Two: Shape

I parked at the theater's side lot. It was there, sitting in the shallow of an ebbing rain puddle where the sidewalk ran down into red clay and weed. I thought it was castoff tire tread. A molt of rubber and wire shed by a passing truck. My father called them Michelin pork rinds.

But the shape of the thing was too liquid. It reminded me of a greased black rag moving in the float of the puddle except that  the colors turned too quickly, from flat to iridescent and back. Moving closer I realize that the shape was a grouping of birds. Crows. More like a pile than group. Each crow pushing from the bottom of the pile to the top in a kind of black feathered boil. This was wrong enough but there was something more. Something my eyes knew while my brain still groped for edges. And then I realized what was wrong.

One: Cinema

I was leaving the movie theater when I noticed it. At first I thought I was disoriented by the change of light. The sudden reintroduction to sunlight bleaching the world to fuzzed watercolor whites. The local Cineplex is older. It's insides don't remind me of a mall food court with overbright fluorescents and corporate neon graphitti. It's a building designed to absorb illumination. Architecture of black hole angles and shadow space The lobby is dimmed and draped, flanked with stairways leading to balcony level. I can remember when the balconies were open. It was like voyeurism on top of voyeurism, watching the movie and then watching the audience below watch the movie.