The Evening Shows
by Scott Withiam
Over and over we’d heard of the rash of
car break-ins at the multiplex theatre, the CD player heists during
the evening shows, the signature Tub-O-Popcorn left on the seat
of whatever car got hit, but little did we suspect that once we
drove there, paid and entered, our movie would show the CD player
thief presently roaming the very same multiplex parking lot where
we had just parked our cars, or that the thief was the very same
usher who, wearing the cobalt blue sport coat and carrying a finger-length
flashlight, had just seated us. Now his flashlight was off and
in his coat pocket, and the aisles weren’t seats but rows
of cars. Without being shown our cars it was hard to tell where
we sat—not so much in the theater but more considering our
place in the world. The audience fidgeted. Eerie wailing came
from the trashed woods at the edge of the parking lot, and the
thief moved toward it. Out came his usher’s flashlight.
He switched it on, searched up in the trees till he found the
eyes of a screech owl, the eyes like flashlights escorting him
to look beyond, into a sky not full of blinking stars but blinking
anti-theft devices. With his back to us, he released a huge sigh.
We couldn’t say that he walked out of the other side of
those woods a new man, but felt sure that his sigh signaled resignation
to a security too overwhelming, a lifestyle too risky to continue.
Scott Withiam’s poems are recently out in Ascent, The Florida Review, Margie, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Sentences, and Willow Springs. His chapbook, Desperate Acts and Deliveries, was last year’s winner of the Two Rivers Review Chapbook Contest. His first book, Arson & Prophets, was published by the Ashland Poetry Press in 2003. (2/2005)
