by Allyson Bird
Not much more, anyway. Dance is still a thorn in her soul. Any mention can send twinges down her damaged spine … start her feet flexing toward pointe even in street shoes—
Rubbing at the answering pain in one arch, she keeps reading.
There’s something familiar about the photo, too: Asian avant-garde, maybe, with pallid paint standing in for kabuki makeup. Or a mask. If it’s advertising a class, though, there’s damn little information: no dates, no times. Just a storefront address a block off the mall, where at least half the shops are vacant.
Pay what you can, the ad continues. Does zero work for you? Cee starts to crumple the paper, then notices two questions penciled in at the bottom.
How do I learn this dance? You already have.
How soon will I be dancing? You already are.
The writing is as spidery as the flyer’s blurred image, yet perfectly legible. There’s something sketched underneath: not a signature; but not a doodle, either.
A symbol? A message?
Just staring at the graphite snarl hurts her eyes. Cee finally folds the paper up carefully and puts it in the back pocket of her jeans.
If nothing else, it’s an option.
Her phone – her last link with the world of work and hope – hasn’t pinged this morning, which means no temp assignment today. No check. And no idea whose couch she’ll be surfing tonight, assuming she doesn’t opt for the Episcopalians again. A part of her knows that would be a very bad idea.
Another remembers wandering alone through moon-washed streets, in the last days of the city when all masks had fallen –
Cee stiffens. No.
A few deep breaths later, reality in the form of car keys reasserts itself. What she needs right now is somewhere to clean up, somewhere safer to park, and then breakfast. One thing at a time.
And none of those things are the shadow now detaching itself from the deeper shadows of the church’s entrance. A fading stain on the day’s first light, it wavers in her rearview mirror and is gone.
The food truck across the street from the courthouse is faded pink and turquoise, a sad tacky echo of the Southwest. Its breakfast burritos, however, remain the best and cheapest on wheels. Cee joins the long line, trying not to notice lumps of blanket and sleeping bag under the shrubberies in this small urban park.
Before this morning, it would have been easier. Now these faceless ones might wear her face if she looks at them a moment too long. If she fails to see only masks. The people ahead of her all have their own masks firmly in place, anonymous in the gray early light.
Gray as cloud-waves –
Cee sucks in her breath sharply. Better to focus to the headlines spewing from the truck’s little TV. These, at least, are not her crises. Not her luggage scattered amid corpses and scraps of fuselage, not her village obliterated in the name of faith. Not her friends unarmed against soldiers clearing free speech from the streets.
Not her world’s mask of reason slipping more each day, revealing raw chaos beneath.
She cannot recall having this insight before. Yet it holds strange comfort: her life has stopped making sense because it never did make sense. Some pallid illusion only hid this truth for a little while. Then her body broke, followed swiftly by her plans, dreams, and love life—
“Next!”
“Bacon, hot. And a large coffee, cream and sugar.” She hesitates. “Double sugar.” Maximum calories for her money, because who knows when she’ll eat next? Not the way she’s used to thinking, but the guy in dingy whites just adds another spoonful to her cup before snapping on the lid.
Cee wraps her hands around it tightly. It’s definitely autumn this morning, though most of the trees haven’t turned yet. Only one sickly aspen … and something about its leaves echoes that dream she can’t shake.
Inhaling steam from her too-hot, too-sweet coffee helps. She needs something solid in her stomach, though; green chile to burn through the thought-fog and ground her in this world.
When she gets to the truck’s pickup window, she reaches out for her burrito eagerly.
Then nearly drops it as her fingers brush the worker’s gloved hand.
What the hell?
Cold sickness washes over her as she backs away, her hindbrain yammering. Only the watching eyes of other customers keep her from breaking into a run. Whatever she just touched – whatever filled out the flabby white latex—it wasn’t flesh.
Not living flesh, anyhow.
Cee drowns that thought with a mouthful of coffee, barely noticing as it scalds her tongue. Heat is good. The fingers of her burrito hand carry a chill they won’t shake for blocks, visceral memory of something boneless and liquid—
Her stomach nearly vetoes breakfast before fresh air wins out. After missing dinner last night, the burrito in its grease-splotched goldenrod wrapper just smells too good to ignore.
She’s about to open one end with her teeth when she realizes the black scribble on that wrapper has nothing to do with Bacon, Hot.
As it did the last time she saw it—when she received the Stranger’s token in one trembling hand—the snarl of lines makes her eyes burn. Cee squeezes them shut for a moment, wondering how many pallid suns will smear the sky when she opens them again. Or does it matter? Unable to answer, she settles for a mouthful of chile.
And feels her day’s options contract to one.
Set shadow-deep between two empty storefronts, the studio door is narrow and gray. It swings open at Cee’s touch, revealing steep stairs illuminated only by sunlight. At the top of those stairs is a second door. A note has been taped to it, but it’s impossible to read from this distance.
Shutting the door behind her feels dangerous. Final. She finds herself climbing before her mind or her eyes can adjust to the dimness.
Halfway up, the music begins. It is primal in its simplicity: hand drum and bone flute in a slow pulsing rhythm that both echoes and contradicts her own heart. Impossible to dance to. Yet somewhere beneath it lies the soft, irregular whisper of bare feet—
Cee pauses to wrench off her own flats. Her toes are ugly and misshapen, a dancer’s first sacrifice. Each step after that jars her spine into memory: the leap, the missed catch, the awkward fall, the fracture. The unending twilight of recovery.
What can she possibly accomplish? Why has she come?
Her fingers are trembling by the time she pulls the note down. It crackles in her grasp like old parchment, and there are stains she does not care to examine. Four words in sepia ink spider across it.
You are already dancing.
The handwriting matches the flyer in her back pocket. The snarled lines beneath are the same as well, but Cee’s eyes no longer slide away.
Before she can reach for the knob, the door swings inward.
The studio’s windows are blacked out. Only a small constellation of spotlights illuminates the skeletal figure crawling and fluttering across its floor, draped in variegated yellow rags.
White body paint covers all visible skin, from face and palms to the soles of the twisted feet. The figure is ageless. Sexless. It does not move to the music so much as it is moved by it, a broken leaf in an uncertain wind.
Cee pulls the door shut behind her and settles on the floor to watch. Though the dancer does not acknowledge her presence, the dance itself changes. Spurred by a faster drum rhythm—a breathier wail from the flute—the dancer whirls and leaps, clawing up at the air with each landing.
The gesture lacks meaning, but the performer’s pallid face is contorted with despair.
When the dance collapses into rags moments later, Cee is not surprised. Scrambling up as quickly as her own damaged body allows, she hurries to help … until one word from the fallen dancer stops the music at its unseen source. Stops her cold.
“Daughter.”
It is a woman’s voice, barely. Ancient. Desiccated. The merest exhalation of breath, yet its certainty makes her pull back her hand. There is truth here, but no truth of her world—
At midnight—and only for a moment—all disguise will be surrendered. All truths revealed.
Yet on the twelfth stroke, there is one who does not unmask.
The Queen stares. Her entire court stares. This Stranger’s appearance is grotesque past art or imagination, an affront to the night’s festivity. Several courtiers have already complained of it.
The Queen points with her golden fan. “You are the last to abandon disguise, sir. We are all waiting upon you.”
The great hall’s clock ticks once. Twice. Thrice.
“I wear no mask.”
There is a sharp, universal intake of breath. Then the glittering fan drops to the floor unnoticed, followed by the courtiers of Carcosa—and all its Dynasty, save two. Still echoing, the Stranger’s words fall into a chasm splitting realities—
“Mother.”
The fingers clutching her own are mere twigs, but Cee holds on tightly as she assists the other woman’s rising. Step by hesitant step, they make their way across the studio, toward a long dressing table equipped with mirrors. The spotlights above them brighten as they approach.
Cee’s companion averts her gaze. “This world cannot live without masks.”
But there are no masks any more. Only cameras. Carried by unarmed heroes through war zones, perched above city intersections, shoved into pockets all over the planet, they are witnesses without discretion. Without pity.
Cee nods in hopeless agreement. “No world can.”
“Ours did not.”
The dressing table is a fine piece, marble-topped and honeycombed with strangely-labeled drawers—but its mirrors are hazed with cloud-waves. Cee helps the other woman to a stool before taking one herself.
“Hali.” Frail fingers touch the glass, opening it into memory. “It took us both, after, when the city’s streets filled with fallen masks. When the last stars shattered.”
Cee stiffens. “Yes.”
“We fell through into a place torn open by terrible light, and we lost each other. Lost ourselves.” The saffron rags flutter with each breath. “I began the dance again there, and the people welcomed it; their broken island had known enough of light. They craved masks.”
Another flutter. “And darkness.”
So the dance was the mask, that pallid illusion drawn across the face of chaos. Cee is no student of history. She cannot trace its ebb and flow of madness through the decades since—yet she has felt it. Her muscles know the steps already, having danced them in dreams.
Beneath black stars, alone.
The other woman begins pulling out drawers in the dressing table. “It is time,” she murmurs, selecting containers of crystal and alabaster, jade and lapis and porphyry. “I must abandon disguise at last.”
Cee opens her hand for the first jar. “And I must learn it.”
She pulls back her hair with a twist of fabric and begins as she is directed. The face paint goes on first, thick and silken as clotted cream. As it stiffens around her eyes – her mouth – she must give it full concentration, for the cloud-waves reflect nothing. This is the mask her world is lacking.
It cannot be less than perfect.
She proceeds to her throat and on to her shoulders, shrugging off her worn flannel shirt. There are fewer instructions, now, and those oddly garbled; though she dares not divide her attention to find out why.
The curious silver applicators are black with tarnish, and awkward in her grasp. The pale compound itself, however, feels perfectly fresh. Cool and pleasant against her skin, it carries a scent of lilies newly opened to a dual sunrise –
“Almost finished.” Cee frowns. “Except for my costume.”
When no reply comes, she glances over at last. The neighboring stool holds only torn fabric and dust, caught in a spotlight already fading.
As the hand drum begins its slow heart-pulse, Cee rises from her own stool. Kicking aside her discarded clothing, she takes up the yellow tatters and shakes them clean before draping them over her body. They flutter in a draft she hadn’t noticed before.
Behind her, cloud-waves break against the mirror.
The last illumination in the studio is that constellation of spotlights. Five stars. She has danced their mystery before … on the moon-blanched sands bordering Hali … in the streets of lost Carcosa.
She must dance it again.
She has never stopped.
Crouching, stamping, shaking her shoulders to the bone flute’s wail, Cee moves to the center and lifts her flawless Mask to her sister Hyades. The studio recedes around her into darkness. An ignorant world dreams on.
FAMILY
BY MAURA MCHUGH
Her call came, as it always did, at the yawn of morning, when the mind drunkenly staggers through the tatters of dreams into the awful glare of wakefulness.
The tune of Björk’s ‘Violently Happy’ announced her.
“Do you know what time it is?” Oisín croaked, prone on the bed, phone misaligned against his face. His anger wasn’t even awake. An indigo hue suffused his bedroom and familiar shapes bled into the walls.
Orla said something, her breath loud as if her mouth was mashed up against the receiver, her teeth clicking against plastic, but the rasps overwhelmed the quiet words.
“…he returns … light fades…”
“What? Are you pissed?” He fiddled with the phone so it slid correctly into place over his ear.
She snapped into legibility. “I’m outside.”
“For fuck’s sake!” Irritation burned off the dregs of sleep.
“Can I come up?”
He fumed, knowing there was only one answer, but let his sister stew. He heard a car rumble past her in the street. One other mad person up and awake in Dublin.
She slid into a soft, American stoner accent with chameleon expertise. “Don’t hit me with them negative waves so early in the morning.”
A smile slipped past his resentment. For a moment he remembered her vividly as a girl in their cramped living room, her wild hair sticking out in tufts from under Mam’s black bra lopsided on her head, enveloped in Dad’s leather jacket, as she rolled around in her cardboard box ‘tank’ and quoted Oddball from Kelly’s Heroes.
He sighed. “The bridge is still up.”
“Put the kettle on.”
It was whistling when he opened the door to the apartment. Orla held up a litre of milk in one hand, and a package of digestives in the other as a peace offering. Her soaked hair clung to her face, and the bones of her skull seemed to press tight against her skin. In the dim hallway her eyes glinted amid deep shadow. Beads of water rolled off her battered leather satchel slung over her drenched trench coat, and splashed into a little pool on the floor.
“Christ’s sake, Orla,” he whispered, checking up and down the corridor to see if anyone was about, “did you swim here?”
She gave him a pouty sad face with puppy eyes.
“You’d get the Oscar for best seal impersonation, but you’re a bit too rough to play the ingénue today.” He opened the door wide to avoid her wet flounce into his apartment.
“That’s not what my director tells me,” she said, chin up, squelching past him with damp dignity.
“Yeah, but that’s what’s trending on Twitter. Hang your coat in the bathroom, but gimme your supplies first.” He unburdened her and hurried to the kitchen.
“There are clean towels in the spare bedroom,” he added, voice raised over the clink of china and the scraping of butter over toast.
She returned, a red towel twisted into a turban on her head, and wrapped in his favourite brocade dressing gown. Not for the first time, he was struck by her effortless way of drawing beauty about her in every circumst
ance.
He handed her a cup of tea.
“Hmm, milky perfection.” She slurped, smacked her lips with comic vulgarity, and winked. “You’ll make a lovely wife someday.”
He snorted, then sipped his tea daintily with his little finger stuck outward like an exclamation point.
Orla picked up a slice of toast and wandered from the kitchen into the living room. Water sluiced down the two giant glass windows. Outside, dull light seeped through the low grey clouds, signalling the timid advance of morning. From their vantage point the car headlights of the very early commuters were hazy dots of light reflected in the slick roads either side of the River Liffey.
“Tea, toast, and cosy inside,” she said, quietly, the expression on her face distant, as if she was looking through the veil of rain onto a different vista.
He finished their mother’s mantra: “All’s well, worries outside.”
Instinctively he moved to her, and wrapped his free arm around her. She leaned hard into the hug, and he tightened his grip. Her skin smelled of sea foam.
A chill transferred from her into his bones. Her stillness alerted him. Tenderly, he spoke to the top of her head. “What’s wrong?”
“I went back,” she replied. “I saw him.”
Orla sat in the passenger seat of the car, her boots up against the dashboard, her body curled defensively as she meandered through topics as varied as her dress disaster during her last trip to Cannes, and the intricacies of the Appalachian accent.
Oisín noticed the tightness of his grip on the steering wheel, and tried to loosen it. Ahead the motorway to the West of Ireland undulated across the patchwork of green fields in an almost direct path to the sinking sun, now a blinding orb in a clear blue sky. In his memory trips back to the West were uncomfortable bus jaunts down bad roads through gridlocked villages while whipped by torrential rain. He’d been a student then. The last time he’d taken this route it had been for his gran’s funeral just before he graduated from art college. Obligation had forced him onto the bus that time, but the apocalyptic row with his grandfather afterwards had been justification never to return.
