “What? Did I wash this batch? I think perhaps you misunderstand the purpose of this little lesson. Don’t concern yourself with such details. This salad is for your husband. Yes, you were always a bright girl.”
Milena blinked and listened in silence.
“Next, we dice the heirloom tomatoes, the cucumbers, and the almonds. The trick is ensuring that you have reduced the ingredients to the proper size. Likewise you must strain the spinach and heirloom salad with a dash of vinegar to reduce the taste of almonds. Why use almonds? It gives the salad proper texture.”
Nonni Marie plucked an old spice container from the rack with the word cantarella in tiny script. “What’s that?” Milena asked.
“A family secret. You’ll learn it in time.”
Curious, Milena googled the cantarella on her phone. Search results proved very interesting. The sleeping poison used in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Allegedly the poison used by Lucretia Borgia. She looked up at that plenary indulgence and wondered again what her grandmother did to require it for her soul and how she earned the forgiveness.
Nonni Marie smiled. “What did you learn? Does your computer admit that science has never been able to properly identify how cantarella was made? The recipe has faded into legend and the memories of a few women. Shakespeare’s Romeo drank it to cause his own slumber to join Juliet. Allegedly it involved a dash of hemlock. Such a sad tale that they both had to die.”
Hemlock tastes of almonds, she remembered.
The kitchen timer sounded. “Listen to that ding!” Nonni Marie crooned. “The chicken smells wonderful. The meal is ready, Bellissima. With a bit of packaging and preparing you can take it to your apartment to meet your husband when he gets come. All you have to do is set the table.”
Milena regarded Nonni Marie with different eyes now. She mentioned that she had buried three husbands in her lifetime. What happened to the other two? She shook her head determined to keep her mind on task. After all, she had a dinner to take home to her husband like a good wife.
The Projectionist
Timothy Baker
It was long after dark when the doorbell rang.
Jack left the kitchen table and cursed whoever would interrupt his Friday night Hungry-Man. He stomped through the living room, turned the two bolt locks to the front door with more force than needed, and slid the door chain aside with a slap. Jack flung open the door.
The porch was dark and empty. He flipped on the porch light and the dull glow of the no-bug bulb cast its yellow light onto the porch. Jack fingered the end of the baseball bat he kept by the door, unlatched the screen door, and pushed it open. On the porch, he swung the bat up to the ready.
"I know you're out there. Why don'tcha come up and get some?"
Beyond the light, the dark did not answer. Jack started toward the porch steps when his foot hit something solid. Startled, he took a quick half step back. A plain cardboard box lay on the porch, its top and corners sealed in shiny, brown packaging tape, not unlike the hundreds delivered before. On the top, neatly written with a black felt marker, was his name and address.
Jack let the bat fall to his side. He bent over and picked up the box, looking at it as he carried it into his house. Two clicks and the locks fell into place.
Jack laid the box on his one-chair dining table and sat before his steaming Hungry Man. Forking the food around, Jack stared at the box. His last purchase was over two months ago and it had arrived in its usual timely fashion. He hadn't found anything worthy since. His collection was already substantial, definitive, in fact, and reels fitting his high standards were getting harder to find. No, he hadn't ordered this and he damn well wasn't going to pay for it, whatever it was.
He dropped his fork and picked up the box, turning it with a light touch. No return address or postage, no clue to its source, just his neatly written address and, bold in the corner in the same black felt, 1 OF 2.
Curiosity had killed his hunger and he tossed the dinner across the room into the already full sink. Several flies rose and circled with an annoyed buzz.
From his pocket, Jack pulled a knife and flicked it open with his thumb. He sliced through the tape on the box, and like a kid on Christmas Day, he threw open the cardboard flaps. The box overflowed with packing peanuts and Jack paused as he stared at their harsh whiteness.
He wondered what perverse prize, or jokester trap, lay wrapped in their soft protection. An uneasy shrug and he slipped his hand into the peanuts. The familiar touch of bubble wrap, and he pulled out his find and held it beneath the low-watt bulb hanging above the table. Jack readily identified it through the distorted lenses of the bubble wrap: a standard 8mm film on a six-inch reel.
Jack cut the tape that held it sealed, and let the bubble wrap drop away. Its paint was gone from years of use, leaving splotches of gray leftover. His heart raced as he unrolled the leader to the perforated, repeated images, and held them to the light. The small black and white frames held a high contrast image of a rough, white X surrounded by a circle, much like that Da Vinci Man drawing. Though the light was low, Jack could make out the breasts at the center of the X.
A hope rose. Was this a genre, so rare they hardly existed? Smokers—named for the smoky back rooms where they were so often viewed—were highly collectible. Thousands had been produced during the first half of the 20th century and perhaps only a handful had survived. So valued by collectors, no one in their right mind would give one away.
Jack wrapped the film back in place, his hands caressing the cold curve of the metal reel. He flipped the reel over. Written along the outer rim in faded ink were the words: A LIFE UNSEEN, BUT DARKLY BRIGHT…
"Oookaay" Jack said, his brow wrinkling. He looked into the box and then rummaged his hand through it, searching every corner, hoping for a receipt, anything to point to the source of his mysterious gift. He pulled out empty handed.
He grinned. "The finder keepeth."
With a new hunger growing, Jack walked to the back of the kitchen into the utility room. His eyes locked on the film he held firm, stepping with blind ease over the piles of dirty clothes and stacks of rancid garbage. The thick smell had long ago been lost to him. At the rear of the room, he came to a solid door, dulled red paint flaking and warping from its aged surface. The neighbor's dog began to howl in a high pitch that fell to a low, lonely note. The mutt started again, punctuating his song with a bark. He unlocked the door, opening it just wide enough to slip inside, and closed it slow and silent. He slid a door bolt in place, and pressing hard, made sure it held firm.
With no windows, the room was pitch-black. A familiar reach for the light-switch, and the
fluorescent lights flickered on. Unlike the rest of the house, this room sat uncluttered and garbage free. Along every black painted wall, there was shelf after shelf of film cases, all labeled and categorized according to size—16mm, 8mm, and Super 8—and years produced. They filled the room with the sweet smell of acetate and nitrate.
In the center, rising behind a large frayed couch, a metal stand with two motion-picture projectors atop. One was his pride and joy: an Athena model 224 16mm sound projector, circa 1968. The other, his cheap but reliable GAF Anscovision 388Z Auto Load, switchable between standard 8mm and Super 8. They were pointed toward a large curtained wall, sandwiched between floor-to-ceiling film shelves. A vintage Christmas tree color wheel sat on the floor below the curtain (a rich movie-house red, with laced gold, and frilled bottom), turning, splashing blue, green, and red on the curtain. At the back of the room where there once was a window, an air conditioner hummed, keeping the air dry and at a preserving 50 degrees.
Surrounded by his collection, Jack felt whole, wrapped in a million celluloid friends. He had collected over the years a bit of everything, from early 20th century silent films (Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy were among his favorites), theater newsreels from the forties and fifties, along with kiddy matinee serials from the same period, to several full-length pornos from the sixties, both soft and hard-core. His most prized possessions sat locked away in a perforated, locked metal box in the corner. Inside where the Smokers: silent 8mm ditties with such intriguing titles as Super Saleswoman, Frat Girls Take a Licking, and Special Delivery. All shot in black and white, they ran for no more than ten to twenty minutes. Enough time for Jack's satisfaction. While watching, Jack would often fantasize of the hundreds of men that, after a raucous all male viewing, would go home drunk and horny to ravage their frigid, distant wives, teaching them a lesson Jack knew they deserved.
With practiced hands, he loaded the mystery film onto the GAF and watched as it pulled the leader into itself. He licked his lips as it clattered, winding the celluloid through its many gears, spitting it out into the rear reel that grabbed and wrapped it around its core. Jack turned on the table lamp on the projection table and flipped a boxed switch. The house lights went out.
Jack paused as he touched the play dial and cocked his head, listening. Through the sound proofed wall, he heard a muted howl. He waited. The projector fan whispered. Shaking his head, he turned the switch to play and turned off the lamp. The projector's lamp blazed from the lens and lit up the curtain.
Jack jumped over the back of the couch and landed with a bounce onto the thick cushions. He grabbed a two-button switch connected to a thick cable running across the floor to the curtain. His thumb pressed the top button and the color wheel stopped and went out. Electric servos whirred as the curtain parted. The burst of light from the reflective screen made him blink as he sunk into the worn-down cushions.
The screen went dark and a long snake of a scratch wiggled vertically across it. Jack expected a titillating title to come up as was the norm, but more scratches, like odd letters, flew by. A jump cut filled the screen with a woman, completely naked except for the thick ropes that held her arms over her head and her legs spread-eagled to a wooden background. At first, Jack thought the camera was directly overhead, but her head hung, chin to chest, and her dark shoulder length hair obscured her face. A voluptuous body, with wide hips and large breasts, her overgrown thatch of pubic hair stood out, stark against her pale skin. A painted circle surrounded her, its outer reaches touching the four walls of the picture frame. Within the circle, strange glyphs were spread about.
Jack leaned forward. A feeling of warmth hit his groin. This is a helluva thing, he thought, as rare as they come. True S and M Stag films were thought to be non-existent and here he was the happy recipient of some collector's grave mistake. Jack grinned.
On screen walked a shirtless muscular man wearing light colored chinos, a black hood covering his head. He grabbed the woman by the hair and yanked her head up, revealing a beautiful and youthful face. She couldn't have been more than twenty, if that. Her mouth fell open in a drugged sag. The man turned and looked into the camera. Though shadowed through the eyeholes, his eyes looked large, angry and piercing. Despite the coolness of the room, a rush of heat flowed across Jack's body. The man turned back and slapped and backhanded her face over and over, each one more brutal than the next.
The girl awoke, her mouth wide with screams. The film was silent with only the clatter of the projector filling the room, but Jack could hear her cries. The abuse went on for what seemed like forever and a minute. The man stopped and let go her hair. Her head falling back against the boards, the girl sobbed in pain and terror, tears and make-up streaming down her bruising cheeks.
Jack started to get a bad feeling. The violence and the girl's reaction felt all too real. He hoped this film wasn't what he thought, a legend, rarely spoken of and never found. But deep down, he did hope a little for its possibility. It would be the penultimate find, a gem at the top of his collective treasures. But who would send him such a thing? And more importantly, would they want it back?
On the screen, the hooded man stepped back, taking in the girl's misery. He sat down on his haunches before her, back to the camera, and bowed his head. Jack could see the hood moving as if the man's jaw was working. What's he babbling on about? Jack couldn't know.
The grasp of the intoxicant returned, the girl's weeping slowed, and her head lolled. Arms raised to a Y, the man leaned his head back, hands palm up like a supplicant priest begging for a blessing.
Jack stared, hypnotized, nausea swirling in his gut.
Hooded man stood, hands still in the air and took a step to the girl. Her eyes held tight, face tense in her fight against the intoxicant. The man's left arm dropped and went to his waist.
Here it comes. The dirty deed at last. Jack palmed the rise in his pants.
The man's right arm fell and he looked the girl in the face. A light flashed from below his left hand. The knife was long and curved, Arabian, its handle ornate and black.
Hooded man plunged the blade into the girl's belly. Her head shot up with a look of painful surprise. Eyes bulged as her neck muscles pulled tight and her mouth gaped.
Jack heard the piercing scream. His hands went to his ears, but it was of no use. He went to his knees as he watched the hooded man step aside, giving full view, drawing the imbedded knife across her belly. Dark fluid spilled from her like a waterfall, splashing down her groin and legs to the floor.
The hooded man withdrew the blade, turned and walked off screen as nonchalant as he had walked on. The girl bucked against the ropes and her stomach convulsed. The wound widened like a bloody, toothless mouth filled with worms. Intestines spilled out and stretched to her feet. Her head dropped and her body went limp.
Still holding his hands to his ears, Jack stared, shaking and unbelieving, as the camera held on the image. His hands dropped to his lap and he looked to the projector. The reel still held around 200 hundred more feet. Ten more minutes, at least. The screen held the shot as the killing room dimmed. The girl hung, bleeding out.
"Is this it? Is this all you've got?"
The light in the room faded and turned gray. Jack reached for the couch and stood up, wary of passing out. A wind blew across Jack's face and the acrid taste and smell of something foul swept into his mouth and nostrils. The light grew greyer and the clatter of the projector faded.
A sound like some alien cicada entered his head, chittering and clicking. Jack's stomach muscles convulsed and pulled him over, forcing him to the couch. He looked to the screen and retched. The girl had faded to a bound ghost. The circle and symbols glowed. A foul presence neared and he felt light tendrils of electricity on his belly. His stomach relaxed and the nausea left as suddenly as it came. He leaned back in the couch feeling cool and at ease. The insect sound became a calming song and a warming sensation rose around his belly button. A healing euphoria swept over him and his body arched.
<
br /> Jack laid his head back and his eyes turned dreamy to the ceiling. Darkness fell across him and sweet oblivion.
#
Jack awoke to bright light. He blinked and squinted. The projector's front reel sat empty and still, the receiving reel spinning and flipping the end leader onto the projector with a clack…clack…clack. The projector glowed like a beacon onto the screen, now imageless and pure white, illuminating the room.
Jack leaned forward, rubbing his face. He looked again at the blank screen, the horrific image of the brutalized and dying girl burning in his brain. Had he fallen asleep and dreamed it all? How long had he been out, anyway? With no ready answers, he stood, half expecting to pass out again, but his legs held firm and no fading of the light came. He took a deep breath and touched his belly. He felt oddly energized, like a man satiated after a long hunger.
Slapping his belly, Jack walked around the couch to the projector stand, turned on the desk lamp, and switched the projector from 'Lamp' to 'Motor'. The room darkened when the beacon went out, leaving only a small island of light in the center of the room from the desk lamp. The clacking of the rear reel stopped. The cooling projector fan and the air conditioner harmonized. Jack's shadow loomed large against the far wall behind him.
Jack fed the end of the rear reel into the forward one and flipped the switch to "Rewind". He whistled as he watched the reels spin at high speed, making a high pitched buzzing sound. The film on the rear reel lessened in size as the forward reel increased rapidly. Jack looked into the dark corners of the room. A feeling of unease washed over him. The sense that unseen eyes watched, hiding in the room where the small lamp light couldn't reach, itched at his skin. He flipped the house-lights switch, sending the light flickering into the corners. Nothing there but angled walls.
The rewind finished and Jack turned off the projector and the desk lamp. With care, he pulled the loaded reel, and walked to his Stag film box. He unlocked it, hesitating after swinging open the metal lid. He turned the film over and back, searching for something, anything, some sign to its dark origin. It looked innocent, of course, and gave away nothing. He placed it into the cold interior of the box and locked it away.
