The Show

Slick city rain ran mirrors over steely roads, reflecting fairy light strings of sickly yellow street lamps. A dressing room full of foundation, concealer and sturdy supporting underwear encompassed her stage as she swept her hair into greasy nets before the gaudy glamour wigs rose from stagnant pools of bones and silk and feathers. Painting hard outlines of dark red lipstick onto a pale face with deep shadowed eyes, she looked into the mirror which flowed into a liquid steel inside the hard ring of lights. Through this window she saw, as if from inside a hundred watching eyes, the ghost soon to be on the stage create herself. As she waited behind blacked-out blackouts she was aware that wings are not places of flight but a runway to taxi along until take-off, the cockpit of the plane a tense box of doubt and transition. This was the last station of safety, a dry place to shelter from the rain before the impossible flight into the bright blinding lights of

Afterwards the kisses and the flashing eyes smiles she turns and turns to smile again at nameless invisible faces silhouetted against the spotlight. She listens to a thousand half-heard words that sparkle like broken glass crunching underfoot and there is one face that is real, the one face that strips away the gaudy greasepaint and leaves her naked and grey and black and white and real enough to speak the words that catch on the hard lines of red around her mouth.