'How to Leave a Mark' - Cosmonaut's Avenue

(For the Record)
(On Tape)

It goes like this: 

It’s 2005 at the Summer Drive-in theater, and Emmy’s outside by herself. She arranges the staging area outside the lobby. It’s dark but she sees by the streetlights that dot the parking lot and by the glow through the lobby windows. The grimy white movie screens loom in a loose arc around—blind and distant eyes. She plugs a floodlight into the extension cord that trails through the lobby door, and a yellow beam pours over a card table. It illuminates a cookie sheet with a dark patina and a giant wine glass that catches the light and throws it back. There’s a bucket of baseballs on the sidewalk and a lumpy plastic bag beside it. Emmy walks around and grazes each of these things with the tips of her fingers and says to herself, This is how Ramona touches her hair before she leaves for a date, a charm to hold everything in place. Emmy’s stomach tightens in excitement. Behind Emmy’s set, a bare bulb flickers over the door to the women’s restroom and Emmy reaches up to unscrew it. She examines the shadows on the table and adjusts the angle of the floodlight. Perfect.

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