Loop by Brian Caswell

clothes.
    I paused for just a moment with her dress in my hands.
    Then I threw it as hard as I could into the sea.
    I stood at the water’s edge and watched it floating as the tide carried it slowly out there, far away from me. Then it disappeared.
    Maybe it was just a trick of the light on the water, maybe it’s just that I know how much Rachael loved that blue dress, but …
    It didn’t just sink. It disappeared. And I could swear that at the very last moment, just before the waves closed over where it had been, I caught a glimpse of grasping fingers. And a shape beneath the surface that looked for all the world like a tiny, white hand …

RUNNING THE MAJESTIC
    No one remains quite what he was
when he recognises himself.
    Thomas Mann
    There are only two things in the world worse than someone crunching fistfuls of popcorn in your left ear when you’re trying to watch a movie.
    The first is the girl in the seat directly behind you who’s seen the movie before and insists on telling her friend everything that’s going to happen – about ten seconds before it does. Like: ‘Look behind the curtain – he’s got a gun’ or ‘It’s okay, she doesn’t die. The guy with the black hair saves her.’
    You get the idea.
    The second – and perhaps the worst – is the person who thinks he’s so important that people will fall apart if they can’t get in touch with him. Right now!
    So he leaves his mobile phone on during the movie, even though there’s an ad that comes on before every session asking you to switch your phone off.
    Of course, it always rings just at the moment when the two lovers are kissing for the first time or when the hero’s best friend – or his dog – is about to die and everyone wants to have a good cry. And the phone always has one of those incredibly annoying tunes that plays for what seems like forever, while he fumbles in the dark trying to find the right button to stop it playing.
    Around about now, you might be thinking that I’m someone who gets annoyed pretty easily. Well, you’d be wrong. I’m probably the second most easy-going person I know.
    The most easy-going person I know is my mother, who never lets anything worry her – even the fact that most of the time we don’t have enough money to pay for the rent and the food in the same week.
    But I really do love movies.
    Mr Alston, who owns the Majestic, knows it, and he lets me watch as many as I like. For free.
    And I help him clean the theatre after the movie, even though he says I don’t have to. Mr Alston is getting old, and the Majestic doesn’t make enough money for him to pay a cleaner, so I figure it’s a fair deal.
    My brother, Sean, says it’s ‘slave labour’, and that he ‘wouldn’t be seen dead picking up after other people’. Sean isn’t easy-going at all. He’s someone who gets annoyed very easily – usually with me.
    Mum says Sean wouldn’t be seen dead even picking up after himself, and that I shouldn’t worry about what he says, even if he is five years older than me and thinks that that unimportant fact makes it alright for him to tell me what to do.
    Mum likes Mr Alston, and she knows I couldn’t afford to go to the movies if he wasn’t so kind to me. She also says that running the Majestic is the only thing that keeps him going.
    I guess he loves movies even more than I do.
    So there I was, sitting in the dark trying to ignore the woman in the seat next to me, who was crunching handfuls of popcorn and slurping a giant soft-drink through a straw.
    Sophie Madsen was sitting right behind me. She hadn’t actually seen the movie before, but she was talking – to Melinda Brodie, about why she hated Kevin Mulligan more than ever since he’d had his ear pierced.
    I figured that if I could just survive until the human garbage bin ran out of food, and