Moving Pictures

[VOICE-OVER]
Hollywood directors don’t get it right about the sound
When she pressed her chest against the ground steel cylindrical round
of the shotgun, and splatter-painted her heart and its protective
gear all over 72 Fuller Avenue, Islip, New York - I heard it.
It sounded nothing like artillery fire. It sounded nothing
like a fusillade of cannon. It sounded slapstick. [l.s. ext. through window]
I rolled onto my elbow and her working draft epitaph:
“Sounds like Donna is having a bad morning”

[FLASHBACK]
The acrid smoke awoke us peeling our eyes like onions
I poked around the grounds, searching for a source, (what I always do)
Jan knocked downstairs at Donna’s door
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Donna said, “I caught my toaster oven on fire”
They share a laugh, I relax, and Jan burrows back into bed.
I open the windows, draw diaphragm-deep, stretch back my head,
exhale spring-delicious air. Then, the sound, like someone tripping over a chair,
a plastic-bag pop and a crumpling thud, and my ironic, unfortunate, eulogy.

[REAL TIME – U.A. SHOT ON FRONT OF CAR]
Screeching Camaro tires. They get this one right. Through the fourth wall the car brakes.
I pull on terrycloth shorts, someone is screaming, running before I am awake,
Someone is screaming; barefoot rugburn down the stairs. I punch Donna’s door
The shrieking dissolves to a keening: “Call the police! Donna’s dead!” [DOLLY-ZOOM.]
I send Jan to call 9-1-1, as the ambiguous someone comes into focus - a man? “What happened?”
I yell at the blank whiteness. From the other side of the door – voice trapped in a can
“The police said we have to call from down here” said Jan in a voice too low;
“What?” I say to Jan. “You have to open the door,” I say to the unknown.

[INTERIOR SHOT B:] Pan to distraught man with blood-covered hands
Attempting to open a door with a knob of smooth brass

[HAND-HELD]
The man, five foot five, paces the pastel living room retching obscenity prayers
Wore a white t-shirt covered in gore. He gripped at his broom-bristle brown hair
The pre-set pea-green phone hung anachronistically from the kitchen wall.
I play fullback; blocking with my body as Jan and I enter from the hall
She strides to the phone and lifts the receiver. Glitch. “The phone’s dead”
“It’s off the hook in the bedroom,” he sobs onto the couch. She starts to head
there, and breaks the 180 degree rule, running out the back door, and down the street.
So there’s me, potential killer, and ‘what’s behind door number three;’ I chose door number three.

[P.O.V] The entire bedroom was pink, before Donna redecorated
She is sprawled like a painted nude on the bed, among the stuffed animals,
legs bent and twisted to the side protecting her pudenda,
She is also wearing a white t-shirt, this one however, has a rather large rip
Between her breasts, red all the way down.
It matches her hair and her panties match the pink of the walls
I see all this while trying not to see – like a Polaroid, with color slide intensity.
The gun, satisfied with the shot, leans rakishly against the wall.

This the Hollywood fuckers get perfectly. The blood splatter and spray
As if from impish children with paint cans, Pollocking all over the walls in play.
After fuck-you-ing the 911 operator until the sirens and lights arrived, the interrogations
and explanations for continuity, ‘she called him before she…, he moved her body, emotion,
he was her ex, she was on heart medication, made her depressed,’
No toaster oven but a bathtub of burned diaries, my Allen Smithee mind
repeats: “Let’s get out of here, let’s get out of here, let’s get out of here”
hoping for the nitrate to ignite, or the arms of the end slate to snap together.