Theatre of the Shadow People

“Charlie’s throwing a party tomorrow night you should definitely come ! it’d be great to see everyone”

“I don’t know, It’s been a really long time since I’ve talked with any of them.”

“Aw” she fake pouted, then chuckled “C’mon it’ll be a good time”

“It's not really my thing...”

“You're gonna make me go by myself?”

I really, really didn’t want to go. The thought of coming up against the dull meandering faces of those incredibly undriven people from highschool made my skin crawl.

High School was incredibly boring for me. I hadn’t yet come into my own, physically or sexually. There was no style in my clothing and nothing suave in my personality. If I wasn’t at home lounging in the basement in front of an old CRT, Then I’d be talking about the latest happenings with one of the few friends I had.

And those were undoubtedly the highlights.

I wasn’t a party guy, not that I was invited to many. It always seemed more fun to watch people drunkenly croon about then to actually join them.

---

Do you remember the winters of a well spent youth? No?

Curious.

Everyone remembers misspent time, crude tidings of regrettable actions. I remember every winter, how could I forget? So many memories, but if I had to pick just one, I wish I could recapture that sultry winter of 1994.

Grade Three, Jesse Mcormic’s mom had made a fuss about pedophiles or something of a similar nature, and the parents had collectively decided that the children needed to group together on their way home. Paradoxically they had also decided that all of the kids whose parents had cars and lived in the far away from the school and in far nicer homes, would carpool together. Our homes, within walking distance, required nothing but a huddled mass of scared children to ensure safe passage from the imagined tendrils of the sick and depraved.

I suppose that wasn’t entirely true either, many of us had after school duties with clubs or sports teams. But being children as we were, there was never a time that the quickly setting sun didn’t impart some semblance of terror among us.

Oh but we found ways to settle ourselves in those early winter nights of november. Us boys would hold Impromptu snowball fights or reenact laser sword battles from our dad’s old sci fi movies with old dry tree branches. The girls would hang back, occasionally joining in, mostly sneering at our escapades and gossiping amongst themselves. The amount of times my baby blue snowsuit would be fussed over by my mom for little knicks and tears wouldn’t have bugged me, if not for how the other’s would tease me for the big brown patches that she would fix them with.

But even with the seemingly insurmountable gap of our gender, we all had one thing that we enjoyed. The Theatre.

That was the name we gave it, we thought that it always sounded cool and hoaky, like the episode titles from old tv shows. The Theatre. It made what we watched seem important and more than what it actually was.

Of course we all knew what it actually was, even if we didn’t have the words to describe it back then.

It was fucking. We were watching people fuck.

We didn’t notice them the first time we passed. They looked almost normal as we passed them, like they were dancing or wrestling. Eventually Mark Donagan caught on though. He had seen his parents have sex by accident. At least he told us it was an accident, none of us believed him. But in any case, we were lucky to have his expertise, otherwise we wouldn’t have known what to look for.

We never learned their full names, but the crisp new mailbox put the last name Burton into our imagination. Everynight, until the end of the winter, this couple would take their sexual escapades into their living room. Of course they didn’t know that they were performing for an audience. They had done their due diligence, drawn the curtains and locked the doors; however they did seem to be one of the few couples who were equally attracted to each other, and so they never seemed to turn the lights off.

This of course wouldn’t have been an especially large problem if they had not also been strapped for cash when purchasing said curtains. The fabric was thin. Although not enough to show their full image, it was perfect for our needs.

Against the harsh light in their living room their shadows projected onto the curtains with a beautiful adherence to the shape of their bodies. We could clearly see each of their bodies, every curve, every part.

Each night we would gather around and began to watch as the pair began their candid performance. The couple’s shadows played out in crisp lines, dancing across the canvas curtains, imparting the secrets of the adult world.

The boys among us began their own performance, as the husband’s member presented itself to us; we stuck out our tongues and crossed our brows, pretending to be disgusted. Although we were always sure to keep one eye open, a hungry enviousness consumed us as we wondered if our own diminutive parts would ever measure up to his.

None of us would dare speak about that hunger, especially as we witnessed the wife’s own veracity, lest our desire be hailed as sexual and therefore convincing the others of deeply hidden faggotry. The shadow of her head consumed and hid his cock and she worked it forward with a strange tenderness that always seemed to favor a teasing sensibility.

I always assumed that the girls in the group stared at the display with a sense of unease. There was no way that my own misgivings about the whole ordeal weren’t shared by at least a few of them. At least I was going to be on top, I thought.

The things he did to her seemed like the sort of thing that his mother would have raised out of him around our age. In the course of about thirty minutes we had seen him push her, bend her over, throw her onto the table, slap her(on both kinds of cheeks), spit on her, choke her and make her moan in that strange and mythic way.

Those of us courageous enough to venture closer to the window would even catch brief passages of the lines they breathally yelled to each other. Which they would then proudly relay to us when they returned. “Fuck me,” “pound my pussy,” “be my cum slut,” “my fuck doll,” “Cunt,” “Cock,” “slave” and “baby”.

We were all enraptured by this new, lewd and crass development in the english language. The smart ones among us, myself included, would huddle around the playground during recess and recount the words to each other. We would giggle endlessly, rearranging the words and mimicking the couple’s voices. The dumber kids among us would boldly shout the phrases verbatim, brash and unashamed. The teachers took personal offense to this teeming corruption and would come down on those children with a ferocity akin to that of a tiger pouncing on its prey.

These newly labeled delinquents would find themselves assaulted with accusations of gross indecency; waves of guilt would be heaved towards them for the terrible crime of acknowledging the depraved action of sex.

In retrospect those same teachers likely enacted the same theatre of sex at home, just out of our veiw, or otherwise would have found themselves fantasing about the display. But even with this onslaught, no one ever broke, no one ever told. We had made a vow to keep the theatre secret and no kid among us would dare break it for fear of losing that dramatic, strange and titillating stage performance that captivated us so.

we would have sat out all night in that blistering cold, watching the pair long enough for even the thickest of our coats to be pierced. But it never came to that, they always wrapped up their performance long before the warmth that the act produced in us could have been replaced by nights embrace. She would always cum first, loud enough that we could hear her clearly from all the way across the street. “Yes, yes yes!” she would exclaim, “My fucking god, shit i’m fucking cumming!” She would always praise and promise - making sure to reassure her husband, her lord and most importantly, herself, that the act had been performed true and methodically, without any hint falsehood.

If her orgasim was the climax of the play, then his would be a slow and drawn out conclusion. After catching his breath he would stand above her, furiously jerking his cock as if he was trying to punish himself for what he had done to his wife. Sometimes it took half as long as the act itself. He would pose and posture, mumbling half heard and dispassionate versions of his previous lines, ad libbing until the proverbial curtains were drawn on the scene. She would assist, waiting to accept his semen onto herself, lest it stain the carpets or find its way in between the couch cushions. Sometimes she would lick the tip, or rub her hands on his balls or backside. Most of us learned to quietly exit during this prolonged kneeling ovation, but those of us that remained would find endless joy joking about whether or not her hands were trying to find their way up his asshole; because we would occasionally see him jump and shudder, as if something had startled him.

We all thought that this part was boring, only good for crude jokes, but looking back I can only be envious at his unfortunate longevity. When I first attempted my own, private, production of this play many years later, I always found it hard to get all of the way through my lines. I’d finish before it was thematically appropriate and I’d have to improv an entirely new scene from between the thighs of my acting partner.

Eventually he’d cum, that was another enviable trait of his. Which in its own way was a bad precedent to be set for all of us boys still watching, his entire body would lock out and then double over. Taking his final bow, he would shake as pulsed strands of jizz fired out at his wife’s face.

I have never cum as hard as that man did every night.

But after the finale, the congratulations and the final stringed encore; the show came to a conclusion. She would walk off stage left, to wash the waste off of her face, and he would collapse onto the couch, spent and tired.