My Film

Amina Green 

2023 

I'm simply a student who loves to write for fun.

My Film

I take a deep breath as I feel my consciousness coming back to me. It feels as if I’ve been asleep for years; my eyes dry and my lips chapped. I try to sit up from my mattress, but nearly choke on my breath when I fold forward and almost off of a chair instead. Startled, my eyes bolt open and take in my surroundings. They dilate to see clearer in the vast darkness that surrounds me, but as my vision adjusts, I realize that nothing about this location looks familiar to me. Instead of being in the compact encasement of my room, I’m located in a large vicinity full of rows and rows of rose-colored chairs. The seats are thick and knit closely together; the set-up almost reminds me of a movie theater. My breath becomes labored as my situation slowly sinks in.

I look to my left to further process all that is going on but jump out of my seat when I see the silhouette of another person in the chair beside me. Almost stumbling, I recollect my balance as the figure’s head slowly turns toward me, an apathetic expression painted onto its face. They bring up their right arm and extend it, their forefinger pointed outward. I take a step back as my danger senses begin to tingle, but instead of coming toward me, the individual then presses the same finger against their lips. I furrow my eyebrows in confusion, not sure what message they’re trying to get across. It’s almost as if they’re telling me to be quiet, but in this suspicious situation, the smartest thing to do would be to make the most amount of noise. Before I can even consider doing so, my heart sinks as the view of the rest of this place fills my vision from where I stand.

I may have thought the rows of seats in front of me were bad, but the twenty rows or so behind me makes me nauseous. The terrifying part, though, is that each and every one of those seats are full of people, all of whom look like dark, anonymous figures from this distance. I whip my head to my right, back to the rows in the front of the room, and shiver seeing that each one homes a person as well. With this final red flag, I nearly break my ankles as I turn to run toward the first exit I can find. Quiet gasps fill the air as I pass at least ten other chairs in my row, and the layout begins to closer resemble a cinema as I take a sharp left and see a slow descent of nylon-printed stairs. 

Not knowing where the steps may lead causes me to hesitate, but I push myself to descend anyway. Suddenly, I’m stopped by a tight grip around my neck, earning the violator a strangled cry. I shove my elbow back into the abdomen of the attacker, but they don’t budge at all. My head turns to look up at him, but my eyes widen as I realize that it’s another dainty female. Her build is similar to mine, yet she holds so much strength in those slender arms. With a newfound sense of confidence, I use both of my hands to push her back this time, but to no avail. Her face remains unimpressed and emotionless before she begins to drag me, hand still wrapped around my throat, back to my “assigned” seat. I let out another scream, but she only hushes me in a similar manner to the first person, her pointer finger pressed against her lips in absolute silence. The pain of her fingers digging into my skin is absent, but my current state of shock blinds me from that fact and is what gives me this natural sense of fight or flight. The woman places me back into my seat, finger still pressed to her lips before she begins walking away. 

Whether from fear or exhaustion, I stay seated with my beating heart being the only sound in the room. Seconds turn to minutes, and those few minutes begin to feel like hours as I remain trapped in this horror movie. I feel frozen in time, unable to bring myself to even look around the interior of the place that confines me, but as if a heatwave made to melt a glacier, a bright light suddenly engulfs the room. My arms fly into the air to block my eyes from burning under the radiance surrounding me, but it’s so bright that I’m sure I just entered heaven. The brightness begins to dim within seconds, and so I lower my arms in sync with its subduing. My shut eyes squint open to see what happened, but I’m only met with a peculiar sight. In front of me, and the entire theater, sits an enormous screen on the wall. The whole situation begins to feel like a sick joke, as it seems like I really was kidnapped into a huge cinema. I look to my left to see if anyone else was seeing what was happening, and I feel my heart skip a beat. 

The silhouette next to me appears to be a girl with the same frame as me, just like the other woman. Her hair is raven black and wrapped in a singular French braid; I twiddle with my own black braid in response. The girl’s eyebrows are just as thick as her hair with an arched shape, similar to her bridged nose that reminds me of my Italian one. I examine the olive skin on her body and compare it to the shade on my hand. It’s the same as mine, just like her thin lips, short chin, hazel-green eyes, high cheekbones, and even the small beauty mark located just below her right eye. She looks exactly like me. I slowly turn my head back toward the white screen and watch as black text suddenly fades onto it.

“WELCOME, SAYLA HAYNES.”

If my heart were to beat any faster, I’d be experiencing my first case of cardiac arrest. An intrusive thought tells me to look to my right next, and so I do. Another olive-skinned, black-braid girl sits in the seat beside me, and she looks exactly like me as well. I look back at the screen in front of me, and the welcome text slowly fades out. With deadly curiosity filling my mind, I stand up and slowly turn around to see the identities of the people behind me.

They all have olive skin.

They all have long, black, braided hair.

They all have thin lips.

They all have one beauty mark placed right below their right eye.

They all look like me.

They all are me.

I look back to the front of the room and read the next text, feeling a shiver run down my spine.

“SIT BACK, RELAX, AND PLEASE, ENJOY THE SHOW.”

I do exactly as it tells me to do. I look at my red chair and sit back down, facing forward, looking just as robotic as all the me’s surrounding me. My hands continue to tremor and my tears blister down my cheeks, matching the speed of my labored breathing. 

“BORN: JULY 8TH, 1997”

I begin to wonder if the people who run this facility have been watching me, and if they have, for how long. Were there any signs that I should have noticed foreshadowing this moment? I don’t understand, and that fact is the terrifying part.

“DECEASED: NOVEMBER 13TH, 2015”

I jump up from my chair and frantically look around the room after reading that text. Wasn’t just last night the twelfth of November? I remember because I babysat my neighbor’s dogs yesterday, so the date is memorable. That would mean that today is the thirteenth of November, but if I’m still alive right now, then… Are they keeping me captive here to make that text come true?

Before I can make a move, or rather, distracting me from making one, a video fades onto the screen. The colors of the recording are grainy with a yellow tint, kind of like a 20th-century film, and this quality makes me think that the video must have been recorded in the nineties. The recording doesn’t have any audio, so the only sound coming from the big screen is white noise. 

The video showcases a woman lying on a hospital bed, putting her hands over her large, round stomach with a pained look on her face. The bottom half of her body is covered by a humanoid figure in mint green scrubs, most likely a surgeon’s body being used as a censor bar for what looks like a video of a woman giving birth. The recording remains on this scene for around eight minutes, the woman squeezing her eyes shut with a clenched jaw, before cutting to a close-up of the woman cradling a small, crying baby in her arms with a soft smile and droopy eyes.

I nearly jump out of my seat when a sudden synchronous roar of clapping surrounds me, followed by a visual jumpscare of the audience standing up simultaneously. The sound of hands smacking together bounces off the walls and painfully into my ear canals. Despite the auditory pain, I hesitantly look around the auditorium in a nervous fit to figure out what new phenomenon is occurring. Of course, nothing close to normal is taking place in this vicinity full of nothing but chairs, a big screen, and duplicates of me. Looking around, I see all of my risen doppelgangers glued to the screen with eerily large smiles on their faces, continuing their sporadic clapping. I shuffle in my seat, my once calmed heartbeat fighting my ribcage harder than it had before. My mind reels with repeating questions and thoughts, “Should I join them? What are they doing? Are they trying to kill me? Should I clap too? Should I stand up? Why are they doing this?”

Silence.

Just as fast as it began, the clapping stops and everyone’s heads snap toward me. 

The video woman’s head also snaps toward me. She mouths "My baby" before the screen suddenly cuts to black, all eyes of the auditorium remaining on me. Small, white words begin crawling up the screen with agonizing slowness. They form names that I recognize next to film-related occupations. I see the name Catherine Haynes, my mother, written next to the title Producer, and Thomas Haynes, my father, placed next to Co-Producer. The names continue to pile on and up until the last row reaches the top of the screen. Black fills the room again before a few more, this time huge, words fade onto the display.

“Welcome to your film.”

That’s when I finally realized what was truly happening. I look around once again at all the eyes glued on me, pinching myself once as a final confirmation. I’m not here to be sent to the afterlife.

I’m already there.