The Cutting Room
Beyond the door was a world in monochrome, perpetual shades of black, white and gray where ruby, ochre, peach and lilac should have been. The steady click click click of film reels was continuous, until it wasn't, stopping only for abrupt pauses, and then starting again.
The room itself was dark, there was a flickering light from the film reels, hundreds and hundreds of feet of 8mm film were strewn about the room some in bits and pieces others in piles. There were pictures hanging from string and clothes pins, some were cut in half, and notably, the pictures all had people shaped holes cut out of them. On the floor were cuttings and clippings, all of the woman standing at the editing table, razor blade in hand, splicing and gluing pieces of film together, marking other spots with a pencil she kept behind her ear.
She was as monochrome as the rest of the room, a bit out of focus like the whole room itself was filmed decades ago and so was she. There was a bit of a crackle to the sounds in the room, there was no digital remastering here. She was smartly dressed, a single color shirtwaist dress (in a light shade), that fell just below her knees. The dress had sleeves just to her elbows, and square shoulders. She wore a string of pearls around her neck, and heels that clacked on the hard cement of the cutting room floor as she walked from table to table with the pieces of film strewn about. She didn't recognize the woman's face, or that it was her own, on the floor. She had received the reels of film when she'd entered the room. And known what to do. "Cut her out. Contract fell through." Was written on the film cans and she had set about doing it. It seemed fine. Normal. She knew where to cut, what to take out. What to keep. Every now and then she watched a scene longer than she ought, found herself smiling. It was a good story. A good film. She blew up some pictures, some stills. And then cut the actress out of those as well. The more she cut the less she knew, the less she remembered when she'd walked in, why she'd walked in, like she'd always just been here doing this.
Some parts were unspeakably terrifying and she was glad to see them go. Others were beautiful and she wondered if she couldn't ask to keep them in, but that wasn't her job. Wasn't her choice. Nothing was her choice, she just worked here. Didn't she? She looked at her reflection in the cold metal of the table, she was blurry, of course she was it was an editing table not a mirror. She finished up the scene she was working on and put it into the can and went to sign her initials. The first can was done. She couldn't remember how to sign. What to sign. Had she ever really known? So she marked it with an X and just wrote "Editing Complete" And loaded up the second reel that said "8-10" and started in. She marked the film first as the view closed on the face of a little girl standing with her family.
The woman, in spite of herself, smiled as the scene started. The girl and her parents standing in a driveway waiting for a car to pull up, and when it finally did the girl's eyes lit up brightly and at the moment the camera cut away to the car, is the moment the woman marked to cut the film. Taking the little girl right out. She'd glue it back at another scene further on.