Claire Walla
Contest - Flash Creative Nonfiction
Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Claire Walla now writes fiction and nonfiction from her home in Fairbanks, Alaska. She has written about film for vanityfair.com and American Cinematographer Magazine and has contributed feature stories to Trail Runner Magazine. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Eastern Washington University, and this is her first literary publication.
Watching Citizen Kane in Alaska
The room is silent, though the movie’s already started.
Inside this black box, it’s as bright as an alpine meadow
at high noon, and just as empty. Instead of scattered trails
of popcorn scat and sticky traces of soda spray, the
ground is slick with glossy sheen. (I’m the only person
who’s been here in a while, it seems.) Black-and-white
images flicker across the screen, obscured, the way a
trout’s silver scales vanish beneath the shimmer of sun-
struck water. Difficult to see or hear beneath the sheen.
You know that feeling when you’re trying to fall asleep
and your mind won’t quit? Being in a lit theatre is like
that. Instead of drifting off into another world, I’m stuck
here, in a bright box, alone with my thoughts. My chair
creaks. The walls rumble. I have an itch and can hear
myself breathe. The joy of going to the cinema is
pretending that we—the world and I—don’t exist. (We
were supposed to disappear at 7 p.m.) Why am I still
here? Disappearing seems different up here in Alaska.
I had moved to Fairbanks two weeks prior. Hopped on
a plane surrounded by men carrying long cylinders with
thick shoulder straps. Engineers or mapmakers, I
thought. When I heard their banter, I realized they were
fishermen. And I—with my rolling suitcase, canvas
kicks, and marked-up copy of The Idiot—was a girl
from La La Land. The kind of girl who grinned to learn
the only theatre in town had a special screening of
Citizen Kane. The only girl who actually went to see it.
Earlier that day, I had been surrounded by boxes. My
boxes. Filled with what, only I knew. (Feathers from
Topanga. Rocks from Dungeness. Spiral seashells from
La Trinité-sur-Mer.) None of it necessary in the arctic
tundra, so it sat in boxes on the floor of my boyfriend’s
living room, our living room, which until then had been
strictly functional. We disagreed about where to put my
things, and I went to the movies alone. I admit, part of
me liked seeing it all in boxes, filling the negative space.
Perhaps it was silly bringing boxes to Alaska at all,
when all I needed was a suitcase. Silly to bring boxes to
a place so wild and free, a state so detached from all
others that on most maps it’s floating somewhere in the
Pacific, detached from the continent, pried loose from
the coordinates of the world; a far-off land where city
folk go to escape the burden of stuff, to sit in bright
light, bask in silence, listen to breath, and hope to catch
something real—something that can’t be found in a box.
I go to the lobby and tell the ticket-taker about my
problem: the light’s on, the sound’s off, and the movie’s
already started. Is it possible to go back to the
beginning? In here, yes. A cursor at the bottom of the
screen drags left. Lights dim. Woodwinds and brass
ooze. A chain-link fence appears. Suddenly, it’s 1941,
nighttime, foggy. A single light shines from a mansion
on a hill. It blinks off.
Darkness.
There’s a man.
Snow.
A mouth.
“Rosebud.”
The glass
case
b r e a k s .
The last scene of Citizen Kane shows a sweeping shot
of Kane’s stuff. Endless rows of boxes, crates,
candelabras, portraits, paintings, statues, globes, vases,
bed frames, lecterns, lamps, bowls, busts, coat racks,
rugs, relics, all infesting the floor of that massive
warehouse like a virus of excess. It’s too much for one
man, too much for one museum. I always thought the
moral of the story was that Kane might have lived a
happy life had he stopped accumulating so much stuff.
And yet.
I will drive home after the movie, longing for stuff. I
will open boxes and run my fingers along the soft vanes
of a feather from a red-tailed hawk, warm the surface of
a wasabi-colored stone with my palm, feel the spiraled
grooves of calcium carbonate in my otherwise empty
hand. And I will make the boxes
— and negative space —
disappear
“ Sometimes you know you’re experiencing a story in real time; the details are just too good to pass up. I began writing about this bizarre movie-theater moment immediately after it happened, just trying to make sense of it. My thoughts came out in equally sized chunks, and the rigidity of those shapes felt neat, tidy, precise—boxed in. I had the urge to break the form, and when I followed that instinct, I realized the literal shape of the piece was telling me what it was about. ”
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