It’s a small box, looking like a photo booth in which we took silly photos when we were teenagers, remember? There are short movies being played inside.
“Come,” she says, ”there’s room for two.” I squeeze in. “If you can handle the dog.”
“Can I pet it?”
“Sure, you can pet her.”
A female, noted.
It’s a small dog, silently squeeling and moving around, until the girl places her into her lap. She then watches the movies with us, silently.
I don’t understand modern art the way I would like to, but I still sit there and watch. I don’t like Spanish either, but I still sit there and watch.
The third movie has no words. A movie, made out of paintings. There’s a girl, painted in orange and red and yellow, touching herself. I can feel her pleasure through the rough brush strokes. The camera slowly zooms in and I’m not sure if we’d know it’s a face if we didn’t see her whole body just seconds before.
A blue hand appears. A male hand. I think it’s her imagination, the hand looks cold as if it wasn’t real. It feels heavy inside. Perhaps it should feel different, perhaps the author wanted to paint something else. But in me, it’s heavy and I hate it. I wish I could cry, but there’s a girl with a dog on her lap beside me, so I can’t.
There’s the Spanish movie again, with a field of poppies. I remember a Turkish TV series I watched in June where a man killed his daughter in a field of poppies and let her bleed out there. I shift uncomfortably. I remember an installation in London 10 years ago where a field of artificial poppies represented rivers of blood. The Kinobox starts getting smaller and smaller, and the poppies on the screen with a woman repeating words in Spanish smother me.
It’s time to go.