Film critic

True, it was an excuse to speak to him. Come on, even the ghosts in this town are dead, and I go to movies alone. So I ask the gorgeous French film director why in the next frame there was no blood after the refugee had eaten the live chicken’s heart and spattered her white cotton tee with blobs of red gore. He looks at me with those steamy Leo eyes but I don’t spill my Pineau or drop my blini, says he kept the faux accord though he’d watched it forty times before some keen-eyed aficionado spotted it. Says it was a better take, so he left alone; incorporated error for art’s sake. The master. What’s more, he knows this criticism means: so glad I made your avant-première, I’ll lambaste your brilliant Cannes-acclaimed film because this isn’t some well-rehearsed moment when I deliver some über-cute line some slick-ass scriptwriter thought up, and even if I had that line, Chéri, I’d need directing.

(First published in Vine Leaves Literary Journal: a collection of vignettes from across the globe, November 2017)