A black-and-white television suspended from the ceiling plays above their heads. There’s an actress on a stage in a long white nightgown. Me. Me playing Lady M in Maine however many years ago. I recognize the footage. How could I not? My final festival. My last show, though I didn’t know it then. I’ve never seen it on-screen before, didn’t know it had even been taped—who taped this? I’m pacing the stage on my bare feet. Cold stage, I remember. White-hot light on my face. My nightgown floating ghostlike around my body. My hands are covered in blood that only I can see. Behind me, a man dressed as a doctor and a dubious nurse discuss my case, my doom. I don’t see them, of course. I’m too haunted by my own demons. I’m too busy trying to get the blood no one else can see off my hands. No idea that I’m about to fall off the stage, that my life as I know it is about to end. I’m having a ball performing my horror, pacing the very edge like a madwoman. And then my bare foot meets the air. I crash spectacularly to the ground. It makes my whole skeleton thrum now to see it. My body lying brokenly on the auditorium floor. Then the recording loops back, and miraculously, I’m pacing the stage in my white nightgown again. Staring rapturously at the blood on my hands. Performing my horror once more. I knew nothing of horror then.
I look away from the screen, back at the middling man. Standing beside the pool table now. Holding the cue stick in his fist. He seems larger than last time. Jacket off, revealing red suspenders, shirtsleeves rolled. Smiling. This supposed stranger who knows my name.
Who are you? I want to say. What do you want from me? What have you done to me?
“Sorry, could you speak up? The acoustics in this room are so terrible. It plagues mine ears.”
“Project,” shrieks the fat man through his hands. “Breathe diaphragmatically.”
“Maybe step a little to the left,” says the middling man. “More. Right. Little more left. There. Right there.”
Now I’m standing under a bright light. Their faces are shrouded in shadow, but I feel them looking at me. Waiting. Wanting to hear. Go on. Tell us. Why you’re really here.
“Briana’s back,” I say.
They gasp softly. Back?
“She came to rehearsal today. And she wants to be King,” I say.
“King, you say?”
Behind his hands, the fat man starts to chuckle.
“I think she’s trying to sabotage the play. Why else would she want to be King?”
Laughter now from the fat man.
“And she’s sick. Really sick,” I continue. “She has a limp.”
They all begin to laugh now. The middling man looks rapt.
“She’s accusing me. She accused me today in the theater.”
They break out into applause. “Oh, that’s good, really good. Love it. Bravo. Wonderful.”
“Encore,” shouts the fat man. The third man brings his fingers to his lips and whistles.
A rose is thrown at my feet. I gaze down at it lying on the floor, the sharp thorns, the riotous red petals. I smile in spite of myself. How long has it been since anyone threw me a rose?
When I look up, the spotlight above my head is out. They’ve turned back to their games. The third man has a dart in his raised hand. He’s taken aim at the fat man, who whimpers, perhaps in earnest now. The middling man is hunched over the pool table about to make a shot.
“Wait!”
They look back at me.
“You have to tell me what to do, what I’ve done. What you did to me.”
They’re smiling, why are they smiling?
“Do, did, done,” says the fat man.
“What’s done is done,” says the middling man.
“Is done, is done,” says the slender man.
“But she’s really accusing me. She’s going to tell the dean. It’s very serious.”
“It sounds very, very serious.” They all look about to laugh. I can feel them brimming with it. The fat man is chuckling again.
“Just tell me,” I whisper. “Please. Did I make her sick?”
The middling man looks at me, mistily. “Oh, how could you do anything like that, Ms. Fitch? You’re so, so good.”
The fat man laughs uproariously now behind his hands.
I look down at the rose in my hands.
“It was an accident,” I say to the rose softly.
“Of course it was.”
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” I insist. “I really didn’t.”
“How could you know, Ms. Fitch?”
“Maybe it was just a coincidence. Her getting sick like that.” I look back up at him, at them all, hopefully.