Kinoplex Diary

	Kinoplex Diary
The air carried the oily vapor from the leaking butter crevasses shinning like a sea of dying stars in the light of our headlamps. The usual virgin walk of the newer boys became crawls as they moved around the mine; I would have laughed like the veterans did but knew that it would have been me on the ground too if it had not been my 183rd day down there. I already paid my dues the countless times when I fell on my ass in the early days in spots that were much more matte than what we were on that day. It was all second nature to me now, eventually I could have tap danced on the butter down there if I had someone to do it with.
Those laughs died just as soon as they started. Natural butter leaks meant only one thing: summer was there, the awful days as I'd heard. Popcorn production doubled in the summer to meet the demand for the hundreds of thousands of normies from all over the spectrum who had to watch the latest blockbuster flicks. We had to feed the free high school and college kids, the work friends, the families, everyone but the people like us. Getting that shit isn’t like getting the peanuts they serve at baseball games, it doesn’t grow on trees. But the grueling months of hard work that would break our bodies down to stiff mush after each shift was not what made us glance through the still darkness toward the elevator doors. I could feel it too even though it was my first summer, I couldn’t tell if I was sweating or if butter residue was melting on face and my intestines felt like they were being squeezed by someone with way more than just two hands.
“If it be summer and you can tell if yer shit’ll be a log or gravy, lumpy or smooth, and your face feels like a projector bulb after Lawrence of Arabia then you’re damn sure you’ve got The Dread, boy.”
	That's what the 72 year-old virgin who has been in the mine since his 19th birthday told me a few weeks before all of this. Back then the manlet cut-off was only 5’4” and you could be a virgin as long as you had not been single for at least three months before your visit to the kinoplex. We all knew that the Chads were coming today.
“Sorry, but I must ask what is going on here?” said a concerned familiar voice that broke through the tense silence.
	There he stood, just a few yards from me, his face illuminated by the headlights of the miners who turned toward the sound of his voice. He wore that familiar smile even on what seemed to be his sterner self, bright and welcoming, a smile that said “Enjoy the movie. Please come again”. It was Robert.
“Sirs, I cannot go back up there and tell my superiors that you are not doing your very best here. Must I remind you that popcorn outputting must double from summer solstice to autumnal equinox?” he continued.
“Hey, Rob!” I couldn’t help exclaiming through the silence of the others. “Robert! It’s me!”
The other guys scattered for their tools and started their search for kernel pods. I stood there, frozen.
	“Rob, what are you doing down here?”
He looked almost vexed but kept his smile. Somehow it was still just as genuine.
	“Sir, I must continue my inspection of this section of our mine,” he said peering over his crescent lenses as he scribbled into an opened binder thick with paper.
“Employees of the kinoplex socializing with the . . . undesired is strongly prohibitted. Now please, sir, can you go do your work now and allow me to do mine?”
I slung my pickaxe and shovel unto my shoulder with one hand and carried my toolbox in the other.
“Fine, Rob. I’m gonna go now but can you throw a couple of crab legs down ol’ Anon’s way when you get back up there?”
He stopped a burst of laughter as I let mine out while I trailed behind the crawling newbies through the thickening haze of butter mist.



	The sharp echo of a nauseating scream traveled through the tunnels of the mine while I made my way to my group. This was not the scream of a man whose face fell into a rusty rogue anvil or whose toe web slid down the adze of his pickaxe, those were painful. This was agony. I rubbed my soles in dry rock granule, secured my tools and jogged toward the ghastly sound. The tools on my shoulder slammed down on my bones after each leap forward as the ones in the box clinked to the pumping of the heart under my shirt begging me to do a 360 and walk away from the strange sounds of pain ahead but I could not stop. If I could not see kinos on a screen then I must see them in real life when such rare opportunities present themselves.
	As I jogged a yellow radiance grew in the distance ahead of me quickly revealing itself as a ball of light violently shaking just above the ground as it got closer and finally showed the shape of the newbie crawling like a spider from the sole of a boot. I stopped and waited for him to come to me.
	“Hey, you! What's going on up there?!” I wheezed out, my lungs heavy with oil. With an absent glance and opened mouth as his answer, he moved the air around him as he continued his frenzied gallop toward safety his toes curling against the cold sharp ground shinning with the crimson blood of another.
	“Fuck you!” I shouted toward the fading light. Against the tug of my pleading heart I continued my trip toward the groans.
	A faint smell of salty ocean air became grew stronger with each step toward the sound guiding me through the mine's corridors until finally when it affirmed its presence I heard a pack of the boys in an isolated pocket adjacent to the main vein of the mine, a dead end. The screams stopped as I stepped into the cave, no one turned around. The room was filled with the men's sounds of fear and cursing some pacing back and forth with their hands on their heads. Otismo – the unironic autist – squatting pressed his closed palms against his ears rocking rapidly in a corner. I moved through the small crowd of men toward the end of the tunnel to see what drew such vivid horror on their faces and there they laid, the source of all the blood that painted the ground around him and the one that caused his demise.
	His innards spilled out of the angular gash that cut across his abdomen through his white shirt like red noodles spilling from the side of a bowl. His denim Kinomine overalls stayed loosely above his waist line barely covering his junk. The lines from his agony stayed etched on his face with his eyes and mouth wide opened. Just a few feet from him was a near-Kafkaesque crab its opened claws red with blood and a pickaxe planted through its carapace into the ground.
	“Excuse me. I'm a doctor,” announced Doc as he pushed through the crowd.
	“Let me see what's going on here.” He raised the man's right arm above his face and pressed his index and middle finger on the grooves below his palm.
	“He's dead,” Doc announced.
	“No shit he's dead, Doc,” Paul said with a smug smirk behind a shadow.
	“What thought your friend was gonna live through a crab snip? Jesus aren't 	you supposed to be high-IQ, Doc?” he continued.
	“He is not my friend. Secondly, I do not see anyone else doing anything about
	so I thought I should at least do something,” Doc replied facing him. Paul jumped out of the shadow enraged.
	“Listen here you fucking Muslim Packi,” he clenched his hand around the doctor's neck making the bold swastika on his forearm pulse as he squeeze tightened.
	“Why don't you get the fuck back to your country's kinoplex mines? I'm an 	American and I could kill you right now, got it?”
	“Y-Yes!” Doc croaked. With one last squeeze Paul let him go and went back into the shadow.
	“Okay! Enough of this testosterone-fueled feuding. Are we gonna like figure 	this out now or nah? I'm still freaking out!” lisped Tom. He's right, I thought.