In the quiet, any flip of a switch will sound gunshot-loud.
A click makes us turn. The clatter of metal on metal turns our heads to look in the same direction. Toward the wings and, beyond that, the alley door.
There's a squeal, and the dark explodes.
In light this bright, after so long in the dark, everything we can see is only black and white. Only glaring shape-outlines we have to blink against.
The light is bolder, eye-shutting stronger than any lightbulb.
It's not the alley door. The stage explodes into daylight-bright, a solid fat beam of sunrise from somewhere overhead. The light so bright we squint and cup hands into shields to block it. This new day so sunny it throws our shadows out long behind us. Our shadows hunched and cowering against the brown water stains on the movie screen behind us.
Outlined on the movie screen, you can see our tilted wigs. Our bodies look so spidery thin, Comrade Snarky would tell us we could wear anything.
It's the movie projector with no film, the projector's bulb shining on us, a huge spotlight. Bright as a lighthouse. This sun shines from almost midnight on the rear wall of the theater.
None of us can stand yet. All we can do is duck our heads and look away.
The projector is so bright the ghost light looks burned out. Dim as a birthday candle on a summer day.
“Our ghost, again,” says the Baroness Frostbite.
Saint Gut-Free's two-headed baby.
The Countess Foresight's antiques dealer.
Agent Tattletale's gassed and hammered private detective.
Miss Sneezy yawns, saying, “Another good scene for our story.”
Like the popcorn. And the furnace being fixed. Our clothes getting washed and folded. Everything paranormal, every miracle is just another special effect.
Saint Gut-Free turns to Mother Nature and says, “Now that we're a romantic subplot . . . how about you give me that foot job?”
Agent Tattletale says, “After we're outside, I'm staying high for a month . . .”
The Reverend Godless says, “I'm burning every church I find . . .”
Each of us, just a lump of fabric, fur, and hair.
Director Denial says, “I'm buying Cora Reynolds a headstone . . .”
Back from the walls beyond the bright light, the place it hurts to look, from that far away, echo back the words “. . . headstone . . . headstone . . .”
All of us, still trying to get the last word. Rewinding his tape recorder, the Earl of Slander plays the words “headstone . . . headstone . . .” And the recorded echo, it echoes. An echo of an echo of an echo.
Echoing, until a voice from far away, from behind the sun, says, “You're playing to an empty house.”
It's a voice from beyond the grave. It's the same as our story about Comrade Snarky coming back from the dead, staggering down the lobby stairs to beg for a bite of her own rose tattoo. Against the bright light, nobody sees our ghost come down the center aisle of the auditorium. Nobody hears him walking down toward the stage on the black carpet. Nobody can tell what's coming closer in the bright glare until the voice says, again, “You're playing to an empty house . . .”
It's old trembling, teenaged Mr. Whittier. Our dying skater punk. Our spotted little devil.
Walking. A cadaver in tennis shoes. A stereo headset looped around the back of his withered neck.
“Listen to yourselves,” he says. Shaking his head, his few hairs swinging, he says, “You're so busy telling your stories to each other. You're always turning the past into a story to make yourselves right.”
What Sister Vigilante would call our culture of blame.
It never changes, he says. The other group he brought here, it ended this same way. People fall so in love with their pain, they can't leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.
Some stories, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories . . . and Whittier gestures at our skin and bones.
“Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us,” Mr. Whittier says. “It's how we digest our lives. Our experience.”
Mr. Whittier would say. This little boy dying of old age.
For a ghost he looks good. His spotted scalp, combed. His necktie knotted under his chin. His fingernails clean, shaky white half-moons. So very much the grown-up.
“You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories,” he says, “the same way this theater seems to digest people.” With one hand, he points to a carpet stain, this dark stain sticky and growing mold, branched with arms and legs.
Other events—the ones you can't digest—they poison you. Those worst parts of your life, those moments you can't talk about, they rot you from the inside out. Until you're Cassandra's wet shadow on the ground. Sunk in your own yellow protein mud.
But the stories that you can digest, that you can tell—you can take control of those past moments. You can shape them, craft them. Master them. And use them to your own good.
Those are stories as important as food.
Those are stories you can use to make people laugh or cry or sick. Or scared. To make people feel the way you felt. To help exhaust that past moment for them and for you. Until that moment is dead. Consumed. Digested. Absorbed.
It's how we can eat all the shit that happens.
Mr. Whittier would say.
Looking at Mr. Whittier, the Countess Foresight says, “Satan.” And her word hisses soft as the voice of a snake.
From Sister Vigilante, clutching her Bible, comes, “Devil . . .”
Hearing this, Mr. Whittier just sighs and says, “How we do love to have our evil enemies . . .”
“Here you go,” Chef Assassin says, and he tosses a paring knife so it clatters across the stage and stops at Mr. Whittier's black shoes.
The Chef says, “Get
