This is the first story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. You can read our Flash Fiction stories from previous years here.
For Jess.
Maček Smolansky was a filmmaker, entrepreneur, and philosopher. But, above all, he was a perfectionist. Which was why no one was particularly surprised when he announced that his new film, “Life,” would be shot on three cameras and would correspond, minute by minute, to a human life span. Filming began with the birth of Mateusz Krotoczowski, the film’s introverted protagonist, and lasted seventy-three years. On the set of the final scene, in which Mateusz hangs himself in his basement after being diagnosed with late-stage prostate cancer, the entire crew wept. Not even the soundman’s desperate shushing could stop the tears.
Post-production took a hundred and fourteen years. Maček died of old age a few months after it started. Sound-editing continued for another ninety-six years, and still, when the film was released, there were several complaints on social media that it was rushed and sloppily done.
All the leading film critics were invited to the première, and the few tickets offered to the public were sold on the black market at exorbitant prices. The film, as promised, was seventy-three years long. When the closing credits rolled and the lights came on, the ushers found that, with the exception of one viewer, the entire audience was dead. Most of them were giving off a pretty good stench. Among all the decaying corpses sat the lone surviving viewer, naked and balding and sobbing like a baby. When his tears finally stopped falling, he wiped his eyes, stood, and walked calmly up the aisle.
This aging man was the son of a famous film critic, who hadn’t even known that she was pregnant when she sat down to watch the film. He was born eight months into the screening and grew up in the dark cinema, transfixed by the screen. When he opened the doors and stepped out into the street, he was blinded by the sun. Dozens of reporters waiting outside the theatre thrust microphones at him and asked what he thought of the movie. “Movie?” he stammered, as he blinked at the sunlight. All along he’d thought it was life.
(Translated, from the Hebrew, by Jessica Cohen.)
