 
## Everyone Knows How Ugly You Are

### pw cooper
Copyright 2018 - pw cooper

All rights reserved.

### The First Age

The dying day is blood smeared across the horizon, writhing red through the gloaming. Trees clutch their gnarled black hands skyward from seats of green stone and naked root. Concrete fades to earth. A long night is falling, even now as you race towards it and into it.

"Are we lost?"

"We're not lost."

"You're sure?"

"Sure I'm sure."

"This just doesn't feel right."

"It is. For Christ's sake, Kate, it's fine. Okay?"

"If you're sure."

He has one hand on the wheel. She sees him by the luminous dashboard, sleeves rolled back and clock-light jaundice on his pale face. A pack of cigarettes in the shirt pocket, curling dark hair low over his eyes. His smell is soft and clean and unnatural. He has the map in his head, he says, and he knows where they are. They have neither of them ever been so far from the city.

She turns the radio dial to break the silence. Static and haze, a swirl from deep deep in the mountains and wild lake-land. Emergency broadcasts and ranger's channels flicker and are gone, ghosts in the air as if of another time. She feels they could be going back, stumbling blind into the past and lost to all who knew them. This wilder world, this terrain of supernatural history. Out of the mist a vision of time before man: no glass no steel no electric in the air. Only a low fire against the chill and darkness.

"We're way out there, aren't we?"

"Yeah."

"She's so alone. So far from everything."

"People like her can't hide. Eventually everyone finds you."

He lights a cigarette in the dark. The flicker of the lighter, the flare, the slow glow burn. He smiles at her. Puts his hand on her knee, other hand clutching the wheel, knuckles white.

"You ready?"

She nods.

"You nervous?"

"No." She is laughing.

"Good."

His hand moves up her leg. His skin feels hot on hers. He feels her, following the curve of the body. There the lacy garter, the nylon cord, the plastic buckle, the silk band. And his fingers follow.

She shivers. "Don't, Mark. Focus on the road."

"Yeah. Sure."

His hand is moving up her thigh, touching her there.

Her legs squeeze together. Then a shake of the head, a laugh. She pushes him away, her voice for a moment low. "Don't. The road." She points ahead.

"Right."

He leans back, smiling and blowing smoke out the crack of the window. Very satisfied with himself, knows he gets her worked up. She thinks it's cute, but it's annoying too. He thinks he can do anything, thinks he owns her. Sometimes she thinks so too.

They are riding into darkness.

* * *

They park amid a fleet of automobiles unattended and silent, glossy in the wild. He shuts off the engine and they are plunged into the great silence of the woodland.

"Guess we're the last to arrive."

"Hope we haven't missed anything."

"We've got the whole weekend. There's plenty of time."

"There's never enough time."

He shrugs on his jacket and puts his glasses in the pocket.

She can see the light of the house, a faint gleam through thick of the midnight forest. This is fire, something alive among savage trees. She feels entranced, summoned, and begins down the narrow and scarcely-trod path. Beyond the light she can see the glitter of the lake in moonlight, its expanse turned to shards of crystal. He follows, branches clinging at his coat as though to hold him back, woody fingers tangling in four-figure knit.

"Goddamn, it's a real jungle."

"It's spooky."

"Anything could be out here. We'd never know it."

"Not until it was too late."

They come through the brush into an immaculately tended clearing. Rust red gravel gardens in wide rock spirals, blooms like petals of stone. Granite steps down to the building on the shore. High brick walls crawling with ivy and wide windows that peer into rooms of indistinct splendor and shadowy figures. The closer they get the bigger it seems, looming and vast, a malignant growth in the wild as if erupted here from deep within the earth. From the connected boathouse there is a lone jetty extruded like a tongue to the water. The front door is the gloss black color of beetle shells, and stands ajar.

He grins and offers his arm. "Shall we?" Sardonic, a half-mocking. She smiles and rolls her eyes as she takes his hand.

In this way, as always, they descend.

A diaphony of sound spills from the house. Voices, loud and jovial and ragged, all concession to the world here abandoned. Faint music, something classical, she cannot recall the composer but feels as though it is one which she'd ought to know. Water licks at the age-stained dock and trees rustle their leafy skirts without, while within soft cries and faint moans whisper in the air. The chink of glass on glass, the slap of footfalls on hardwood, the creak of the door as they pull it open and are thrust into the light.

He goes inside, and she follows. For a moment she resists, iris constricted lips parted, knowing not what holds her back. Of course she goes; the tide is crawling and she cannot but be borne upon it.

Flesh and gold. Blood and money. To the chattering of voices.

"It's Mark and Kate! They're here!"

"Well, look at this... the young starlets finally make an appearance."

"Now the party can really begin."

An overwhelming array of faces greet them, dozens of voices calling out to them. And yet the crowd seems almost to melt away, it fades until there is only one person left standing in the center of the room. This is the mistress of the house, and they have eyes only for her as she turns to them with the ghost of a slow sad smile crossing her lips. Her dark nails clack against the banister, her garment is a whisper of black silk. There are lines on her face deep as the cracks of a city sidewalk and her eyes are as empty as glossy puddles in the road. She holds out her hand to them, regal and rictus. Kate kisses it; the skin against her lips is soft and without warmth.

"You're here."

Welcome children.

On the balcony above a man in leather crawls, welted thighs and stiletto marks along the spine. Below a woman with milky skin and languid eyes and hair the color of wheat in sunshine, she smokes an ivory pipe on the settee while another basks between her thighs. A man, naked with a hanging belly and hairy as a bear is eating soft cheese and turning the heavy rings on his fingers. A lash a sigh a laugh a moan and the gurgle of running water.

She withdraws, and beckons them after.

"Dear Kate... and my dear Mark. Come in, come in. Be comfortable. You had no trouble finding us?"

Mark is nodding, he removes his jacket and looks for a hook. A young man appears to take it, his expression impassive as he bows and removes himself.

"Darling Joel. I would be lost without him." Her voice is distant and clouded, as though she were already gone. She turns and laughs, but it is a laugh as weary as her smile.

"I'm Sophia," she says, but of course they already knew that. They had recognized her at once.

Everyone in the world knew Sophia.

### A History of Love

The immigrant girl sits in the waiting room. Her eyes trace the grains of the wood-paneled walls. They seem false; everything in this city is fake but these seem especially so. This could be a movie set, something one could reach out and push aside. All the world on wheels ready to be deconstructed at a moment's notice, at the command barked through a megaphone.

Six other girls wait. They will not look at each other. They seem each of them in a universe of their own, no sound or light or shared breath.

This is a room with two doors. The first, drab and slate gray as a tombstone, leads back outside into the cold. To hunger and chill, cockroaches in the mattress and rats in the walls. One by one the girls are sent back through it. One by one returned to anonymous misery. And the other door, polished oak, varnished and gleaming hardwood with a handle of brass like gold. What waits behind this door is opportunity. A life beyond all of this. One by one, to each girl in turn, it is denied.

And now it is her turn. The secretary calls her. Harsh angular woman behind half-moon glasses, gray-shot hair pulled back and high. Her every look a curt dismissal and a judgment.

"You can go in then," the secretary says, and the immigrant girl nods – almost a bow – as she steps through the door.

They're waiting inside, beneath the great clock counting down, behind a desk like the prow of a monstrous ship. Three men, corpulent and breathing smoke, laughing as they swish amber liquid in crystal glass. They look at her, chuckle, brushing ash from their mustaches. Their suits are elegant and painstakingly tailored; they're wrapped in linen and silk like sausages, red faces full and squeezed out. They watch her approach, watch her stand there in the center of the room with her hands folded. Their laughter does not stop. It seems to the immigrant girl that they are laughing at the young woman who came before her, the one who just left the office dabbing tears from her eyes.

The immigrant girl stands perfectly still, head down, hands folded. She does not touch, she does not act, she only waits.

The man behind the desk waves at the two sitting beside the smoke-stained window glass and the laughter dies away. The man turns to the immigrant girl and sizes her up, his deep-set eyes twinkling. He brushes his graying mustache with his thumb. His smile is like that of a hunting animal, lazy after killing.

"What's your name, love?"

She tells them her name, the foreign history of her family naked for all the world. An Eastern European heritage of fallen empires. Her voice a murmur, a whisper, an echo.

The man lets out a half-amused snort. "Fucking Polack! Should have known. Pretty little thing, though." He turns to the other men. One of them smirks, the other nods slowly and takes off his glasses to clean them. As if to better examine her.

The immigrant girl is trembling. She wills herself to stop. Not to tremble, not to cry, not to speak out.

"Okay okay. You're reading for Julia, yes? Of course. Perfect. Go on then."

The immigrant girl stammers. This is so sudden, so impersonal. She doesn't even know their names. "I-I... I s-should read the lines now?" She is fighting to cloak her accent, clipped precise English. Speaking like an American speaks, because the only roles are for Americans.

"Yeah, you should read the fucking lines!" The man laughs, he looks at his friends. "Christ, why are the pretty ones always so goddamn stupid?" His friends laugh.

"I am sorry." She speaks slowly, carefully.

The man waves a thick hand. "Just go ahead then, read the thing." He opens a folder on his desk, starts sorting papers. The two men by the window turn to each other, speaking in low voices. Nobody is looking at her.

She opens her mouth. Throat dry, tongue thick. She swallows. She speaks.

Julia. Beautiful confident Julia. A goddess, a star. Julia is afraid of nothing. The immigrant girl knows the lines. She has studied them, spent hours with the script at the library, looking up each word in the dictionary as she goes just to be sure.

She lifts her chin. She speaks. She is Julia now. Focus on that, let nothing come between this. No longer afraid, no longer shy. Julia is not shy. Julia is not scared of these men, Julia would eat them alive.

Julia is glowing, hot and fierce as a sun, and all the heavens inflamed. She is not here in this office with these men, she is standing on the steps of the estate, calling into the wind and rain as her lover shuts the door of his automobile. She is pleading, begging him to stay, to hold her, to love her, to be hers. And he shuts the door. She runs to the car, she pounds on the windows, she is desperate, she would do anything if only he will stay! She screams the name of her beloved and he-

"Yeah. Okay, go ahead and stop there, alright?"

The immigrant girl stammers. She feels as though the world has dropped out from under her, as though everything has been upended. She almost falls to her knees, swaying like a doll with three strings cut. Stop? How can she _stop_? They may as well command her to stop living. And yet she lives on.

"Not bad. Not too bad." The fat man taps the ash from the tip of his cigar. "Something there maybe?" He looks to the man in the glasses, who nods, then returns his toad-like gaze to her. "You've got something, maybe. Good presence. Not for Julia. All wrong for Julia." He opens another folder, shuffling head-shots. The devil is playing cards for the souls of the righteous.

"I... do not get the part?" She is shaking, her controlled accent breaking down. She _is_ Julia, it's all she could ever be. How many weeks – or has it been months? – pouring herself into this other woman, this other life. How can they take it away from her so easily? Without a thought.

"Not Julia. There's another picture I'm casting though. Think you might fit. _The_ _Hangman's Call_. War picture. There's a part there might suit you. I could put your name in."

Her head is spinning. Another picture? A different role? Just like that, shuffled away. Julia recedes. Who is she now?

The other man by the window, the younger one, leans forward, cocky grin on his face. "Show us what you're working with, sweetheart."

The fat man's lips flicker, a quivering little smile buried in his jowls.

"Excuse me? I do not understand..."

The man in the glasses purses his lips. "We want to see what you look like, darling."

"Lose the outfit, will ya? Christ, this broad dresses like my granny."

"I..." She touches the top button of her coat, fingering it fearfully. Why? How could? Who are these men?

The fat man waves his hand. Impatient. Bored. Go on then go on. Like a policeman waving an old lady across the road. Go on then go on. This is how this works. Don't hold things up. Don't be difficult. Go on then go on. Don't make me wait.

She undresses. Down to her garters and stockings and brassier. Her skin prickling in the cold.

The young man licks his lips. The man in the glasses frowns. The fat man laughs and unzips his pants. He speaks as he reaches in. "The picture's being directed by James Cavendish, fine man, great eye. He'll take good care of you. I've got his number right here. Should I give him a call?" He pulls out the thing. Stumpy pale in a thicket of coarse dark hair, soft as a sea slug and quivering. She wills herself not to flinch.

Should I give him a call? She stands frozen, her thighs prickling, her hands trembling. She won't go back out there. She won't be one of those girls going back out the gray door with nothing. She can't. She crosses the room. She goes around the great desk and she gets on her knees. This is nothing. This is nothing she has not done before. The border officer at the dock. The landlord of her apartment. The booking agent who set up the audition. This is what they want. To have her. To devour her. She will not be devoured by them. She will last. They cannot touch who she is. This is only a role, only a part to play. The beautiful woman abused by the powerful men. She understands this. She can accept this. It is not her. It is only the beautiful woman who suffers. Not her. She touches him.

The fat man grabs her by the back of the head and forces her down. He forces her to himself, holds her there. Stronger than he looks, as they always are. No point fighting. He picks up the phone. He dials.

The young man claps his hands once, rocking in his chair like a boy. The man in the glasses smiles icily and watches, wire-frames glinting.

"Yeah, give me Jimmy Cavendish. Sure I'll hold. Take your time." He covers the receiver and smiles. The young man cackles, tapping his feet on the ground. Tap tap tap in rhythm. Like the marching band that went below her window on the fourth of July. The boys in brass and scarlet, with their drums and horns, the parade floats following like a dream on wheels. Turning. On and on it went, for hours it seemed. When will they ever stop, she wondered, nose pressed to the glass, how long and how far in this country of infinite riches? She watched until the last float was long gone, and dreamed of marching boys for weeks after.

"Jimmy! Listen, I found you a girl. No, no, for Laura. Right, that one. Haven't cast it already, have you? Good man! I'll send her round the studio tomorrow, see what you think of her. Yeah Jimmy, I think she'll do just fine."

He is stroking her hair, like petting a dog. They talk on, trading pleasantries, laughing. Who is this man on the other side of the telephone wire? Who is this into whose hands she has been given? Do not cry, do not. This is only a role, only play. This is not really happening. Everything is fake in this town, remember? Remember.

"Perfect. Alright, she'll be there." And he hangs up the phone.

He lifts her, hand on her chin. Like a drowned child, like a baptized sinner. All of this washes clean. He looks down. She looks back, trying not to cry, trying not to gag. Serene and beautiful. Always serene. They don't like to think they've disturbed the surface of the water, don't want to see the river running. That all they do is good and what they take only their just due.

He scribbles a name and an address on a scrap of paper, folds it into her hand. "Go see Jimmy tomorrow. You'll be a knockout, darling."

She nods, half-rising.

The young man laughs. "Need to change that name though. Can't put a name like that on a goddamn poster."

"My name, sir?" Who is she?

"He's right. You're no gypsy, darling. That hair, that voice, those eyes! You're an Elizabeth Taylor, a Sophia Lauren." The fat man snaps his fingers. "That's it. Sophia, that's you."

"Sophia, sir?"

"Sophia."

The man in the glasses nods fractionally. "What about a surname?"

The fat man laughs. "Surname? Shit, what am I, her agent? We'll come up with something! Name her after the dog for all I care." He chortles, a deep rolling belly laugh. The other two men laugh along. The immigrant girl tries to smile with them.

Who am I now?

The laughter stopped. The fat man studies her again, and there is a sly look in his eyes. "What else can you do, love?"

What else? What else is there to be?

"I hear gypsies take it up the ass." The young man snickers.

"I've heard that too," the man in the glasses remarks, tone dry, expression blank. Is he joking? Is this American humor?

The fat man pats her cheek. "You like that, darling?" Blowing hot and foul smoke in her face.

Her lip trembles. "Please sir, I-"

He laughs. Deep rolling laughter. "Hear that? How bad she wants it? Please, she says!" And he's lifting her, turning her, bending her over the desk, thick fingers yanking at her garters, at her underclothes.

Her throat is dry, her tongue frozen in her mouth. She cannot speak, she cannot move. The men are laughing, are they laughing at her? What are they laughing for? What has she done? She will not cry. She can feel her fingers closing around the scrap of paper, clutching tighter and tighter.

The fat man's bulk is looming over her. The young man by the window is clapping his hands and rocking in his chair. She will not cry, not in front of them. Not here.

Later she cries, sitting on the toilet of her apartment. Knees up against her chest to keep from pressing against the wall. She holds a fold of tissue in one hand. Red like a Rorschach test. A reading of tea leaves. This is your true self, this is your future. Clutched in her other fist is the scrap of paper. The ticket.

She cries, but it is not she that is hurt. She is safe, beyond this. Only the new self weeps. Sophia. Sophia. She whispers the name to herself, like a prayer. Nothing can hurt me now. It is only a role that I play.

Sophia.

### The Second Age

Death has opened its arms to you, my child. Run to it. Bare feet in the grass and the soft mud as you run screaming with laughter into the fields of your fathers. It stands, patient and still and spilling love, to wrap itself about you. All the earth is a loving thing made for you alone.

"This isn't what I expected."

"Oh yeah? What did you expect?"

"I don't know, really. You just have a feeling about these things, right? I don't know anymore..."

"Just give it a chance."

"I'm not sure I want to stay..."

"You wanna go? We can't go. We can't fucking go, it took a whole day just to get here."

"I know, I know..."

"Look, if you aren't happy we can go."

"I didn't say I wasn't happy."

"It's only the weekend. Just a few days."

"I'm not saying we have to leave. It's just not what I expected."

She's standing against the wall and he's leaning into her, an unlit cigarette between his fingers. There are stories on his fingers, the dirt swirled in his prints, the dandruff under one fingernail and the blood under another, the wire-thin scar on the side of the thumb. All of his history is etched there if you look close enough. And everyone is looking, everyone is watching. But not here. These people know him, and they know her too, but here alone no one seems to see them. It is a relief and a horror. Her greatest wish and greatest fear: to be invisible, to be _invisible_. She has seldom been ignored as she is being ignored now.

She looks at him. His is a magazine face, made to fit just there in the crease of the glossy pages, there in the fold of the cheap tabloid print. There are no cameras. She remembers a life like that, if she were a child again, in the time before. Their lives a song to nothing, unrecorded and unheard.

It has her off balance. She's out of her environment, a great cat free after a lifetime in the zoo. No more bars no more smudged Plexiglas. But this is what she wanted, isn't it? This is why they came here? Sometimes the thing you most want is the thing you are least able to endure.

He lights his cigarette.

"Kate?"

She jumps a little when his fingers brush his shoulder. "Yeah babe? What, uh, what is it?"

He smiles indulgently, and he tucks her hair behind her ear. She knows the maneuver so well. Means he's impatient with her. "You're not going to hide here in the corner all night, are you?"

She laughs. "No. Sorry. No. I, uh. I'm just adjusting, right?" She gestures at the room. "I mean seriously. This is... something, yeah?"

The room has become an elaborate architecture of flesh. Bare skin and limbs interlocking, bodies joined and joining. A tableaux of cruelty and of unification.

In the center of the room there is a woman, a thin girl suspended by her wrists from the high ceiling. Her toes dance on the floor, slipping and feeling to hold her, to take the weight off her slender hands. Two people, a pair, a man and women sexless in black leather, masked faceless creatures with whips in their hands. An irregular cracking of thongs singing, and the thwack of leather against flesh. The girl's face twisting with pain at every impact. Her cries muffled beneath an elaborate gag strapped and twisted between her lips.

Wine flows, and cool conversation babbles across the room. Flickering lights – all flame, nothing electric – refract in crystal and diamond, jewels glinting at throats and heavily laden fingers. A woman stands with one stiletto heel rested on the throat of a man abject and leashed. Her head is thrown back and her wine glass lifted. She drinks deep, her throat bobbing and moving as the blood-red liquor spills over her lips.

"It's... It's fucking something alright." He smiles, a knowing sort of smile.

"Like some kind of nightmare."

He tuts, ticks one finger back and forth like the hand of an errant clock. "Lighten up, Kate. It's only a party. They have parties like this in LA every night. We've been to them."

She shrugs. "You're right. I know. Forget it. I'm just... I dunno. Just not drunk enough, I guess." She laughs.

She plucks the cigarette from between his lips and takes a long desperate drag. Her first in weeks. She is perpetually quitting, has been since she was thirteen years old and her mother gave them to her to help her lose weight.

He pats her cheek. "There there," and he reaches into the shirt pocket where he keeps a little plastic bag. A half a dozen pills inside, shifting as he jiggles it in her face, worm teasing the fish, hook gleaming. "You just need to relax." He grins and taps a pill into her hand and another into his. He winks and links arms with her, his hand to her mouth, hers to his. They feed each other pleasure, chemical signals to the brain like a cascade of fire.

He blinks and shakes his head and grins crookedly.

She tries to smile back.

He brushes the tip of her nose. "Feel better?"

"Yeah."

The fear is there still, she can feel it worming beneath the sparks. But it is buried for now, and she will not wish it back to the surface.

"So, can we leave the corner?"

"Sure, sure. Let's mingle."

* * *

The fat man laughs, mouth open, masticated hors d'oeuvres between his teeth. His blue silk robe is open down the middle and his stomach hanging down dirty with damp black hair and quivering as he chortles. His whole body seems to crawl over itself. He chokes and sputters as his amusement fades, brushing his mustache and pushing more food into his mouth. "Of course," he says, raising a greasy finger, "of course I couldn't say the same for myself. Not at the time, anyway."

She nods. She has forgotten the context of his story. What is the man's name? Did he ever tell her? She is sure that he did, they both did, he and his companion. The fat man's friend is an inverse mirror, scrawny and tidy as a cat licking its paws. His nose twitches and he giggles like a flute to his partner's bass rumble.

"Mark and Kate here, _Christ!_ " and here the fat man points to her, points three times in rapid meaty succession, "The ratings they've got on this show of theirs. God, I'd sell my soul for half their demographic if I still had one." And he bursts into a new fit of uproarious amusement. The scrawny man snickers and brushes at his upper lip.

She finds that she cannot stop staring at them, studying them. They seem only half-human to her, creatures of dream and imagination. She cocks her head to one side, looking at them, head to toe front to back, trying to make sense of their presence.

The fat man parts his robe and reaches down beneath his gut. He fishes out his cock and clasps it in a sweaty fist. "You don't mind, darling?" He says, eyes twinkling.

She smiles, feeling serene. "Help yourself."

His whole face seems to twitch. A hellish sort of smile, all the muscles of his face contracting and spasming. And he begins to work at himself. Quick brutish strokes.

Mark scoffs and takes another sip of wine, rolls his eyes.

Kate moves just to one side, out of the line-of-fire, as it were. "Is this your first time here?"

"Sophia's? There's nothing like it. I'm right, aren't I? I mean, have you ever seen anything like this?"

She shakes her head. "Not quite like this, no."

"You _won't_! You won't ever see anything like one of Sophia's parties, goddamn it. You're lucky to be invited. But of course you're having a hell of a season, darling. I hear there's talk of awards coming your way? And Mark?"

Mark smiles coyly. "Oh, I don't pay attention to the awards, Harvey."

He laughs, but it's a differently laugh, knowing and cool. "Of course not. Of course you can't really pay attention. Not to the _awards_! For fuck's sake. But still..."

"We're just happy to be doing good work," she says.

The fat man and the skinny man look at each other, a secret knowing passing between them. All the while the man's fist never ceases its shuffling movement. His penis, curved and hairy, peers out from under his heavy belly like a thing gasping for air, a beast slowly suffocating.

The suspended woman screams. Kate turns with a start. The woman is revolving slowly, trails of blood traveling down the backs of her milk-white thighs. She wears a black silk blindfold, and her face is twisted with pain.

"Is she alright?" Kate asks, blinking quickly. She has taken Mark's cigarette and is turning it in her fingers again.

The fat man shudders, groaning and quivering. His face a deep beet red, his fingers gripping the marble counter-top. Then with a gasp and a shudder he releases. Pale colorless semen spills onto the floor, an elliptical trail leading the way back to him, cooling fast on the hardwood.

"Hm? Is she what?"

"Is she alright?" Her eyes follow the path of the cum across the floor, like footprints in the forest.

"Sasha?" The fat man laughs, "my darling girl, I should say so. I can only assume that Sasha is in heaven at this moment."

The scrawny man laughs. He is getting down on his knees, crawling at their feet. He is lowering his face to the floor and extending his tongue. He follows the drops of semen with his mouth, licking them up one after the other. His long throat bobs with every swallow.

The fat man is quivering with amusement. He shakes out his silk robe, peeling it from his sticky body. "She's in heaven, Kate. In heaven."

### A History of Knowing

"Sophia! Goddammit! Cut!"

She blinks into the light. She is blind, a child emerging from the womb. The enormous floods are pouring on her, four of them and each as tall as any man. Beyond the lights are arrayed the engines of war in terrible disorder. Tanks and planes and guns creeping upon the earth, and around them soldiers in their hundreds. Cameras are on them in swarms, like carrion birds eyeing a great carcass. Standing with her in the light is the old soldier, his lip curled with disdain, his hair waxed back and his skin blotchy with make-up.

For a moment she is unaware they are speaking to her. It was two months ago when she was given her new name, and she is wearing it still only reluctantly. She sees the eyes turned on her, the accusations and disappointment. The great machine is grinding to a halt, like an enormous dog which refuses to go on no matter how its master pulls and curses.

James Cavendish is an odd man. Everybody calls him young, the young director. He is at least ten years older than her, however, so he seems old to her. They all seem older than her, and more experienced. Everybody knows just where to stand and what to do at all times, and she cannot work out how they know, nor how their method of communication seems to elude her again and again. She studies their every action, aching for a clue or a sign, but their world remains closed to her.

She blinks into the light.

They are once more angry with her. What has she done? She forgot that she was on the set of a film. She is Laura Thorpe, and no other. The tanks had seemed to be coming closer; they had seemed to be about to fire. Everything was going to be taken away from her. She remembers seeing the advance of the tanks when she was a little girl, seeing the great armored things like massive insects creeping over the ridge. She remembers the way her parent's home burned, and the way the fire was reflected in her mother's eyes for so many months after it had gone cold. Her own memories are becoming Laura's, and when the tanks rolled over the hill she screamed.

James is pacing back and forth, tugging at his little beard. He did that, she'd noticed, when he was upset. Usually he was upset about something to do with money, though she thought surely he must have more money than anybody could ever hope for. They had turned the old quarry into a bristling war zone in a matter of days, building a town and inflicting false destruction upon its false denizens as a matter of course.

The old man came to her. The producer, Leigh. The avuncular old man who listened placidly while James screamed. The one who said that she could come to him, if she needed anything. Think of me as another father, alright? That's what he'd said to her. He puts his hands on her arms, just below the shoulders. He holds her with both hands and he makes her face him. He looks at her, his kindly brown eyes intent on her.

"Come on, sweetheart, come on."

She looks away. "I am sorry," her accent thick. It still slips occasionally, at the worse times. It makes her afraid to speak. They will know her, see that she is just a poor little Polish girl, a nobody lost in the vastness of America.

"Do you know what you did, honey? Do you know?"

"I went too soon."

"That's right. Too soon. It's okay though, they didn't set off the charges yet. We'll just roll the tanks back down and run it again, it's alright."

She can hear the strain in his voice. It is _not_ alright. She can imagine the money spilling through his fingers, the precious money which James insists is so desperately needed. They have spent enough money on her. One thousand dollars, she could hardly believe it. One thousand dollars to sign! More than she has ever known or could ever know what to do with. The money is very important.

"Just remember, sweetheart, you don't react until the explosion. Not until after the _bang_! Remember what we talked about? You're frozen! In shock!"

The old soldier spits on the ground. "Come off it, Leigh! She's just a silly girl. Probably can't understand a word you're saying. Waste of time, prodding her about like a cow."

"Now now, Geoffrey." Leigh pats her cheek and gives her a smile.

The old actor does not like her. He has called her names, sometimes very cruel names. Sometimes only a little cruel. The others patted her afterward, but they would not speak for her. Nobody wanted to upset the old actor. He is mercurial, they say, a genius! It's just his way, darling, his process. He calls her worse names when he is drunk, and he slapped her when they were acting, to keep her on her toes, he said. One day he slapped her so hard that James insisted they film from the other side afterward, so her glowing red cheek wouldn't show on film. He'd been angry that day, but somehow it had become her fault. It was easier for everyone if it was her fault.

James comes back into the glare of the lights. He is nothing against them, a shadow overcome by the light, you can't see the details of him. Like he's been obliterated, a ghost frozen in the flash of the shell or the bomb, speaking from the moment of death, the instant before the mortal strand snaps.

"Alright, we're running it again from marker two. Sophia, remember. Don't jump your cue." He nods to the man beside him and that man bellows instructions through his megaphone.

The soldiers and tanks below groan as they shift positions, reversing and running back time.

"Places!"

Geoffrey comes to her side. His voice is low and softly slurring, "Do try not to fuck it up this time."

She nods, wanting to cry. But of course she can't do that. She is too afraid of what they will say if she does that. And besides, Laura is not supposed to cry.

"Okay people! Everybody ready! Action!"

The cameras are all rolling, and the tanks are all rolling. The snarl on Geoffrey's face melts away and his arms wrap around her. He holds her close and he looks at her and she is sure that he is a different person. Her savior, desperate to protect her, willing to give his life to see her safe. She presses her body against him. Laura trusts him.

She waits, trembling at the sounds of war, at the sight of her doom approaching. She swallows her fear, holding it in for the moment when she will once more be allowed to feel it.

* * *

She can't tell anymore what is false and what is real. She is like the two sides of a coin, flicked into the air and spinning, no way to say which side will land facing up.

The old man leans down and strokes the side of her face, his weathered hand rough on her smooth cheek.

The old man is on top of her, his body crushing hers. She is like a bird trapped under the paw of a lion, fluttering uselessly, her struggles hardly noticed.

He caresses her throat, hand moving down her slender neck. He is going to kiss her, she can feel it. His breath is hot on her cheek.

He reaches down and pulls aside her underpants. They tear like tissue paper, like nothing at all.

His lips touch hers, the gentlest brush of skin on skin. His breath is clean and cold, like mint or colorless liquor.

His thing is shoving into her, batting at her like an eager puppy's damp nose. She is so dry, it hurts when he pushes it.

His mouth is pressing on hers, his hands holding her like a china cup.

He is forcing himself inside her. His hair down there is course as wire, like bristles and pine needles.

"My little dove," he says.

"My darling girl," he says.

He does it again and again, the same motions repeated, the same words spoken in her ear.

He does it again and again, the same motions repeated, the same words spoken in her ear.

Geoffrey rolls off her, brushing his lips with the back of his hand. The love falls from his face like a discarded napkin, stained and useless. He doesn't look at her. Someone hands him a cup and he drinks, coughing, clearing his throat. "Was that alright?" he asks the director. The three walls of the bedroom set seem to loom over her.

Leigh rolls off her, wiping his penis with her torn underwear. The lust falls from his eyes like a veil dropping. He doesn't look at her. He wrings his hands, coughing and clearing his throat. "Was that alright?" he asks her. The four walls of the trailer seem to crush in on her.

She only lays back and she stares up at the ceiling.

* * *

She is crying still, dabbing her eyes and sniffling. They are gathered around her, laughing, applauding. She is the bright center of everything, and around her they orbit with smiles on their faces like fluttering moths. All the weeks which have gone and the days yet to come, we have traveled together through this.

James has his hands on his hips and he's shaking his head, if you couldn't see his face you might think he was disappointed, but he is also smiling.

She laughs, she cannot stop crying.

"It was beautiful! You were amazing! Bravo!"

They are all crowding around her, it is like they are sucking away the air from her lungs and blocking out all the light. She wants to scream and push them away and die.

She breathes slowly. It is a passing thing. It is not a real thing.

She is dead now. Laura died, and her death was such a beautiful thing that the technicians and the assistants and the actors and the produces are all crying over her. Weeping for the body of Laura, while Sophia breathes on. The pale shadow.

I am dead. I am dead. I am dead. The words are ringing in her head, like an echo of distant music. Like a memory.

_So this is what it's like_. To be dead.

She brushes them aside. Takes their congratulation in stride. Returns their smiles. And she rises. Rises from the ground where Laura will forever lie. And in the cold dark lens of the camera her reflection ascends. But the camera does not see this, it has been tricked. The camera sees only death, and it believes.

James comes and he shakes her hand. "You did good, kid."

She laughs and wipes her eyes and nods.

He claps his hands. "Alright people, that's a wrap for Sophia. Let's give her a big hand, eh?"

A smattering of applause, a few sharp whistles, a halfhearted cheer. Already the mood is beginning to dissipate. Already the thing is coming to its end. And they are drifting away, a few people to here and a few to there. There are many places to be and they cannot linger among the dead and dying. There are more scenes to shoot, the show must go on. We're not finished yet, but you, you Sophia. You are free. Like a spirit flying loose from the crumbling body. She is like a ghost.

She walks through the set, through the ruins. She can feel Laura shrinking, all her life hissing out like air from a balloon. It comes out through her mouth and eyes and fingers. Comes out in her tears. But it will not all leave her, a hard knob is left, a pit in the stomach, a knot in the throat. Laura will never been gone, she's left a waste of her. The teacher once told her that if you swallow chewing gum it will remain in your stomach forever, and that is how she feels. Laura is a little mass of gum stuck forever inside. A little cancer inside.

Sophia walks alone through the war zone, out past the edge of the set and into the meadow. There's a track just on the other side of the trees where they cart in trunk-loads of supplies and equipment, where actors and extras alike arrive like an invading force in the terraformed world. But in this meadow there is nothing but the faint calls of the distant production.

It all goes on without her still.

Sophia lays in the field, in the autumn sunshine. There is blood all down the front of her dress, smoke and smolder, dust and dirt under her fingernails. All of this is an illusion. But Laura is dead, and a part of her remains.

Sophia curls up, hugging herself, and she weeps.

### The Third Age

This is the child. Touch it, press your fingertips into its skin, put your lips to its body. You can feel the shape of it, a thing of promise and misery. Another life. How this goes on and on, the parade of broken things. Your child is dead and gone.

"Yeah. Yeah, that's me."

She blushes, playing with her hair, biting her lip. All the little games. "I _thought_ it was you..."

"Yeah, well." Mark grins. He likes to play this game. Likes to flirt. Drawing flies.

Kate watches him, half-interested, as he laughs with the girl. As he strokes her bare arm casually, almost accidentally. As he brushes close to her. There is a flute of champagne in his hand and a folded linen napkin in his back pocket.

The girl is like any other of her kind. A slender creature of bright lights and bathroom purges. One can see the way her body is set upon the bones, like paper or lace draped, only a wisp of a thing, hardly human. She stands with one hand on her hip, one finger between her lips whenever she stops speaking. Her heels are knives, clacking the hardwood. Gaudy jewelry dangles from her like crystallized slime, a hundred thousand dollars in borrowed diamond. Her cheekbones her practiced smile her painted face.

Kate knows her. She is the familiar girl, the thing which orbits about fame, the bobble to be hung from every producer's arm.

She likes girls like that. Slim delicate creatures who cry when they are alone like lost puppies for a master. Placid as a lake now and desperate beneath the surface. They're tragic shapes, ghosts of sorrow and life left behind. Somewhere a listless heartland woman and her fat husband are missing their bright-eyed girl, wondering if maybe tonight she will call and perhaps we'd better stay a few hours more by the phone. She's here, far away, gone a dull glaze with betrayed hope. Girls like that are gone and gone forever. Girls like that were never children; they're built in a factory from eggshells and crocodile leather. They don't go home.

Mark laughs softly. He leans close and whispers something in the girl's ear. His lips brush her cheek. She smiles and she looks down, teeth parted. She turns away, eyes distant, mouth red as an opening flower. And her hand is on the collar of his jacket, touch light as breath.

We've come a long way now. Infinite repetitions of the essential act. Somewhere back there are mothers and fathers rutting by the naked fire with dirt under their nails and blood in their mouths. And history is a great gear turning, a generator of love raised like a blister on the skin of time. We're far off.

Kate twists the cork and pops it. She drinks from the bottle, poking about the kitchen, her hands running over every shining surface. So this is Sophia's kitchen. How strange to think of her in a place like this, chrome and ceramic, knives in the block.

Sophia has always seemed to her a thing not entirely of this earth. It's impossible to imagine her puttering, stirring soup pots or cutting onions, mixing egg salad or peeling the skin from an apple. She is not one of those who do things, but one for whom things are done. It seems wrong somehow that she would even have a kitchen.

Kate closes her eyes and breathes in. She tastes the air around her, Sophia's air. _And this is where you live_. She feels the surface of the counter. She listens to the sounds of the house. A drip of water in the sink, unsteady. A creaking of the floorboards below. A gentle moaning of the water moving through the pipes. This house is alive, and it is a part of the woman. _I could become you._

Kate's fingers swipe across something, a viscus liquid, thick and sticky. She opens her eyes. Red. Blood. She holds her hand up, touching the dot from thumb to forefinger, watching it part. She runs the water and washes it from her skin. She wonders whose blood it is. There's a small collection of it on the counter, a few spatters. And more, a dribble down the face of the cabinet, three thin streaks. And on the floor another, and another trailing out of the kitchen by way of the rear door.

Kate looks at it. There are a thousand reasons, a thousand possibilities. She follows the trail to the doorway and pushes it open. The old wooden frame creaks. A long dark hall, no lights. The illumination of kitchen lamplight spills through and shows another red drop down the turn of the passage.

"Mark!"

He ignores her for a moment, laughing at something the girl has said.

"Mark, come here!"

He sighs, extracting himself from the patting hands of his slender new friend. The girl pouts, her arms folding and her lower lip protruding. Mark reassures her, kisses her once on each cheek. She wags a finger at him and drifts away, a beggar searching for more generous patrons, and Mark at last crosses the kitchen to join her.

"What _is_ it? Jesus. I was starting to get somewhere."

"Oh please, as if you even have to try with her."

He grins. "Never hurts to stay in practice, you know."

She rolls her eyes.

"What's so important? Or are you jealous?"

Kate points down the hall. "I'm going down there. Come with me."

He frowns, giving her a long and searching look. When he's concluded that she is indeed serious he peeks into the dark hall. He says nothing, but the look on his face speaks well enough for him. He downs the last of his champagne and sets the glass on the counter. "Down here?" he asks.

Kate does not answer. She steps into the hall. He follows.

They go beyond the light, like shadows into darkness. His hand is on her shoulder, and down her back. He has hot hands, she can feel the warmth of him against her cool skin. She is a chill thing, lips blue and lashes frosted. Problematic circulation. People flinch when they come in contact for the first time. They're startled, surprised. They shiver. She has always been cold, feet like ice under the covers between Mom and Dad, her small body clinging to theirs like a dying thing. An ex – a boy actor she dated – called her a cold fish when she was just fourteen years old. She slapped him. Now she wears it as a shield, a cloak against everything. The warmth of the world is a distant thing, and she is perpetually coming in as if from an outer chill.

Only Mark has never made any mention of her temperature, not once. She's never asked him about it directly, but she leaves hints, drops suggestions. He never takes the bait. Perhaps he simply does not notice. Only he.

"So what were you going to do with that girl?" she asks.

"Come on."

"Were you going to fuck her?"

He hand moves over her back, knuckling between the shoulders the way he knows she likes.

"I wouldn't have minded, you know."

"I know."

"Just in case you were worried about me."

"She was just a girl, Kate. We were only talking."

"It looked like more than that to me."

"I thought you didn't care."

"I never said that. Of course I care. I'm okay with it, Mark. I accept it. I like it, sometimes. I like knowing you fuck other girls. I never wanted to be exclusive, you know that. I care, though."

"Right. Sorry."

"It's not like I don't fuck other guys."

He snorts. "You don't."

"Sure I do!"

"You might think about it. You might _say_ you do it, you might _want_ to do it. But you don't."

"How would you know?"

"I know."

"Fine. Think what you want to think."

"I wouldn't mind either, for the record."

"I know."

"I mean, Christ. This is what we're here for, isn't it? It's why we came."

"It's not why _I_ came, Mark, you know that."

"Oh right. Of course. Sorry."

"I'm working right now, believe it or not."

"Sure you are."

She laughs. "Don't tease me!"

"Fine fine fine. You go ahead and work, then. I'm gonna go back and fuck that girl."

She slaps his arm. "No, you aren't. Not right now. I need you now."

"Why? What are we doing back here anyway?"

"Worried we'll get in trouble?"

He coughs.

"People like us don't get in trouble, Mark, didn't you know?"

He rolls his eyes.

She crouches down, touches the dusty floor. "It stopped."

"What stopped?"

"The trail."

He taps his feet, frustration mounting.

"The blood trail."

"The _blood_ trail? Jesus, Kate."

She rises. Just ahead the hallway ends, turning down a long low stairway. There are no lights but a dusky glow ahead and behind. "Down there..."

"This place is fucking creepy."

She touches the wall. Stained wood, rough once and smoothed with age. It drinks at her fingertips, as cold as she. A cold coiled heart in the stone and the wood. "I kind of like it. Now that I'm inside I find it growing on me."

"You would."

"Come on."

He grumbles, and follows her down the creaking steps.

There is music somewhere below, a moaning dirge, a crackling low rumble that she can hear in her belly. At the foot of the stairs a narrow hall. They are under the earth now, down with the corpses.

A door, cracked open, flickering golden light spilling like the yolk of a broken egg.

Not music, she thinks, not music but the sounds of a crowd. People in agony or pleasure or both. They are calling to something beyond.

Mark catches her arm. He shakes his head. She brushes his hand away and opens the door.

Sophia is there, sitting in the center of the room, enthroned on flesh. The floor is carpeted with limbs, sticky shining in the light like melting metal smeared across skin. There are at least two dozen people in the airless room, tangled like bodies in a mass grave, still writhing and moaning as the final spasms of life flicker out or flare bright.

Kate cannot see any eyes, she searches, but every face is either turned from her or buried in the flesh of another. Against the wall, against the floor. They are the faceless ones, lost in bitter ecstasy.

Sophia is there in the middle of the room, the only one still clothed, still in her black lace. She holds a man against her, her fingers digging into his chest, her face buried against his neck, mouth working his skin. She looks up when she hears the door swing open.

Sophia smiles at them, her mouth full of blood.

### A History of Forgetting

The flashbulbs are snapping like a forest of firecrackers.

"Geoffrey! Hey, Geoffrey! Look this way, sir!" Their voices chatter at the old actor, all in a great clamor as their arms shoot up and wave, a sea of limbs flailing as if calling ashore for help. They strain at the velvet rope, howling and snapping one picture after another.

"Alright boys, alright." The old actor forces a smile, hardly more than a grimace, and waves to the reporters.

"Put your arm around the girl, sir, how about that! Give her a kiss for us!" They are hungry, teeth showing as they snap and bray.

Sophia is flinching in the light, struggling to keep her face composed, to balance upon the points of her high-heeled shoes.

Geoffrey throws an obliging arm over her shoulder. His breath reeks of whiskey, the sour warmth of it spilling between his pursed lips. He stands a moment gripping her arm, then lets her go. He continues on down the red carpet with a wave and not so much as a glance back.

Sophia blinks into the light. She is penned in by photographers on both sides, like a dog at the racetrack with slobbering gamblers screaming after her. And she runs. The hunted bitch, sprinting in useless circles while others laid odds on her fate.

"This is it! This is the special night!" Leigh clasps her hand in his own. He doesn't meet her eyes when he talks to her anymore, seems to speak at a point somewhere beyond her. "Come on then, come on!" He chuckles, brushing his wispy gray hair back and scampering along the path.

The doors of the theater glows like a great golden mouth, this carpet its vast unfurled tongue. One by one, she thinks, they are strolling happily into the creature's belly.

Above the doors their names are shining. _The Hangman's Call_. And all of them beneath. James, Geoffrey, all the others. And she is there, down at the end of the list. Sophia. Everyone is watching her, they can see every move, every imperfection. She feels that she is among the drowning men, she feels like she should have her own arms up, waving for rescue. A crimson river carries her ever on.

She used to go to picture shows all the time, whenever she could afford it. Back in Poland, the old movie theater on the far side of town where you could watch two films one after the other. American pictures sometimes, where they spoke so fast she couldn't keep up but only watched, just drifting through the images. And then here. Here everybody goes to the pictures. She went along when she had the money, usually alone and once or twice on a date. She had been one of the crowd then, nobody watching her stand in line, two coins jangling in her pocket.

And what a world it was beyond the ticket booth! The glistening metal and bright carpets, the pop of neon and dazzle of chrome counter-tops! Men and women in red and white striped suits offering oil-paper bags overflowing with golden popcorn, which she had never been able to afford. All the laughing youth with bottles of soda pop clutched in their hands. How she had envied them, the bright-eyed American young.

And now she is alone. The lobby is empty but for a pair of ushers and a few men in suits smoking cigars. Money men, producers. She is learning to recognize their type. The fat man from the office. She blushes and turns away.

"Sophia! Sophia, darling!" They call to her. What can she do but go to them?

"What did I tell you, eh? What did I tell you?" The fat man laughs. He pinches her cheek.

Leigh laughs with him.

"Such a doll, isn't she?"

"She is that. A real darling. She was a trooper."

"And dealing with that bastard Geoffrey, too. What a soldier." He reaches his hand around her waist and pulls her close, tight against him.

"Oh, come on now, Bernie, don't knock the talent."

" _Talent_ , ha! We were lucky to squeeze another one out of the old soak." The fat man's hand slides down to cup her bottom. Her spine stiffens, but she doesn't move. She is like a deer in the forest. These men are old wolves, hungry and gray. If she just stands still maybe they won't really see her.

"What did you think, eh, darling? What did you think of the great actor?"

They all laugh. Deep inside the theater the lights are going down. She can hear the first strains of music. The film is starting. How did she get trapped here? Her whole body is trembling.

She sees herself reflected in the glass. What a creature she had become. Her face is too perfectly made up, she does look like a doll. Perfect red lips, perfect pale skin. Smoky dark around the eyes, long black lashes. It is the face of a stranger, painted on by the same make-up department which had transformed her into Laura Thorpe on the film set. So this is just another character then. Sophia the movie star.

A good actor can play any role, disappear into anybody like slipping on another skin. That's what a good actor is, invisible and chimerical.

But she is learning something more. She is learning the difference between an actor and a star. A movie star is something else. A movie star plays only one role, and they play it forever. A movie star doesn't stop playing their part when the cameras are off, the show goes on and on forever. An actor, in the end, is nothing, little better than the faceless carpenters and seamstress and lighting technicians which make up the great army of the production. A star is something else.

She smiles, she laughs. They smile with her, they laugh with her. Their hands wander over her body, almost innocently. They are just clumsy boys, feeling in the dark and lost. She is something greater. They are but puppets dangling on her strings. Just a yank here and a pull there and they will dance for her. She slaps the fat man's hand. Bernie. She slaps it away and shakes her hips.

"I _swear_ ," she laughs, and her voice is not her own, "I swear some days Geoffrey was so _drunk_ , I'm not sure he even knew he was on a film set!"

They all laugh.

Bernie slaps Leigh's shoulder. "Didn't I tell you she was a doll, buddy? Didn't I tell you?"

"She's a doll, Bernie, a real doll. A big bright star."

"No shit."

They take turns kissing her cheeks. It seems their hands are everywhere, touching her, guiding her, taking her as if sweeping her away. They link their arms through hers and they lead her into the theater, where already the sounds of war are rising to a deafening clamor.

* * *

And in this way she is made.

* * *

The doors of the limousine open slowly, and hold.

He looks at her, and he smiles. He pats her hand. He is like a god before her, a matinee Christ. His hair dark as jet, swept aside, his eyes clear and blue as the sea. When he smiles she feels sick with delight, feels her stomach flipping inside her like the fish in the boat. When he looks at her like that her whole body quivers with delight, she feels it like beams of atomic light running down her arms and through her fingers. When he looks at her like that it is almost more than she can bear to be living still.

She touches her hair, looking for her reflection in the window. "Do I look nice, Freddy? Am I nice?"

He leans close. He smells strange and beautiful, like a distant shore and a fair warm wind blowing in. He smiles, and his hand caresses the small of her back, like a jolt of electricity up her spine it goes. "You're an angel, Soph."

She blushes, and she gets up out of the limousine all in a rush, a flurry and a swishing of laces and silks and velvet and she steps out onto the carpet.

He slides out easily after her, waving to the photographers and flashing his smile at them.

She imagines the camera bulbs bursting when they flash at him, the film melting in a hiss and a puddling when it takes his image upon itself. What a creature! What a creature he is! All mine, all mine, my god he is all mine! She feels intoxicated, her head spinning, her thoughts all in a frenzy.

"Look at that, angel," his arms are around her, his mouth close to her ear, "Just like I told you." And he points.

There it is, her name, gleaming and transcendent, radiant above the doors. Hers alone. She laughs, the sound bubbles out of her, unstoppable and giddy. "It is me! Oh, Freddy, it's me!"

He laughs softly. "It is, angel. All you, just like I said."

She met Freddy on the set of her second film. And now he belongs to her. Now her name is alone up in the lights. Sophia ascendant. This is all she ever wanted to be, all her desires springing to life about her in fairy-dust shimmers.

The photographers are calling to them. "Give her a kiss for us, Freddy! Kiss her!"

He grins and he takes her in his arms and he dips her low and presses his lips against hers and she explodes inside like a firework going off.

And he belongs to me alone!

She comes up gasping and laughing and blushing and waving to the photographers. All of her life she has dream of this, of being _this_. The joy is like a disease taking hold inside her, eating everything and leaving nothing but his face glowing there.

She takes his hand and she runs down the undulating red ribbon, giddy and living and all the world watching.

### The Forth Age

You're in the kingdom now. Through the primordial wood and over the wall of the ruined castle. This is the world of spiders, bloodsuckers and larval parasites. Their fingers are on your skin, fleshy long legs forcing themselves down your throat and up your nostrils and into your eyes. Don't struggle. Candle-flame dancing in the half-light and pale moon spilling through the window-glass to pool on the floor. Their feet are skittering and scuttling as they dance. You cannot see the way back out.

"Darlings! There you are, of course. Come, come. Follow me. This is not for you."

She comes to them like an angel through a battlefield. All the twisting bodies writhe and moan, limbs and features contorted alike, and she floats through it all in colorless silks.

"However did you find yourselves in such a place? Come with me, you are my guests, of course. My special guests."

She reaches out both her arms to take their hands. She leads them from the velvet dark room beneath the house, back up the stairs and out of the twisting mass of entwined bodies. Behind them the people are like one being, sighing and calling with one melancholy voice. Come back. Sink. Come back to us.

They follow Sophia up the stairway and out the glass door and into the starlight.

She leads them out onto an elevated deck over the water. Beyond the lake is twisted like black oil stained silver. A long low table cuts the deck, laden with food bloody and living. Men and women in various stages of undress are talking and laughing with each other, picking at the dishes with their fingers. At the center of the table is a bubbling cauldron.

Sophia claps her thin hands and all attention turns to her. She steps aside, gesturing to them as if she were presenting another course to the assembly. "Mark and Kate, everybody. Our guests of honor."

Heads bowed, smirks exchanged, a wave and a cocked eyebrow.

Sophia snaps her fingers. A dusty sound. She points and an empty space is cleared at one end of the long table. "Sit," she says, "sit sit."

They sit. Sophia does not sit, but leans gently against the rail behind them. She hangs herself like a great gray bat, wings furled.

The table is moving before them, squirming prawns and lobsters suffocating and octopi thrashing in shallow water. A woman in leather picks a lobster and lifts it into the bubbling pot. Its glossy black eyes are void as it goes into the scalding water.

Sophia puts her hands on Kate's shoulders. Her long polished nails are like claws, like teeth biting the skin. "Kate is going to make me immortal."

Everybody laughs.

There is a naked girl lying across one end of the table, her body bearing a display of sweets and sushi rolls, his face hidden beneath a silk hood. A bored-looking man with pale skin puts a small crustacean on her belly. He watches, half-interested, as it crawls between her thighs. She doesn't move. She looks dead.

Sophia lies on the low bench beside Kate. She picks a tart off the girl and eats it slowly, her tongue extracting the sweet red filling. She tosses the gutted cookie over the side of the deck. It drops noiselessly into the water. "So, tell me, Kate. How are you going to do it?"

Kate laughs, blushing. Everybody is watching her, waiting for her to speak. She is flushed red, her pale skin glowing. "Do what?"

"How are you going to become _me_?" Sophia's voice is low, coiled like a snake about to strike.

Kate looks at her hands. "Well, I could never be you..."

Sophia laughs lightly.

There is a man, bald, his neck scarred in a ring, a noose of ruined flesh. His mouth shifts and moves, his eyes immobile. He picks up an octopus and sucks the tentacle before biting in. Seven limbs thrash weakly in his fist.

"You've all heard, of course," Sophia is speaking as though addressing the whole table, but her gaze is fixed on Kate, on her and none other, "That they're making a film about me. About our little Sophia. However will it go, I wonder?"

"They're still working on the script," Kate murmurs, not meeting the other woman's piercing dark stare.

"Are they? Well, nobody's asked me about it. I suppose they're getting all their information from my darling Freddy. I'm sure he's more than happy to tell them everything they might ever want to know." Her voice is noticeably icy, her eyes as dead as those of the lobsters going into the pot.

"I'm sure they're considering all sources," Mark says, trying to draw some of Sophia's attention away from Kate. "I've read a few scenes. It really is very good."

Sophia laughs softly. "But of course. Isn't it funny how our lives become not our own? How they fall into the hands of the others so easily? We are all just characters in the great play after all, are we not?"

Glasses of blood-red wine are raised. "Here here," some say, their grim toast half a joke.

Sophia leans closer. Her breath is sharp and dry, the scent of a wine barrel long ago emptied that yet retains some flavor of its contents and forever will. "You are a pretty little thing, aren't you? That's why they chose you. Those beautiful tits of yours, am I right?" She smiles, her wrinkled hands caressing Kate's body. Her fingers stroke the soft curve of the younger woman's breasts, sliding gently down to cup the clothed flesh. "Of course, I was never a big girl like you. Not that they'd let a thing like that stop them. You know I spent my whole career losing roles to girls like you. Blondes with fat tits." She pinches Kate's nipples through the cloth, her hands darting away like recoiling serpents as Kate hisses in pain. Sophia laughs, a husky wisp of laughter, and she brushes her hands together as if dusting them.

Kate stares at her, mouth open a little, confusion painted on her features.

Sophia smiles. She reaches out and squeezes Kate's cheek, just a grandmother showing affection. "There there. What a pretty girl. I'm sure you'll be wonderful. I couldn't ask for a better Sophia. Do just remember to make me look good, darling."

Kate nodding dumbly, unsure of what to say.

Sophia turns away from her. She is all smiles now, spreading her arms wide. "Why is everyone so sad? Your faces, they are going to make me cry! This is a happy day." She steps up, standing on her chair, black silks fluttering like scraps of storm-cloud.

Kate's whole body is shaking, her lips quivering. Mark leans close. "Are you alright?"

She nods, trembling, brushing the back of her hand across her eyes. "I'm f-fine,"

"Do you need to get out of here?"

"No. No, Mark, please. It's nothing."

"You're sure?"

"Oh, don't henpeck at me, Mark!"

"Henpeck?"

She waves her hand at him, brushing him aside. Her elbows are on the edge of the table and her head in her hands. She is like a broken thing trying to hold itself together, keep all the pieces from falling to the floor. Like a pane of glass shattered by a single stone.

Sophia is dancing along the length of the table. The other guests are laughing and toasting her, pouring out their wine over her toes. Sophia is humming a strange song, melody foreign, vague and unknowable. Her feet move assuredly across the tabletop, deftly stepping between plates and serving dishes. At the center of the table she dances her sly way around the boiling water, giving a little wave to the crustaceans submerged inside. Her stiletto heels click on the polished surface, every step precise and measured.

She stops at the crab platter. The animals crawl weakly at her feet, sliding down the sides of the silver basin. Her humming gets louder and louder, the strange swaying tune going low as a dirge and moving to the back of her throat. She lifts a foot and brings it down inside the bowl, heel punching through the hide of a crab like a lance. The creature twists and writhes in silent agony, pinned through its core to the tabletop.

Sophia laughs, dancing through the gore, dead things falling from her.

Kate covers her eyes and fights to breathe.

Sophia's body sways to the sound of music which plays only inside her own head. Her body is reduced to a silhouette against the night, only a sifting and formless thing moving in the moonlight. Beyond her the water laps against the dock, unceasing caress of lover and rapist.

### A History of Regret

"Fuck you! Fuck you, fuck you fuck you!"

His lip curls. "Listen to you. Christ, you sound like a fucking butcher, talking like that. When did you get such an ugly mouth, darling?"

The wineglass shatters against the wall just behind his head. She is trembling with rage, wishing she had more to throw.

"Dammit! You came this close! This fucking close!" He holds his fingers up, almost pinched shut.

"So what? So what, Freddy? So what? I ruin your face, maybe your whores don't want you no more, maybe! So what if I do it!"

"You gypsy _bitch_!" He brushes his hair back, licking his teeth. "You wouldn't live to regret it, believe me."

"You don't threaten me! You don't threaten! This is _my_ house, I bought it! I earned it! You are nothing without me, nothing! Just a cheap man with a pretty face."

He leans back in the chair, one arm up, very casually draped across the top of the chaise lounge. He lifts the glass to his lips and takes a drink, empties the glass. Whiskey again. He raises his cup to her. "Have it your way, darling. Just a pretty face, fine, fine." He shakes his head, swallowing a chuckle of wry amusement.

She squeezes her fists so tight that her fingernails dug into her palms, so hard she thinks it must draw blood. She hates this, his way of turning on her. He will fight, and then he gives up without warning, steps back so she falls on her face, sputtering with rage. How does he change so quickly? How he can move from rage to tranquil bemusement without missing a step? It confuses her, it frightens her. _What if it's all just an act?_ What if he's faking it, the whole thing? What if he'd never loved her? She can hardly bear to think of that.

She leaves him there, slamming the door as she sweeps out.

God _damn_ him. She stands at the balcony doors. Sliding doors, all glass. She lights a cigarette with trembling fingers and cracks the door open. Cool autumn air comes in, infiltrating the house like the first slender finger of impending winter. She shuts her eyes, savoring the sensation of the chill on her skin. She takes a nervous drag.

They're out there, of course. Every day they're out there, huddled by the fence with their cameras clenched in their hands. Her life is that of an animal in the zoo. Huddled in her cage while the clattering crowd watches and waits. What does it matter that they are driving her to madness, what does it matter? She is theirs, their precious thing, they've paid admission, and now they'll have their fill, to the last drop of her.

Vultures.

And that would make her the corpses, the circled object. She feels dead sometimes, like a dead thing. She can see them, prowling ceaselessly. Oh _why_ will they not leave her alone?

Of course it's her own fault, and Freddy's too, damn him.

Who could resist them? Two famous movies stars falling in love on a film set. It is the stuff of which the dreams of the world are made. Every time they went out the cameras were there, flashing and clicking. No matter what they did they were always caught at it, and back then they hadn't minded. They were in love, and none of it seemed to matter at all. They had only each other, and nothing else mattered.

They married, and of course that only attracted more cameras and more attention. More blurry images in the grocery store tabloids. And then everything unraveled.

It was so perfect at first, for a time. Everything in its place and beautiful. Freddy was beautiful, she was beautiful, their life was a beautiful thing. He went away to New York to make a picture, a romance. She didn't mind. She called him every night, hundreds and hundreds of dollars in long distance telephone calls. She didn't care. What did that matter? Money? Money didn't matter to her any longer. It seemed every film she appeared in was bigger than the last, and her paychecks were multiplying by the day. Her name in lights, her face on billboards. She couldn't go outside any longer without being spotted, without drawing a crowd. All her life she'd been a mouse, a shadow on the wall. Now she was the sun, burning brighter than anything. Everyone else was a shadow now of what she was.

She bought a house – _this_ house – and she spent long lazy lonely days there, wandering the grounds, poking about the cupboards and nooks of the place. Hazy hot days passed by in gauzy nightgowns, a stack of scripts by the pool. Her choice, her choice. She could have anything she wanted, they told her. The studio heads loved her, the audiences loved her, _everybody_ loved her.

It happened so fast. At first she'd been afraid, it felt like she was living in a shiny bubble, floating higher and higher and one prick would pop the thing and send her plummeting down. But it didn't happen, she didn't fall. She only went higher.

You could get away with anything in this town, as long as you weren't boring. Just don't ever be boring, and they will never leave you.

Then the rumors. Freddy was going out with his leading lady. Freddy had been caught kissing her in the back of a taxi. Freddy had been seen buying her jewelry. Freddy was in love with her. Freddy was leaving his new wife for another woman. She'd ignored it at first. Only rumors, just gossip. She'd heard enough of it about herself to know that it was mostly false. Eventually it added up. Then there was the picture. Freddy caught in the park with his hand under her shirt. Freddy with his lips on her neck. She saw it and she assumed that they'd been shooting a scene from their new film, and it had hurt. A dull pang inside.

But there were no film cameras, no crew. They were alone together. And that hurt more.

He came back. He told her that it was all nonsense, that none of it had been real. That he loved her only. But she knew. She could see it in his eyes, he was bored of her already, he'd already grown tired of Sophia and found another and already grown just as tired of her. It was only a matter of time. But he wasn't going to leave her, he wouldn't leave her. She was a star and he was only an actor. Without her he would fade, would recede, go all gray and transparent. A ghost, a Hollywood memory. He told her that he would always love her. She told him that she loved him and it tasted like ash in her mouth.

And now they live under siege. Six weeks now with an army of photographers hounding her every step. It was getting to be more than she could stand.

Some days she lay inside with the curtains drawn and wished that the whole world outside and everything in it would catch fire and burn away to nothing.

* * *

"Okay okay. I need... Let's try that again. Just... let's try playing the scene a bit _closer_. Can we try that? Freddy? Sophia? Let's try it closer, alright? Good. Alright. Places? Action."

* * *

The air itself feels thick and liquid, like water around her. She is only swimming through it, every motion a languid struggle. The ground an ocean bed of shattered glass, shards in their thousands like a carpet of diamond. A break with every step, a sound that follows her as if she were crossing a frozen lake beginning now to crack. Though she feels already submerged.

Freddy is gone. He was caught again, ratted out, discovered in the arms of another. He just shrugged his shoulders. He wasn't born for this life, for her. His was a rambler's road, never to alight for long. So he tipped his hat and tapped his shoes and strolled back out the door and into the world. And she, just the chain, just the weight, just the withdrawing tide slithering off the sand. She was left. She watched him go.

She smoked and she let the cigarette ash fall around her. She drank and she let alone the bottles broken on the floor. She dreamed, and she remained in the dream long after waking.

How could she let a man do this to her? A man like _that_? Freddy was nothing, he was a leech, a parasite. He'd sucked her blood too long.

Why hadn't he loved her? Why had he wanted to leave? What could another offer which she would not give? It perplexed her. She would have given him anything. So... _why_? It didn't make sense to her.

They were still outside. Still circling. She could go to the window and she would hear them, the murmuring, the clatter of equipment. The clicking of the cameras like swarms of the hive.

So she stays inside with the doors locked and the curtains drawn.

This house which is like a nightmare to her now. It stinks of Freddy, of his memory. How foolish she had been! She bought it for him. To fill it up with their love. In every room she had loved him, and now there was nothing left of the place that did not bring him to mind. But what was he really? He'd hardly been here, hardly lived in the place with her.

She had dreamed of the life she might have with him. Of children, of family. Of simple things. Their lives could have been like anything. She'd dreamed of that, of simple happiness. A fire and a dog and a supper roasting. A Christmas tree laced with tinsel and a wool blanket across the bed. Like she had always wanted, like her family had wanted and never had. She had everything now, at last. And there was no one.

He had only ever been the face of her desire, he had never shared it. It should have been easy to wipe away his features and put another upon the shape. Why should it be Freddy? She could love anybody. She could give that life to anybody.

She slumped against the door. She put her hand against it, the old wood, painted red. They were just on the other side, all the clamoring ravenous world. They wanted her, wanted to devour her. They were picking their teeth and sharpening their knives.

Just on the other side of that door, the cameras were click click clicking away. The flaring of the flashbulbs like the echo of distant gunfire. Of a war being fought far in the distance. The dead dropping namelessly in another city, and all one could do was wait as the dread crept ever deeper. That one day the war will find you. She sits in her mansion of broken glass and empty memories, and she knows that it has happened at last, in the place where she least expected it.

Now they have her. Now they will make her pay.

### The Fifth Age

The window is open. Beyond the window there is a green light, a dancing shimmer glow in the distant trees, an arboreal borealis writhing. The summer air seeps through like warm fingers on your skin. Your naked back, your buttocks and the backs of your thighs glistening with perspiration. The world is in a frenzy of motion about you, breath coming hot and hard. This is your world now, inside deep and forgotten. A coin tossed down a well and clattering against the stony sides of the pit, down down down, it seems we're going forever. Stay here.

"Tell us about yourself, Mark. We want to know the real you."

"The real me?" He is panting, sweat running between his shoulder blades.

"Yeah, yeah, the _real_ you. What other people don't see, you know? I mean, come on, who are you really?"

Mark has to think about that for a minute. The _real_ him? What the fuck does that mean? He's just Mark, just a guy, a kid who got lucky. Good-looking guy who went to LA and got lucky. Most people didn't get lucky, but he had, and that was all there was to it. No special destiny, no fucking fate which had drawn him to the abyss of power. He'd been lucky enough to run into an agent who liked his look and his agent had been lucky enough to know about the TV part. He got the audition and he was lucky enough to catch the producer's eye, and that was that. Now he was a star, ejected from common orbit, shifted into a parallel reality. He was a pretty face in the right place at the right time, and he knew it. He was comfortable enough with that, had no pretensions to artistry or destiny. People wanted to see good-looking people on their screens, like looking out the kitchen window into a more perfect world. That didn't bother him.

But Kate... she was different. Kate's world was not his world. He was only visiting the upper realms, and he knew it. She had been born for this life, breed like a prize horse to assume the mantel. She was a creature of fame, born to inherit the attention of the world. She'd been in movies since she could talk, had her childhood splayed across the supermarket checkout aisles. She had hardly known another life, and had no aptitude for such.

Kate was the real fucking deal, and everybody knew it.

Mark forced a shrug, shifting the weight off his elbows. He flashed a smile. The _smile_ , that smile that lit up the room, dazzled the questions right out of people's heads, made them forget. That famous smile. "The real me, eh? Come on man, you know me."

The guy – what the fuck was his name again? – just about giggled. "That's what I thought, Mark. That's what I like about you. Don't you like that about him, honey? He's so... _true_."

The guy's wife was panting through her teeth as she rocked her hips back and forth. "Oh yeah baby, I love that. I _love_ that about him."

Mark grinned. He reached down and caressed her cheek. "I know you do. You love this, don't you?"

She moaned, pushing her pelvis up to take him in deeper. "I love being fucked by you baby. Fuck me, Mark, fuck me."

Her husband sat back in his chair, biting his lip. He put his hands on his knees, rocking back and forth a little. "This is great, this is just great. Isn't this great?" he leaned over and asked the couple on the settee. They both nodded, the woman casting her gaze lazily across Mark's naked body. The man reached over and clinked his glass against the husband's, and they both drank.

Mark kept fucking.

He couldn't remember who they were. One of those power couples, entrenched in the money. You could smell it on them, their wealth. They'd zeroed right in on him, came at him like a bullet from a gun. Kate had seemed shaken by her encounter with Sophia, she was still shivering in the toilets as far as he knew. She'd be fine. Delicate temperament, but she'd get herself under control. Anyway, this whole thing was just a part of her process, he'd seen it a hundred times. So he'd been alone when they found him. The husband pushing bottles of wine on him, the wife pushing herself after them. The flattery, the we just _love_ you, and they'd worked him back here to this corner room on the second floor. She didn't bother playing games about it, dropped her robe before the door was shut and swung her long thick legs up and over him. Her husband just watched, peppering Mark with questions.

It was hard to focus on them both at the same time, but their desires seem equally urgent. Hers to feel and his to know. The second couple had come in at some point, he wasn't sure. Maybe they'd been in the room first for all he knew, sequestered in the dark corner. He didn't really care, audiences hadn't ever bothered him. Back in high school his girlfriend used to charge her little sisters to let them watch from the closet while he screwed her. He wasn't supposed to know about it, but they hadn't been especially good at hiding. He'd done porn, just once, a nasty shoot not long after he'd first come to LA. Fucking thing was buried deep by now, but you could never tell when somebody might dig it up. Whatever, he wasn't worried about it. He didn't care who saw him. It was all just prostitution anyway, he had no fucking illusions.

The trick was to enjoy it more than they did, then you were really in business. Take pleasure in your own exploitation, and you'll survive it. He'd never shared this particular philosophy with Kate, but it was always in the back of his mind.

"Tell me something, Mark. Would you tell me something?"

"Sure, man. What do you wanna know?"

"When you're shooting a love scene, right? A love scene with Kate, I mean."

"Yeah?"

The guy was wringing his hands, sweating. He took off his glasses and cleaned them, put them back on, blinking through the lenses. "Do you ever, you know...?" He trailed off.

The woman was moaning in his ear, a long low groan of contentment. Her whole body writhed beneath him, her features twitching, as to suggest final spasms of electrical energy shooting through a brain stem. She started biting at his shoulder, her teeth dragging over his skin.

"What, man? Do I ever _what_?"

"You know. Slip it in? Ever just go all the way? On camera?"

Mark grinned. "You wanna know if I ever fucked Kate on camera? Like, for real?"

"I-I've seen every episode of your show Mark, and some of those scenes are pretty... realistic looking. I just, I mean, you had to right? Like the scene where you two get together after the wedding in the second season. That looked too real to have been faked."

"Nah, man. Sorry. I never fucked Kate on camera."

"Oh. Oh, of course not." The man sat back, wringing his hands, clearly crestfallen.

"But hey," he tried, struggling to keep his thrusts coming at a steady rhythm. She was dragging her fingers down his back, nails digging in sharp and hard. "Plenty of times we've fucked right after. Gets her in the mood, you know?"

"Hm, yes, I suppose." He took off his glasses again, rubbing them on his shirt sleeve.

"It's just movies, alright?" Mark tried to laugh, but the man's wife lifted her head and took a big fucking chomp on his neck just as he did. The false amusement turned to a yelp. He could feel her teeth breaking skin. He tried to jerk away, but that only made it worse, tearing his flesh away from her clenched teeth. He felt blood spill down his shoulder.

She stared up at him, eyes gleaming, body slick and shining with sweat, teeth bared and red.

He clapped a hand to his neck. He could feel the ruined skin hanging loose, the hot blood pumping through his fingers. He felt a little faint. "Jesus Christ! What the _fuck_?"

She laughed, her legs wrapped tight around his waist, pulling him close. Her eyes were glazed and empty. Her husband was still cleaning his glasses, muttering to himself.

"What the fuck?" Mark said again, wincing as the pain shoot through him.

He felt a pair of hands on his naked back, and twisted around in the woman's grip. His cock was still deep inside her. He could feel the wet heat of her wrapped around him, like a clenching fist. The couple in the corner had risen from the settee. They were standing just behind him, their hands on his shoulders. They looked at him, but did not meet his eyes. The man leaned forward, his mouth open, and he extended his tongue. Mark felt it lapping at his fingers, licking up the blood spilling from his body.

"What?" he said, and no more. The man pressed his mouth against Mark's. A horrible damp copper kiss. He felt hands crawling all over his body, he felt lips kissing up and down his torso and arms.

And he felt teeth.

### A History of Majesty

Sophia is alone at the award show. She sits alone, wreathed in fur and lace and gold, and she feels as though all the room has eyes only for her. She hates it, the feeling of their eyes, of their judgment. She squirms in the red velvet seat as the presenters break open seals of yellow wax and call names into the crowd. Like reeling in fish, schoolchildren being called to the front of the class. They go, the chosen few. They go and they return draped in glory like warrior kings from battle. All those faces shining up at them. And Sophia is alone.

The divorce has been finalized, the house has been sold. Everyone's taken their slice, their cut. Sophia and her marriage and her image of a life to be have been carved like a slaughtered heifer, blood dripping from the cleaver. She will never say his name again, never never. She curses him to the ends of the earth and to the ends of time.

He is here. He is here and his new woman is with him. Whoever she is, she is here and she is not Sophia. He doesn't seem to care.

She wishes they would both die. Or that she would die herself, and be rid of this misery. It's like steel in her throat, like an iron fist wrapped around her heart, squeezing with every beat. She feels like she is going to choke. They can all see it on her face, she knows they can see it.

Sophia doesn't even notice when they break the seal and read her name from the cream-white envelope. Red ink spilled like evidence of a murder. _Sophia_. A woman she does not know takes her arm and points to the stage. "They want you, darling," she laughs, "they're calling for you."

Sophia rises, unsteady on her legs, her fingers shaking. She feels as though she has been stripped bare, like someone has slashed her throat and left her to bleed on the sidewalk. She stumbles down the row, resting her hand on the back of each red velvet seat in turn, murmuring low apology as she goes.

Why are they doing this to her? Have they all banded together to make of a fool of her? To drive her mad? Their cheers and laughter is in her ear like the crawling of beetles on the inside of her skull, shiny-green and pinching as they go. She wants to cry, to sink to her knees in the red aisle and weep.

The producer is at her side, and he has her by the arm. He has taken pity on her, the fragile girl-thing, the exhausted ruin, and he has come to her. He holds her steady. "Easy on there, Soph, easy now." What is his name again? For which film is she being honored? Which performance? She can hardly remember them all; the characters are a blur, like a crowd on the street shouting after her as she drives by. It seems they will never be silent. She cannot escape them.

"Thank you," she murmurs, "thank you." She pats his hand, feeling dizzy, feeling faint. The lights seem so bright, like suns contained and directed. The thousand suns of a distant world and she its first explorer.

"Christ, you're tight." The producer grumbles. "Try and hold it together, sweetheart."

She wants to scream. Who is this man? What does he know of her? Nothing! She just nods, just says that she'll try. And they go up the steps together.

He leaves her at the podium, stepping back and hovering awkwardly behind. The presenter pushes the golden figure into her hands. She clutches it close, as if it might keep her from drowning in the sea of voices rising up at her. But it is nothing but an anchor; it will only bear her ever downward. All the way down.

She is alone behind the microphone, staring out across the room. A thousand faces and more, cameras like mouths licking and slavering. She opens her lips to speak. She is supposed to speak, is she not? To thank those closest to her who have brought her to this place, those who have lifted her on their shoulders as she scaled the greatest height.

There is no one. She has no one. She is alone in this world.

She stands before the microphone, clutching the award in her fist, and she waits for the words which will not come.

* * *

She walks through the slum, stumbling, teetering in her high heeled shoes and dragging the crimson train of her dress through the filth. She's been drinking. The world is blurry, a haze. The buildings seem to sway and shift above and around her, great slouching giants peering down. She feels sure they will tumble down on top of her, bury her there in the alleyway.

These familiar walls, the familiar crawling parasites and the calling of the mothers in oily foreign tongues as the strange smells of exotic food rise thick and hot in the close heat. Dark-featured men slump upon their porches with long pipes in their mouths, rubbing their chins and letting the smoke spill up through their crooked black teeth. They watch her pass with an idle curiosity.

Nothing like her has ever come into a place like this. Nothing like her has ever shown herself in this underworld of poverty.

Yet they cannot bring themselves to affect overmuch astonishment. Emotion is a hard earned capital in a human pit deep as this, and they cannot spend it recklessly. Their eyes shimmer and turn in her glittering wake.

Her award is still clenched in her fist. Bright as a magnetic star. Polished gold in her clean hand. This is the abattoir. This is the opening grave. She moves as one dead, among the dead.

A long set of steel stairs, up the side of the building in a dizzying chaos of switchbacks and reversals. She touches the handrail. Still broken, swaying, held in place only by that which surrounds it. Rust comes flaking off on her palm, dead skin shed. She climbs, her gown trailing behind, sweeping a way through the corrosion. At the top of the stairs a door and through the door a hall. Naked children dance in the half-light. Naked men chase naked women from flea-darked sheets.

She finds her door and she traces her number. Rats gnawing somewhere in the walls. She never thought she would want to return to this. This is no place for her, not any longer. But it is a place which will always have a hold on her. This is where she was made. This is the stuff, the dead matter of which stars are born.

She turns away and she steps out into the air. The stairs sway beneath her. The alley hums with life and unlife. She descends; her hands are empty.

* * *

"What is before me now... This table. This ashtray. This lighter. This empty cup. Ha ha.

"I'll tell you about my next role. That's what you want to know? I'll tell you about her.

"Let me just think. Let me find the words. I have a picture in my mind. I have a picture of her, I only need the words.

"She is a woman... a woman who...

"No that isn't right. She's not a woman. She doesn't think of herself that way. It's like she's pretending, only she's been pretending for so long that she doesn't remember what exactly it is she's pretending to be, or what she was before. She's not a woman. She doesn't think of herself in that way. She's alive. _Alive_. But she feels like she is buried in herself. Buried alive in all that time she's spent building herself into this thing.

"Well... they're just men. All sorts of men. I don't know. What do I know about it? Have you ever talked to a man? Of course you can't, you can't talk to a man because you are one. Men don't talk, they don't talk like women do. Women make men talk, force them into the world. Men don't talk to each other. They're all masked, making poses, you know what I mean? They're eggs in the shell. Crabs in the shell, I mean.

"But that's not... I'm trying to talk about _her_. She's... I'm off-track. I've lost track. I don't know what I'm saying anymore. Let me just... gather myself. My thoughts.

"She doesn't think of herself. She gives. She gives because it is all she has ever been taught or told. She doesn't know how else to have any... respect. For herself. Self-respect. She cannot accept herself unless she is destroying herself. Degrading herself. She gives because she is afraid to take. She doesn't know how. If she knew how she would not stop. She would get her hands on everything there is. She would stand on the top of the world. But she's never been told. She wouldn't _believe_ it if she were.

"It's a matter of perspective.

"Do you believe in perspective?

"This is not the world. This air. There's no common air. You breathe out and I breathe in. We don't see anything the same. Always from our own angle, that's perspective. There's no... one thing. Everything is a million things. Nothing is true or a lie, because nothing _is_.

"I don't know if I'm explaining this in a way...

"You don't mind if I smoke do you? Well, I'm not concerned. Don't answer. I'll smoke.

"She's alone. Profoundly alone. Separated from everything. She gives and gives.

"Let me tell you a story my mama used to tell me. Years and years ago. Three little girls are walking down the road. They're going to the county fair or... maybe it's the market, I don't know. It doesn't matter. The first little girl sees something shiny on the side of the road. She kneels down in the dust and she picks it up. It looks like a diamond to her, but it is broken glass. Worthless and dangerous. She slices her hands open and she falls down in a pool of her own blood. Her sisters leave her there to die. Her mistake, her _sin_ : she has been curious. Curiosity will lead you to treasure which is worthless. That's what my mother would say.

"A man rides by in a carriage. A wealthy well-dressed man. He flatters the second sister. He tells her she is beautiful, he tells her that he loves her. She gets in the carriage and he cuts her throat open. Her last sister finds her body in the dust of the road. My mama said her flaw was pride, but I always saw her mistake in another way. Trust was her true sin.

"The third girl gets to the market, and that was the happy ending as my mother told it. She would stop there, as if it were the end of the story.

"My character is that third sister. The one who lived, without trust without pride without curiosity, who left her sisters to bleed in the dust and the dirt, who walked on when they died and did not stay beside them. Did nothing to help them.

"You might think she's evil. She does, she thinks that. She hates what she has become, she hates it.

"That is what is before me now. That girl. Before me and behind. I cannot be rid of her."

### The Sixth Age

You are under the earth. We are all under the earth, all blind sightless things feeling our way through a close and closing darkness. Tongues extruded and pale-egg eyes filmed over fingers scrambling at hard damp soil. Breaking our nails on embedded stone, clawing towards a distant surface which we have never seen, with only dreams to guide us. Keep digging. You can only hope that you are going the right way, vertigo spins you in the depths. You could be digging yourself deeper for all you know.

"Goddamn this..." Kate mutters low under her breath, patting at her nose with a folded piece of toilet paper. She sniffles, touching the puffy skin beneath her eyes.

She hates the way she looked when she cries. She has always refused to cry in front of anyone. Nobody has seen her true face, the bloated wet red twisted visage. It is hers alone, her face and none others. The ruined gaping mouth gasping, the dribbling red-rimmed nostrils, the eyes like absences weeping. She hates that face. When she was a child her mother used to slap her for crying like that.

People say that they love the way she looks when she cries on set, but of course everything is different on set, that more perfect reality. She weeps delicately and cleanly, chemical irritation inducing perfect crystal droplets down the cheek. An image of beauty and of womanhood. This is the woman weeping, what a sight, a dream. And so she cried that way in the world, after all wasn't the whole world a stage? Wasn't that what they said? Especially for her. She cries pretty for Mark and for her parents and for her friends. She cries ugly only for herself.

So why _now_? Something about this place, about Sophia, is breaking through her. Kate cannot contain what is inside; it's coming out hot and wet and ugly. She pushes the heel of one stockinged foot against the bathroom door. There are no locks on the doors here. Her shoes lie cast off in the corner of the room while she sits on the toilet trying to regain control, unable to stop the hideous tears. She reaches a trembling hand into her clutch and takes out a silver locket, size of a quarter, shape of a spiral mollusk. She pushes the little latch with her thumbnail and shakes out two round cream-colored pills. She holds them between her lips and tilts her head back. Swallow.

Kate gets to her feet, stands barefoot on the polished tile, moving her silky toes across the smooth surface. The sensation flares a kind of pleasure deep in her brain, the contentment of a lizard in the sun. She wipes her eyes, patting the swollen skin. Everything is going to be alright, it will be.

She looks up at the tiled ceiling, like a refracted mirror of the pattern on the floor. There's a half-window at the top of the wall. She climbs up on the back of the toilet and presses herself against it. The glass is cool on her nose. She pushes her body against the wall. All the outside world is there, separated by almost nothing. She peers searching into the darkness. She sees nothing, only the thrash of movement in the dark. The wind in the trees or the rushing of a thousand terrible beasts, it could be anything. She thinks of Sophia, floating through the forest in a sea of diaphanous black silk, the pale face and arms like the shining of the moon in a black sky, her eyes like black stones.

She sinks back down, curling on the seat.

She's not sure what she expected of this night. There's no telling with this sort of thing, people get strange when you strip away their inhibitions. She remembers a party she went to with Mark last year. They'd ended up with another girl on the highway, blasting naked into the LA night at a hundred miles an hour, a great tangle of fingers and tongues and wet eager lips. She has a feeling this evening will end very differently.

There's something about this place. It's like a fortress almost, an enchanted castle glittering in the woods. It's like a dream. She has a thought that one could look right through it, eyes scanning across the trees and seeing nothing. Unless you are desired, unless you are invited into the fairy realm you won't see it even if it's right in front of you. It is a world of its own, separated from everything and waiting behind a shimmery curtain catching with uncertain winds.

And Sophia.

Sophia is nothing like Kate had expected. She'd expected the girl from the movies, the girl of the screen. That girl was immortal and familiar; the woman is other. She seems not immortal but lifeless, a shell of a life gliding still in the world.

Sophia frightens her.

The door clacks, handle twisting. Kate shoves her foot back against it, slamming it hard against the frame. Something on the other side seems to hesitate, then there comes a firm knock, three taps.

Kate clears her throat, dashing a hand across her eyes. How did she look? The face in the mirror seems blurred and distorted. "Who's that?"

"Fucking Sasha." A female voice. Dry and detached, the voice of someone smiling and rolling her eyes.

"Sasha?" She doesn't know that name, she doesn't know anybody here.

"Open the door, Kate, it's fucking alright."

"You know me?"

A scoff, a dark chuckle. " _Everybody_ knows you. Come on. Fucking Harvey sent me."

"Would you give me a minute please?"

"No. Fucking let me in, alright? I'm here to help." The woman shoves in the door, wedging her hip in the frame and scooting herself into the little bathroom. She grins, smoothing her dress. "Just think of me as your fucking fairy godmother."

Kate gathers herself up as best she can, patting self-consciously at her eyes one more time. She slips her shoes back on.

Sasha rolls her eyes dramatically and leans back against the door, shutting it with her weight. She's a short slim girl with cropped black hair and darting green eyes. She is wearing a tight black dress so short Kate can almost see her underwear. There's a dragon tattooed on her thigh which matches the serpent in heavy gold brocade winding round the dress. Her lips and nails are painted black, and her smile flashes sardonically. Kate feels at once that she likes the girl, knows at once she cannot trust her. She has the slippery features of a mercenary.

"Harvey sent you to look for me? Why? I'm fine."

"Fucking obviously. Come on, it's no big deal."

"Do I know you from somewhere?"

Sasha chuckles dryly and pulls down the front of her dress, exposing her small breasts. "You probably fucking saw me upstairs earlier getting whipped." The soft flesh is crisscrossed with long red welts. Sasha laughs and covers herself.

"Oh." Kate feels her skin crawl. "I remember."

"Well don't fucking pout about it. It was only fucking fun is all." Sasha sticks out her tongue and runs it over her front teeth. The inside of her pert mouth seems impossibly pink within the ring of flat black lipstick.

"You enjoy that sort of thing?"

"Fuck yeah I do. What, not your scene?"

Kate shakes her head. Her breath is coming steady now. She feels like herself. Whatever it had been, the _episode_ , it had passed. "Not really. I don't like pain."

"Fucking life is pain." Sasha winks, and it seems to close the discussion.

Anyway, Kate doesn't have anything else to say about it. She's never been drawn that sort of thing. It didn't especially bother her, she always knew it was happening down in a basement somewhere, but she'd never been tempted to investigate. She thinks of her own skin, thinks of what it would be like standing naked in the make-up trailer with all the crones and fags fluttering over her, tutting at her scars and marks, brushing their soft judging fingers over her skin like sucking remora mouths. That just wouldn't do.

"So what makes you think I need a fairy godmother?" Kate slips her feet back into her shoes and folds her arms.

"Uh... you're fucking hiding in the bathroom at a sex party is fucking why. Harvey doesn't want you to have a bad time." Sasha cocks her head. "There's a room upstairs where a bunch of us are making fun of old movies and drinking daiquiris. Not screwing even. Why not come and fucking relax?"

Kate shrugs. "Alright."

Sasha's grins on one side of her mouth. "Thatta fucking girl."

Kate follows her out of the bathroom. The lights are low in the long hall, glowing ocher like the inside of a honeycomb. Gold light and deep black shadows. The embroidery of Sasha's dress glitters in the half-light. She walks with an easy gait, all her weight shifting from side to side, her slender hips bobbing with a kind of effortless seduction.

"So... what are you, Harvey's girlfriend or something?"

Sasha laughs, a dry papery chuckle, and points her lolling finger into her mouth, _ugh_ _gag me_. "Not a chance. I'm his assistant."

"What sort of assistant comes to this kind of party?"

Sasha lifts an impeccably plucked eyebrow. "You'd be surprised how many of us there are." She lowers her voice and spiders her fingers ominously, "We're everywhere."

"Does he pay you for, you know..."

"This?" Sasha smirks and flashes her welted breasts again. "Nah. That's whatcha call a perk, I think." She laughs.

"Well... thanks for looking for me, I guess. Nice to know someone cares."

"Even if it's Harvey?"

Kate grins. "Even if it's Harvey."

"He wants you, you know."

"Um..."

She laughs. "Not like that. Well... maybe like that. No, he wants your face, your image, your beautiful luminescence." She over-pronounces each word, gesticulating passionately. Kate can almost hear the words in Harvey's silky low voice.

"He wants to work with me?"

Sasha licks her teeth again. "Honey, he wants you to work _for_ him. But I'm not supposed to say. I didn't say. Zip fucking nadda, got it?" She pinches her fingers and draws them across her mouth, makes a little motion as if tossing something over her shoulder.

"I'll be sure and act surprised when he brings it up."

"You should have brought your fucking assistant, Harvey could have sent me to talk to her, and we've have this all taken care of without any squishy face-time."

"What makes you think I have an assistant?"

Sasha laughs, a genuine laugh for the first time. "Fucking _please_."

Kate looks away. Of course she has an assistant. Everybody she knows has an assistant. A silent shadow clutching at least two smart-phones and murmuring in their ear. You start to forget they exist after a while, start to think of them as extensions of your own self rather than autonomous persons. Kate hates it, of course, she tries not to be like that. She bought her assistant a gorgeous pair of shoes for her last birthday. The girl cried. It had made Kate feel like a duchess, some minor noble elevating one of the common folk. She'd loved the feeling, and hated it.

" _Any_ -fucking-way," Sasha goes on, "This is all in the future we're talking. You have to finish the Sophia movie first. You have to survive it."

"Survive it?"

Sasha looks at her and winks. In the shifting golden light of the long hall, the slender girl's irises are glinting like the huge luminous eyes of a jungle cat.

### A History of Innocence

Into the pantheon, star-child, and into the light.

Sophia is the god of gods. She is light and she is the absence of light. She is shadow between the two.

She drinks in darkness. She looks. She looks with eyes which cut like silver. Which burn like silver.

All the universe is spinning, and they are in her orbit. The men. The _men_. They disgust her. They are children, slobbering hounds. Eating and fucking and rolling in the dirt. They're just dogs in fancy-dress. She _hates_ them. She is at the head of the pack, running with all her might. Whether leading the charge or prey herself, she runs. She can feel the hot breath, the saliva, the brush of their teeth as they either follow. Or give chase. She _hates_ them.

She stares into the lights and she does not blink. They are swinging into position, one after the other, flooding the world. She stares into the light.

"Jesus Christ! Do we need all that?" he holds a hand over his eyes, wincing and looking away.

"Oh, leave them. It's fine. Don't stop. Just leave it!" She is a creature of the light. She craves the light. Behind her on the wall her shadow like the dust of the nuclear dead.

They flee from her, technicians scuttling like insects, grumbling and cursing her. She hears them, but she does not hear them. She understands the words yet they have no effect on her. There is nothing they can say which will break the shell. They are nothing. Sitting in low rings nursing cold coffee and dark mutterings. What small creatures, and of what insignificance.

She stands in the light, bathed and eternal and birthing endless darkness.

"Alright, Soph, you know the scene?" A voice from beyond the light. A man. He comes to her. Small thing.

"I know it."

"Richard is going to step up behind you and grab hold of your arm, you see? Just as he says look at me, he takes your arm and spins you around. Like this."

He reaches for her, his fingers brushing her skin. Her flesh creeps at the feel of him. A revulsion sweeps through her. She can smell him, the filmy gray smell, the soft and unassuming. She wrenches herself from him, eyes flashing.

He blinks, steps back, uncertain, unsure. He mimes the motion awkwardly, alone. "Like that, you see?"

"I do not like it."

He takes off his glasses and rubs the frames clean on his shirttail. He licks his lips. He chews on the inside of one cheek. "Well, uh... what don't you like about it?"

"You are treating me like a doll. I am not a doll. Not yours _or_ Richard's! Why not I turn around. I face him. I look him in the eye. He says look at me, and I already am. He wants something more. He is pleading me. He wants me to see who he really is. He is desperate for my trust, and I will not give it to him. I look and I am cold."

He pushes his wristwatch up a little and rubs the skin. He holds his hands behind his back. He makes a show of consideration.

"Interesting. That's an interesting take on it, I guess."

"Do not pretend that you are listening."

"Sweetie, the scene's written."

She hisses. "Do not speak to me this way! I have read the scene, I know what is written. 'He approaches. Richard: Look at me.' I have read the words. But you know more. You have seen what is written but is not on the page, is this what you mean?"

He presses his thumbs against his eyes now. He takes them away and blinks, seeing stars. He is fucking fed up with _stars_. "Listen Soph, I know you got ideas okay, but trust me, yeah? I know the picture."

"You know better than me?"

"Jesus Christ!" He is standing with his weight on the left leg, his fingers trembling, making straggling motions at his sides.

Richard interjects. "Look, uh, maybe we should take a break..."

She holds up a hand. A warning. He falls silent, he fades away, moving from the light. She is staring at the man, her mouth trembling, clenching with agitation. Small things all.

"This is my picture, Soph, it's _my_ goddamn picture."

She sneers. "Your picture? Your picture, then why is it my name that will be on the posters and on the sign boards? You are nothing. I could have you replaced and you know this. It is not your picture."

His fists clench. "You fucking _bitch_ , you think you can-"

She spits in his face.

He steps back, dumbstruck. He takes his glasses off and he cleans them again.

Two hours later he is gone, and they are apologizing to her, and they are kneeling before her in supplication and regret. She forgives. She forgives them all. _He_ will not be coming back. She is magnanimous in her conquest, and she allows them to assuage her temper. She is forgiving in victory alone.

* * *

"Come here to me, girl! For heaven's sake! Stop your lurking when I need you. Always lurking."

"I'm so sorry ma'am, I'm very sorry. What do you need?"

"Shh! Don't ask me what I need. I don't need you to interrogate me! I need you to be here. When I need something I will tell you, just be here!"

"Of course, I'm sorry."

The girl sits on the chair in the corner of the room, eyes down and hands folded and knees together. She wears a blue dress that covers her knees and high socks, but there is still something. Leg. You can see leg. She's an ugly girl, pug-featured with tangled hair and thick glasses. Ugly girl. But good legs. Plump legs, smooth as silk. Sophia finds her eyes drawn to them every time she looks at the ugly girl.

"Don't just sit there looking stupid!"

"Ma'am?"

"Make yourself useful, bring me my coat."

"Your coat?"

"Are you an idiot? Yes, my coat! The fur coat in the other trailer, go and bring it! Fetch it! Go now!"

The ugly girl leaps up, hurries from the room, shuffling like a geisha in her tight dress. Sophia watches her leave, lip twisted and eyebrow angled. She watches the firm rump beneath the blue dress. Who does this ugly girl think she is? She sits, and in the half-dark she ruminates. When the ugly girl returns Sophia has a great many thoughts whirling in her mind. She waves away the coat, and the girl drapes it gently over the back of a chair. The girl returns to her seat. Hands folded, head down and knees together.

"Are you here to become famous?"

The girl looks up, her eyes wide, shocked almost. The girl looks guilty and so Sophia knows that her assumption is correct. Yet the girl shakes her head and she blushes.

Sophia laughs. Dry as paper shuffling. "You _are_ , of course you are. Everybody comes here to be famous. Not only famous, they come to be _great_. We are all hungry for greatness in this town. We want to be woven into history, am I not right?"

The girl nods, shifting uncomfortably. "I suppose so..."

"I am beginning to think that everybody wants this. Everybody wants to be remembered." It is the new evolution. God is dethroned and his children are seeking always to put themselves in his place.

The girl reaches up, unconsciously, and fingers the little gold cross hanging around her neck.

"We are being punished, girl."

"I'm sorry?"

"What is your name?"

She blinks, eyelids fluttering. Like the thumping heart of a deer under the rifle sight, like a wild bird held in your closing hand. "Judy."

"Judy."

The ugly girl nods, and blushes deeper.

"We're the same, Judy."

"Oh no, I... I'm not anything. Not like you, you're... well."

"What?"

"You _are_ great. Everybody knows you, everybody is going to remember _you_. I'm not anything."

"There are two great sorrows in this world, Judy. The first is to desire greatness, and to be lacking. The second is to be capable of greatness, and to have it denied. Which one are you?"

She blushes, and her chin sinks to touch her breastbone.

"I _could_ be great, Judy. I could be a great being, I know this. You may look at me and think that I have this in my hands, but you are wrong. You are all wrong about me. I am only a doll to them. Only just a toy. Dressed up and posed. Taken and shaped. A possession in the end. Something held in the hands of cruel men."

The girl brushes at her cheek. Is she crying? Weeping. Her whole body is trembling as if from fear.

Sophia rises. She picks up the coat and she wraps it around her shoulders. She approaches the girl, stands over her, too close. She can feel the heat of human fear, of misery. She stands with her legs touching the girl's plump legs. Her stockings and the ugly girl's rub together, whispering.

"You are not like me, Judy, but our sorrow is shared between us. I know what it is like to _want_. I know how much it hurts."

The girl says nothing. She clutches her chest, pinches the bridge of her nose.

Sophia lifts the girl's chin. Now they stand face to face, and in their eyes reflected darkly. The girl's eyes are red with tears. Sophia's legs are parted, straddling the girl's pressed knees. Her fingers on the girl's smooth cheek. Her lips parted and moist.

"You think if you stand close enough you might be like me, Judy. You think that you might reach out and touch me, don't you? This is what you want?"

The girl shakes.

"You can touch me, Judy. I want you to touch me."

The girl touches her.

Sophia turns her face to the ceiling, eyes shut, mouth open. She sighs, murmurs, caresses the girl's smooth cheek. "I know how much this hurts you, Judy. I know how much it hurts to want something that you can never have."

### The Seventh Age

Time rises. A shadow on the wall, it lifts its dark head and it opens its dark mouth dripping and it steals silently into motion. It shifts, groping blind and frail and lit with ceaseless animation. It flits quick as a thief, now before now behind. Time will have its hands about your throat, my love. It will have its knife in your back.

She has lost track of time. She is drinking, a liquid that seems to shine and feels as if it is glowing warm inside her. The loft is a haze of light, diffused and absolute, a spangle of color swirling. Their crooked voices are all about her, patois and cant, lips quirked brows flexed with arch affectation. To them all the world is a game in which they have no stake, little role but to watch. All the snide children of dispassion here roosting. The loft of the mansion is their detached bastion, their fortress of irony and liberation. Theirs is an absolute freedom from the burden of desire. Their only truth sublimated, their only want artificial.

She feels tired and miserable. Her feet are aching. There's an itch under her eyelids. She misses Mark.

There are nine or ten of them in the loft, assistants and house staff. Ancillary people, their identities coiled in those of their masters. Now they are cut loose, birds from their cages and tittering high in the rafters while below them the revelries go on. The ceaseless carousing and debauchery. A hive of fucking primates, their power and status in crumpled piles on the floor. And above the vestigial personalities chuckle.

They're trading stories of outrage and excess, of stupidity and grotesque avarice. They laugh. She always knew that they laughed. Every weakness, every foible. Every drink spilled in the lap and every tube of hemorrhoid cream. Every fit and every confession. Every plea. How they laugh, shorn of their jesses and keen.

She can see it shining in their eyes, their ruthless hatred, their jealousy.

"So he says that he wants to be her puppy and she says okay, okay sure, right? So, you know exactly where this is going because James, James always takes things too far. Never knows where to draw the line and he's _so_ literal. So he comes over. I'm sitting there with my memo pad, because Julia always needs me there to take down her memos, of course. Like, really? So he's coming over, and I'm sitting there, and he comes into the room on all fours. He doesn't even see me there. I think she just _forgets_ about me. Seriously? And he comes crawling in, sniffing and whining. _So_ creepy! And he comes right up to her chair and pushes his face, like, you know, between her legs? Kind of up under her skirt, and he's sniffing. She's laughing, good boy, good dog, you know. _Whatever_. I'm so over it at this point, like, can I go? But they're right between me and the door so I'd have to step over mister paws if I'm going to leave, practically. And do they even care if I see? I don't know. So he's sniffing and he starts licking her. But not, like, sexy, you know? Not like proper oral. He's going at her like a dog, just lapping and flapping his tongue around, and he's shaking his ass. Like, _Jesus_ talk about issues. But whatever, it's not even weird yet. He pulls down his pants, and he's wearing a fucking butt-plug. Like, the kind with a fur tail. I _know_! So he pulls his face out, all slobbery and red and panting, and he growls at her. Just like in the movie, right? You know how he does it? I swear, I'll never be able to watch it again now. He growls 'I want to sniff your asshole.' I just about lost it. I'm sitting there in the corner, just trying not to laugh. But she's getting into it. 'Cause Julia's always got to be the Freaky One. She bends over and starts waving her butt in his face, and he's just licking and sniffing and wiggling his tail. Funniest thing I've _ever_ seen. So gross. She pets him on the head, and he cums _on himself_. Like, oh my god, really? After all the buildup, this is it? What a stud, right? And he's lying there, he reaches back and strokes his butt-plug, and he's like, 'Recognize this?' so she's like, no not really. And he says, 'It's Shep.' Seriously! He seriously says this. The dog, the fucking dog from the movie, the one he adopted. After he died, James had him _stuffed_ and he made his tail into a _butt-plug_. Most twisted thing I've ever seen. I could _not_ believe it."

Everyone laughs. Makes faces. There are bottles glittering in the light of the television, the image warped through colored glass and moving on the walls. In the light, through a haze of cigarette smoke and half-filled bottles, her face. Through the chatter and the clinking and the creaking floor, her voice.

Sophia is here with them, Sophia the queen of all beauties, the embodiment of youth eternal and glowing. Her face in black and white on the screen, a still shot of her frozen features. A deep stillness. Her beauty seems to be a thing living and tangible, a force exuded through time, touching them even here.

A scream. A howl of anguish, of pain and fear. A cry of absolute despair. It is a cry of abdication, of resignation to nothingness. The cry of a doll. It shakes them, and for a moment talk ceases. All eyes turn to the screen. There are tanks rolling over the world, fire burning but this means nothing. This is a distraction. Then the camera is on her face again. Sophia. They all look, they stare locked in unison for an instant, at the face.

"Someone turn that shit down."

A spell turned away, a glamour disrupted. Conversation burbles back up. Someone mutes the film. Her grief is done now in pantomime, her mouth opening and closing without making a sound. What is she now, really?

Kate half rises, knees buckled. She feels like she is looking in a mirror through time. That her own self is seeing her through the glass and the screen. She feels silenced, feels her mouth opening and closing, shaping words. Like the screen she is ignored.

Sophia's assistant is standing in the corner of the room, an empty wineglass cocked between his fingers, dangling. Joel. She can feel him watching her as she takes a step towards the screen. His eyes are black and liquid, soft in the sockets. A knowing smirk, his weight on one leg.

"Here she comes," he says, "here she comes now."

And the lights go out.

* * *

Kate wakes slowly.

"Acting, of course, is a liar's world."

"They're not all liars. Some of them are just fucking crazy. Those are the two categories. Fucking crazy or a liar."

"Fair enough, I suppose I'd agree with that. Method versus technique. The personality as an instrument to be manipulated, or a beast to be tricked. You're a cold creature, a heartless thing of no truth which slips into the skin of invention. Or you're broken. You've fooled yourself into believing the lie. You let the lie move you and speak for you."

"So what's Sophia? I mean, shit, you'd know right? Is she lying, or is she crazy?"

"I honestly can't answer that. If she's lying, she's the best liar there has ever been."

"And if she's crazy?"

"Then she's further gone than the rest of the lunatics. Much further gone."

"Hah," Soft laughter.

Sasha and Joel are talking. They lean close to each other across the television screen. Sophia's face is suspended between them, hazing and twitching. Paused at the point of climatic emotion. Lines of static scar her opal skin.

"Actors aren't alone in this. It's one of those central human – what do you call it? – dichotomies. The difference is that they are allowed to express this at its most extreme ends."

"We let them fucking get away with it."

"But not just that. We encourage it, we _revel_ in it. Art has taken the place of shamanic ritual in our culture. It's our new mysticism. Early spiritualism gave way to religion as religion gives way now to art."

"And Sophia is the fucking fairy queen of hell."

There is no one else in the room, the others have all gone. Kate rises, as if in a dream, as if her feet refuse to touch the ground, and she goes to the door. She opens it, and goes out into a world of blood.

They are all dead. There are few enough bodies in the hall, but there is something in the arrangement of those broken forms present which makes her absolutely sure that everyone has been killed. Death has been visited gruesomely upon them; it has reduced them to nothing. Limbs torn away, insides spilled loose of their vessels, faces peeled off and slapped against the wall.

There is a head dangling in the middle of the hallway. It hangs on a hook by its extruded tongue, swaying and dripping. The steady rhythm of liquid fall, a widening ripple pool on hardwood. That head has no eyes, but she can see. This is Mark.

She staggers against the wall. Feels her clothing stick to the wet gore, peel away. It penetrates the fabric, down to her skin. Still warm upon her. She is moaning, low and wordless. And from the sound one word formed and repeated, held like a talisman forth, again and again: No. No. No. Her knees shake, bones soft beneath the crawling flesh. She sways but does not fall.

She holds the head. Tendrils of warmth flowing from him. He is jawless and broken, raggedly torn. Beauty in ruins. She kisses the hair matted and clotted. She cradles his head against her chest, hugs it. Shuts her eyes and can almost imagine him whole again in her arms, that he will in one moment move, that she will look and see him returned to her, grinning. She can feel the blood running down her chest.

"Oh Mark. Oh _Mark_." She turns, she turns like a girl on the balls of her feet.

They've lost all control now. They're careening down the freeway. They'll burn in gasoline fire.

She tilts her head. She looks. She puts a finger in her ear and opens her jaw two three times wide. Something is wrong. In one ear a perfect stillness. Utter silence. The house quieted and the lapping of the lake and the creaking of the trees in the wind. Alone in all the world. But in the other ear. In the _left_ ear, something. She can hear the rising sounds of chaos. Screaming, wailing. The crack of the whip and the slick of the razor blade. The sound is building, growing. She turns her head and the sound turns with her. It is not without but within, aligned to the hemispheres. She is standing between the streams.

She removes her shoes, toes drumming in what bleeds. She lets Mark loose to sway, sightless staring after. She leaves him with a kiss upon the unblemished forehead, and she goes towards the stair. The night is black through the skylights, and the light of the stars burns her miseries back to her. She can only now descend.

In the left ear a relentless calling. A laugh crawling. A scream that rises and shudders and breaks. Panting ecstasy and orgasmic delight, the sound of flesh ripping. A tear from vagina to anus opens so fast that for a moment the blood does not disguise the rending of flesh. Distended testicle twisted until it pops off and falls like a grape. Teeth cutting through muscle. Tongue lapping in the tear.

In the right ear wind moans and leaves hiss. Water gulps and house groans. The world in pain.

There are spider legs in her hair, dancing across her eyelids. Her body is tight and quivering. A rubber band pulled to its furthest extent. About to snap broken or fly free.

She comes to the foot of the stair.

In this room they are still living. A sea of twisted limbs and gawping mouths, naked bodies tangled, bloodied fingers grasping. A hand from beneath, quivering and fluttering like a bird, touching for something before it goes still. Pale flesh ivory bloodless as the life goes out of it. Screams rattle the walls. Blood is misting in the air. In the right ear silent as a grave.

In the center of the teeming mass, one standing amid a sea of cripples. She is naked, but robed in a shimmering crimson skin. She looks at Kate, and she smiles. Her teeth are the same yellow color as her eyes.

Sophia's mouth goes wide. Tongue curled, lips broken open, jaw unnatural as a python's swallowing. Sophia smiles.

### A History of Despair

She lies in the arms of the young actor. He reaches down and he strokes her cheek. "Like this?" he asks. As if he is playing with a doll. As if he is cradling a child. He is not asking her, he is not looking at her. As if she were nothing but a prop.

She slaps his hand away. "No! No, not like this!" She looks to the director, eyes flashing.

The two men sigh. They groan. They roll their eyes. Here we go again. He holds a hand out to her, palm out. Quiet now. Quiet child. "Hang on, Soph." And he speaks to the young actor. He does not meet her gaze; it is as if she never was.

She flinches. Confused. Hurt. What is happening?

Time is passing over her. Age paws at her, its fingers pulling her skin, pulling her breasts, pulling her eyes. It puts its mouth over hers and breathes into her and she feels herself expand. She fights it with thicker make-up, heavier jewels dangling, clinging like a crust. Her dresses are richer, a gaudy facade, a shield to hide behind. She wears her hair like a hood around her features and demands that they shoot her through gauze like a haze of fog and silk.

She lies in the arms of the young actor. She does not speak again. She stares up at him and tries to make him love her. His hand is on her skin. His lips press against hers and his mouth is dry inside. When the director calls cut he distances himself.

"Like kissing my mother," he says an hour later, still spitting. She hears.

She tells them to get rid of him. They put her off. They attempt to placate her, but there is nothing now which will satisfy her.

She sits in an empty room and she stares at a papered-over window. She looks at her hands. The hands of a woman, not a girl's. Only a woman. She feels her power running like sand through her fingers.

Every day she is diminished. Every day she is ignored, rejected. They push her further and further from the light. She feels like a blind thing, like a mole burrowing through the darkness of the earth. An ugly thing buried and clawing.

The young actor's name is above hers. Always they have been wanting to put men above her. On top of her. She screams. She tears at the poster, to rip it from the brick. All around her the vultures clacking, snapping with their cameras like teeth. Nipping at the carcass. She screams, she weeps, she bloodies her fingers on the wall. She will not be put beneath a man, not a pup, not a _child_. Not one who does not love her. All her life she has been beneath, and then one moment, one bright light. Her true ascension.

She will not be pushed back down again.

The police remove her from the street. They drive her to her home and they call for professionals. They all speak as if they know her. Her agent is there, her management. They twitter and fawn while in the hall they titter. They laugh at her. Unraveling like an old sweater, a baggy shapeless used-up thing. She drinks, her jewelry clanking on the glass. Her hands are shaking. Her hands are trembling. Blood smeared on the glass. All the world is spinning. Her beautiful nails, her fine delicate fingertips. She begins to laugh. She laughs and clutches her face, painting blood on her cheeks, and they frown. They summon the psychiatrist.

The policeman are chuckling and shaking their heads as they leave. Crazy actors. This town, right? Crazy fucking woman. Such a shame, she was something in her day. A real piece.

The psychiatrist frowns and makes notes.

She speaks and speaks, she tries to explain. The words come so slowly, so haltingly, with such _difficultly_. She hates English. She _hates_ it! The mongrel tongue of a mongrel people.

The psychiatrist sighs and he shakes his head and he gives her a name. I can't help her, he says to her management. I can't do anything. There's someone you could try. A specialist. He might be able to make her see reason.

He gives her the name, and she resolves to go.

She must go. After all, what else can she do?

* * *

But she has not yet gone. Where is the card with the name scrawled upon it? Shoved in a drawer, crumpled in a purse, lost in a pocket. She is too busy for this.

"I need _something_! I need to work! You know that is all I need. Find me work."

He frowns. He steps from one foot to the other. He folds his hands behind his back then deep in his pockets. Hm hm. Well. Yes.

She sneers at him. Limp creature! "Stop your twitching! My god. Find me work!"

* * *

"I will do it. I like it. I like this. She is a good character..."

"Hm... yes. Well."

She wants to scream. "What? What?"

"Well, they want you to audition."

She stares at the man. She can feel the fury rising. _Audition_? Who are they to ask? Is she nothing then? Only a girl? Bend over, girl. That is an audition. Has her entire life lived in their eyes not been audition enough? Has the truth written in her own blood not offered proof? She is Sophia. Sophia does not audition, she _takes_. The world begs her to bless it with her presence. And now they want her to come before them, cup in hand and rattle for their grace? To crawl before them. The great actress. The famous woman. Has she become this then? So reduced in their estimation?

Her eyes are narrowing to slits. Like the eyes of a serpent. A basilisk gaze.

The man quivers and bites his lip, rocks on his heels.

She cannot trust herself to speak. There is no saying what may emerge if her lips part. She cannot speak. She waves a hand, dismisses the man. He leaves briskly. Nothing he would rather do. He leaves as fast as he can without running for the door.

And she is left there, shut in darkness.

* * *

"I'm sorry Sophia. You've got a reputation. They're calling you a prima donna."

"What is a prima donna? The _best_! The best deserves to be treated that way! I want what is _mine_!"

"You got a reputation problem. The studios think you're a pain in the ass."

* * *

"There's nothing we can do. They're passing. They want someone younger. Fresh face, right? Don't worry, it happens."

* * *

"Look, I'll be straight with you, Sophia... take the part. Do the job. Everybody plays mothers sometime. This is not a bad role."

* * *

"People don't like you in those parts anymore. Leave it to the younger girls. You need more mature material. Have you ever considered Shakespeare? Hamlet? They haven't cast Gertrude yet, and you would be _magnificent_."

* * *

"You know I love you, sweetheart. You're the best. The queen. Things will turn around. You just have to adjust your mindset. Adapt to the new normal."

* * *

She finds it. The scrap of paper. Folded between the cushions of the sofa. The number. She dials with trembling fingers, and she clutches the receiver. Knuckles bone white, she holds it like a drowning sailor holds to a shattered raft. She makes the call.

### The Eighth Age

You are dreaming. This is only a dream. Wake up if you can.

"Kate? Wake up, Kate. It's alright. Only a bad dream."

Her lids are heavy, gummy. They open slow, unwillingly, sticking shut. Sasha is hovering over her. Her eyes dark, rimmed kohl black. She snaps her fingers beneath Kate's nose. Skin porcelain white. Expression hard and brittle.

"Come on back, baby. You're not in a fucking dream."

Kate tries to rise. A wave of dizziness and nausea floods through her. She groans and slumps back down on the couch. She feels a hand on her shoulder. A male hand. Smooth fingers. Sophia's assistant Joel. He has a soft sad face, devoid of features in some way. Blank, like a man formed of clay in only the most basic detail.

"What?" her tongue is thick in her mouth.

"You frightened us, Kate. You were shouting. Thrashing." His voice just as soft, as emotionless.

"Fucking screaming more like it."

"I was?"

Joel strokes the back of her hand with his long smooth fingers. "You were. It's alright though. Just a dream. Forgive us, we shouldn't have let you sleep in this condition. Shall we take you to your room?"

"My room?" The loft. Glittering in the light. The television still frozen on the image of Sophia's face. How long was she sleeping? Could it have been only moments? She feels like she has been asleep for years.

It is coming back slowly. Her room. Of course she must have a room. The gathering is supposed to last three days. This must be the early morning of the second day already. Time slipping through her fingers.

"Where's Mark? Where's Mark!" She sits up with a jolt, a sudden surge of panic jagged in her mind. The image, which is as plain as if she were seeing it before her, of the head hanging on its hook.

Sasha strokes her arms, touches her shoulders. "Don't fucking worry, Kate. Joel will find Mark for you. I'll take you to your room. Copacetic?"

She feels something rising in her, a clutching groping dread. She feels its cold hands wrap around her throat and squeeze. She gasps, sucking in deep lung-fulls of air, and she bursts into tears.

Joel pats her back. "There there. Sasha will take you to your room. Get some rest. I'll go and find your Mark for you. Try to sleep."

Kate nods, brushing angrily at her face, biting her lip to keep the choking sobs at bay. She can feel her face turning red and puffy, the fat tears dribbling down her cheeks. She can't let them see this! She won't allow herself to become another of their cruel stories.

She shuts her eyes. She shuts her mouth. She freezes her mind, her thoughts. It is not real. Mark is alive. _I_ am alive. Don't be silly, Kate, don't be silly. You can do this. She stands. Wipes her eyes. She laughs, a weak little chuckle, frail false thing. "I'm fine. Sorry. Forgive me. Just a bad dream." Another laugh, a little more convincing. "Sasha, would you mind showing me the room? I think I would like to get some rest." She has to fight to keep her voice steady, keep it even. In her mind she is a calm pool of dark water. No ripples on the surface, no matter what lurks beneath, let nothing show.

Sasha nods. "Yeah, no fucking problem. Come on."

They are looking at her strangely. Of course they are! But it will pass. She nods. One last sniffle, another weak laugh. She is in control again. She is in control. The body and the mind are but an instrument, that's what her acting instructors taught her. It is an instrument and it can be made to do anything if you have the skill.

Emotion is not real, it is only a shifting of chemicals. _You_ are in control, Kate!

She follows Sasha down from the loft. She fights the urge to flinch when she steps into the hall. Silent. Nothing there. No bloody massacre, no hanging corpses. Of course not.

They descend a short flight of stairs, then down a narrow hall and up another set of steps. The house seems like a maze, labyrinthine and ever-expanding. Sasha leads her across a wide landing and down into a dim passage. The place seems to be deserted. She can hear very little, only the faint muffled sounds of those most determined revelers still coupling behind closed doors.

Sasha opens a door in the hall. A plain door, one of many in a long row. Guest rooms.

Kate steps forward, but the other woman's arm stretches out, blocking her way.

Sasha moves closer. Her eyes seem unnaturally wide, yellow as a cat's. "So... what were you dreaming about that scared you so fucking bad?" She smiles, wide as a shark. There is no warmth in it, no offer of friendship. A beast about to take a bite.

Kate shakes her head. "It was nothing. I- I don't remember."

Sasha laughs, her throaty bray of raw amusement. "Bull _shit_! Come on, Katie. You can tell me." Her hand moves off the door frame. It is on Kate's shoulder, the fingers trailing sinuously. And her other hand is on Kate's hip.

Kate is pulled closer to the woman. She feels slightly faint, almost dizzy. As if pricked by a venomous bite and now drawn slowly into the spider's weaving.

"No, no," she protests weakly, "It was nothing, honest. I'm sure it was nothing. Anyway, what does it matter? Only a dream." She laughs softly, miserably.

Sasha smiles. She leans in close and kisses Kate's cheek. The lightest brush of her black lips. "This is _all_ a fucking dream, Katie-baby. It matters as much as anything."

And she is being drawn into the room, pulled across the carpet. She is barefoot. When did that happen? Her naked steps seem to sink deeper and deeper into the plush floor. Sasha's hands are all over her, feeling everything, cupping, caressing, pulling her deeper into the gloom.

There are no windows. The door swings shut with a slow rasp, and clicks.

Kate is blind in the dark, feeling, eyelids drooping. She feels herself pulled towards the bed, falling into it as if falling into a cloud. The smell of cotton and burnt candy, an old candlestick, a musty scent like being locked in a wardrobe which had not been opened for a great many years. She can feel Sasha's fingers on the buttons of her clothes, on the zippers and laces.

"No..." Her voice is murmur; it seems faint even to her.

Sasha laughs. "I like that, Katie-baby. Say it again."

"No, don't, I-"

"Tell me to stop."

"I want you to stop. Please, Sasha, I-"

"Try and push me away."

She tries, panic swelling her throat.

"Not strong enough, little girl. Not strong enough."

"S-stop!" she is crying now, voice thick and liquid.

Sasha's arms are like iron, her hands wrapped around Kate's wrists tight as manacles. Kate snivels. Sasha just laughs. "Aren't you a little fox, then? Aren't you a firecracker?"

"Don't t-touch me..."

"You know, I always thought you were pretty. One of the prettiest people I ever saw. You know that? This face in the magazines. On the TV screen..." She curls her fingers through Kate's hair, caresses the side of her cheek. "Just look at you now."

Kate wriggles. She bites her bottom lip, bites her tongue. She hates Sasha in this moment, hates her deeply. Is this still the dream? Has she woken? Could anything outside of her own mind make her feel so ashamed? So weak?

Sasha is leaning down over her face. Kate can feel the warmth of the other woman's breath on her skin with every word.

"What's it like, Katie? When everybody's looking, and everybody can see you? See through you, see what you really are? What's it like when everybody knows how ugly you are?" She laughs, and she touches Kate.

Gasp. Cry. Beg. Sniffle. Writhing and groaning. No no no. Don't do this. Don't make me feel like this. Arched back, tight muscles in the legs and neck. The clawing scrabbling fingers. The waves of unasked for feeling. Groaning. Eyes shut. Teeth grinding. Thighs clenched. A shudder of released breath.

Sasha wipes her fingers off on Kate's stomach. "You know," she says, as she gets to her feet, standing erect in the silence, "you look prettier when you do it on TV."

Kate rolls over, sobbing. Her whole body is wracked with it, convulsing, rocking. Curled in on itself, knees against her chest, mouth open and drooling as the tears pour from her eyes.

The darkness folds over her, and she is lost.

### A History of Glamour

"Go go. I do not need you anymore."

"Miss Sophia, I-"

"I have said to go! So go. Wait for my telephone call."

The driver looks once more down the long path. The crumbling stone road leading away into sparse bracken. He tilts his cap back. His skin in the afternoon sun is the color of an old chocolate bar, melted and hardened again. The buttons on his uniform shine like bullet casings. He shrugs, and he starts the car.

She watches, making sure that he is leaving, really leaving. She must be alone for this, will suffer no observers. Shame prickles on the surface of her skin.

What is she doing here?

Far on the outskirts of the Hollywood hills, away up into the curving roads, far from the glitter of the vainglorious city. This is a place of the earth. Dry and dead but for those ugly things that cling to the lifeless dirt. Dust blown over the stone.

She takes a step down the path. Hot wind touches her. She is like a thing of crystal and lace, wisps of wrapped silk and diamond, lips painted violet and eyes golden. Her heels sharp as fangs clack on the crumbling ground, teeth to the stone.

Ten steps down the path. She sees something hidden in the brush, and she pushes away the clinging growth. Twisted iron gates seven feet tall. Wrought and ruined. Across the front a metal nameplate, a sign. _Burnham Women's Asylum_.

She laughs. She stands there teetering in the scrub, thorns clinging to her silk gauze, and she laughs. So this is what she has come to, a house of female madness. An empty ruin echoing with the calls of the lost. She continues on down the path and around the slow turn of the road she sees it: the shuddering building.

A leering lecherous thing, heavy awnings and crumbling balconies. Filthy glass like the stillness of a thousand stagnant pools.

There is no doorbell and so she does not ring it. She simply enters.

* * *

The man appears, yes that is the word, just appears. As if he smelled her. As if he sensed her. As if he was drawn to her presence. As if he were lurking behind a grimy window and watching her come slowly down the long dirt road and now approached to give the appearance of fortunate happenstance. He smiles, and he grasps at once her arm in his hands. His fingers are feathery. Like nothing of flesh born. Very soft, his touch light. He smiles, and his papery lips seem to peel back off his teeth.

He is not an ugly man, but unhandsome. Old, yet without the weight of age. He seems rather as if he has begun to go translucent.

"And you are Miss Sophia? Yes. I was told you were coming. Marvelous. So pleased that you found the place. It is rather out of the way. Poor old thing, falling to shambles." He chuckles, patting at his coat pockets absently. He takes her hands, both of her hands in both of his, and he smiles. "Of course it was quite a sight in my father's day, bless him. Now it's all too much for me to keep up with. You understand that, of course."

"What do you mean by this?" She withdraws her hands, but not right away. Only after he has held them for a long moment. But why? Why let this lecherous old shrink paw at her for even an instant? What must she have been thinking? His eyes. Yes, it was his eyes. Milky gray pools of lightless depth. She had been staring into his eyes as he spoke, and scarcely aware of his touch. She was staring into them still, falling and falling into a deep mist.

"I know why you have come, Miss Sophia, yes yes, of course I know." He reaches suddenly, violently, wrenching her hand back and squeezing it, a sudden grasp that makes her shriek at the sharp and unexpected pain. And he withdraws from her hands, clenched and crumpled as it is, the piece of card. He smooths it out in his palm, disregarding her outburst completely. She glares at him, rubbing her wrist, unsure how to respond to his assault.

He smiles at the little card. "Ah." He traces the raised lettering. "My name, yes?" Written in curling letters, _Lester Burnham, Consultant_. "Me and mine." He chuckles again, and the sound is perilously closer to a snicker.

"My father built this place, you know. Leonard Burnham. A house of madness it was then. A home for all the women who had reached the ends of their means. Oh, you saw the sign, I am sure you saw the sign. You seem to me one who sees a great deal. I was raised in these walls. I played among the inmates as a boy. And what are the mad but children, really? Those who have become like children again. Are you like that, Miss Sophia? So hard to keep things up. I have read about you, of course, but I believe nothing. I believe only what I see."

She narrows her eyes. Dust fills the air between them, making a haze as if of a dream. The sunset light is pouring golden through the doorway. Is it so late already? "What sort of consultant are you? Do you think I am mad, is this what you think? I am not crazy."

"My _darling_ ," he purrs, "I think no such thing. What a weight you carry. All their eyes upon you. I want only to sooth you. To _help_ you. To allow you to _rest_. This is what I do, this is why you have come to me."

"This is what you do." she repeats, voice frosty, "You tell people why they have done things. This is not something I need, Mr. Burnham. I know myself. The problem, the _only_ problem: I do not know the world. How can I? It is a place of madness. If they were all locked away a thousand buildings such as this would never be enough."

He smiles. A narrow and oily smile that seems a shrug on his mouth. He slides his hands into the velvet pockets of his gray waistcoat. "I can tell that you are very wise, Miss Sophia. And I think that I was right: you see things. I am very much looking forward to speaking with you further. But come, let us not stand all day on the threshold." He turns, walking away. He stops at the foot of the stairs, but does not look back, only pauses, wiping with his thumb at the dusty balustrade.

She follows. Each step seems to her as if it covers a very great distance. She is floating over the world, a giant on stilts a thousand feet high. The close dry air seems to squeeze her skull. She can hear something in the walls but it is not rats. It is like the slow scratching of a thousand fingernails from the depths and from the dark places.

Lester Burnham turns. He holds up his finger. "You see?" Skin black. "They say that dust is largely the dead skin of a building's occupants, drifting through the air. Like spirits. This whole place is coated with it. An epidermis borrowed from deceased lunatics." He giggles, and rubs his fingertips together.

"You are a strange man, Mr. Burnham."

"Yes, yes I know." His tone thoughtful, musing. "Sometimes I wonder if I have gone mad in this place."

And it is at that she resolves to leave, to turn tail and go without another word. But then his eyes are on her, and she is falling deeper into the cool gray fog, and she does not flee. She follows.

The old asylum is choking with age, a withered and withering husk. Lifeless shell. Room after room all empty, doors swaying listless and windows gaping. The linoleum stair is crumbled, turning to chalk under the boot of time. There are marks on the walls, effluvium of indeterminate composition. Finger marks raked in plaster, the prints of teeth on the banisters. The building itself is a silent cry. It is a torture, it is an agony.

Finally they come to the upper apartments, the living quarters far above the rabble-housing. Lester Burnham opens the door wide and bows. "My home," he said, gesturing for her to step inside. "And my offices."

If this is indeed a home then it can only be the abode of a man with no life in him. The walls and shelves are bare. All objects squared to plain angles and no color but those more pallid shades of slate and charcoal.

They sit in a room unfurnished but for a small stool and a low couch. She sits on the couch – though he asked her to lie on it – and he upon the stool. He folds his hands, steeples the first two fingers, and he licks his lower lip.

"Now we are here, my darling. Tell me everything."

### The Ninth Age

This is a great engine, this world of people. You are but a shred in the tapestry, a gleaming strand. Society is a grinding thing, a weight under which you will be crushed. When they know you, you stop being yourself. When you stop being yourself you cannot know yourself. How then can _they_ know you?

The sun crawls. Light spilling through the narrow window, pooling over her, dripping and thick on her skin. It gathers and flows and slides away.

She lies on her back, watching the shadows dappling the ceiling.

Kate. Kate. Kate.

The name is heavy in her mouth. It feels alien again.

She does not remember with any clarity the time before. When she was Georgia. Named for her father's mother. Named in memorial to the dead, by the dead. She did not remember his face. Not the sound of his voice nor his touch. She recalls only the scent, the earthen odor and woody smell of his sweat. Not enough to recall the man. Only a fair smell on the retreating wind.

Her mother chose Kate. Katherine, after Hepburn. Another memorial. Another exhumed woman. _Kath_ erine, the emphasis spat from the tip of the tongue and the remainder but an afterthought trailing in the slime of disinterest.

Katherine was forced on her as a matter of course. Children are nothing in the hands of their parents, raw putty to be molded and reformed. When you do not like what has been made you have only to close your hand and obliterate all detail, reduce self again to shapeless formless. And to make again anew.

She told a casting director once that her name was Georgia. Slip of the tongue or childish rebellion, she no longer remembers. Five years old is a long time ago. She didn't get the job. A cereal commercial. She was turned away, and turned away as a past self, which was worse.

Her mother was not an angry woman. Did not yell. Did not strike the child. Kate, little Georgia once, was allowed to forget. For days – weeks – it evaporated from her mind. And then: Taken in hand, lead to the television. Mother stands behind her, heavy on her shoulders. They watch, and they watch. Again and again the same images. The other girl, the chosen girl: smiling, laughing, spooning mouthfuls of sugared oats into her perfect mouth.

"Say the words, Katherine."

"What words?"

"The words you were supposed to say. That she's saying now."

Her mother kept her there for hours, repeated over and over the lines of the commercial. Even now they are burned onto her tongue. She wakes speaking them to the darkness. She murmurs them a mantra against fates, chant for the future.

Never Georgia again, her mother told her. Only Katherine. Convinced that the name was the only thing standing between her and success. The name father chose, and the name mother chose. Father is dead. Father's name is dead. Only Katherine now.

"Hm hm, that's so good, Mom! I love it!" And, "Toasty Crunch for breakfast is the best!"

Her voice echoes in the dawn gloom. A child's words in her adult mouth.

Her mother never let her forget that she is not the property of her own self, that she belongs to Mother. I gave up my own _body_ for you, Katherine! She used to say that. Disgust in the mirror. Sagging, stretched. Georgia despising her own existence which cost so much, which destroyed so much before taking its first breath. I gave you my _body_! This is the _least_ you can do. The _least_! Kate is the corrective, the revenge. An expression of hatred for the man, that dead man who smelled like a being of the earthen world. We are higher bodies, Katherine, beings subordinate only to the demands of _beauty_. Beauty is the only true thing.

And beauty is a thing of clean teeth and cut nails. It is a thing of cream and powder, of smoke.

And youth.

Kate watched her mother wither. An angry dark star eclipsed by the moon and diminished in its shadow. But always dangerous and always burning. A cruel lady burning in the white bed. "My _body_! I _gave_ you this!" Ungrateful, undeserving. A thing which cannot be loved.

Dark star swallowing the sky.

She was a good child. A good girl. Did what she was told, did as she was asked. Hit your marks, hit your ques. Cry when you are required to cry. The self is a lie, a creation of lesser souls. To be false is the only purity.

She got her first commercial when she was six years old. Underwear.

They made fun of her at school, the other children. But they were only children and she was more than they. They knew it and she knew they did. She knew that they were only jealous of her. They were only ever themselves. She had within her multitudes. Of course it hurt, of course she cried, sobbing in dark corners, watching from behind and afar.

I do not need to be like you. I do not need to be loved by you. I will be loved from a distance by faceless pluralities. She was confidant in this. But of course it hurts.

She grew up a lonely girl. Quiet. Obedient. Kate never rebelled, never spoke a word against. She was pliant and sweet; it was enough to be beautiful and young. She got her first series on her tenth birthday, and considered it a perfectly justified personal gift. She has only to abandon her self and she will be given everything they say she'd always wanted.

Mother took her out of school then, of course. No longer down among the other children, she was pushed into the world of adults. Adult coworkers, adult tutor. She worked, every day she worked. In the quiet darkness of an isolated trailer on the edge of the lot, in the shining glare of studio lights – all this becomes one, light and darkness united.

Little Katie. She found herself reduced to an object of adulation which existed outside herself. Another name: Sallymae. For six years she is Sallymae, and Sallymae's family is her own. The man who embraces her, calls her his little button within the glare of the lights. In the darkness he drinks and squeezes her knees and eats her with his eyes. The new mother in the light, loving her, doting on her, comforting her. In the darkness is her real parent, a coil of mistrust and betrayal.

She lived her childhood under the guise of another name, scripted and shaped by faceless men. Ruled always from without, from their desire and from the relentless changing of her body. The woman they called mother held her close when she broke her arm, and the studio audience sighed their sympathy. When she started to develop as a woman they brought in leering teenagers who whistled and cawed after her, over and over and over until they could see the correct level of misery in her face.

It was a strange thing, to need the attention, to crave it. And yet hating it, shrinking from it. She felt herself split within herself.

And in the darkness her mother hissing and spiteful of the thing she had made.

She never rebelled. She saw them all around her, the child stars burning out and washing up. Charred wreckage on the shore. Caught fucking on in the back seats of Italian cars, arrested with needles in their arms, turned from cherubic to plain-faced by happenstance of nature. She was never like them. She floated above, continuing. After all, she had another show to shoot in the morning. There was only the next moment, only the next line and the ripples of laughter and applause. It filled her like true love.

She never loved. Her first friend was Sallymae's, her first enemy, her first lover. Life in the light and the darkness fused, blended.

When the show ended it was like she was dead, a cringing crawling thing of no substance or shape. And then the next casting call, the next role. She became Victoria, and Sallymae faded. Sallymae's friends faded, her lovers, her mother and father. So easily supplanted.

She was the malleable child, and remains as such.

Kate lies in the darkness, staring at the ceiling. All around her is empty. She is nothing. She cannot become Sophia, she realizes. Sophia is as formless as she, as ephemeral. Water that flows into water cannot keep its form, it can only bleed. If she tries to become Sophia, one of them will vanish, and she knows who is the stronger spirit between them.

She lies in darkness, ebbing.

Waiting.

### A History of Death

It is raining in the great necropolis.

She is alone in the back seat of the limousine, watching the light of the street lamps slide across the window.

These are the lights of the endless city. A city without a soul, it goes on and on and she is but a flicker of shadow in the sun. The artificial light. They will not miss her when she has gone. There will be another in her place, and another after that.

Water rolls over glass. It dances on the roof of the car. She drinks from a crystal goblet. Wine red as blood running down her fine pale chin.

All this world is peopled by the dead. They sit on street corners or in golden seats alike, and they stared empty-eyed across the slow arc of the globe. She can see them now, the faceless. There are no features, only masks. Only the death's head. She feels her skin, Smooth, unbroken.

There is no future.

She walks down the carpet, through the flashbulb forest. Her dress is pale gold, pearls ring her throat. Those about her are but clay. Their mouths opening are but the crumbling of dirt and stone in the rain as it falls. She looks for eyes. Swollen and black and turning like marbles in their heads.

She walks, driven by a thirst which cannot be quenched.

Another film. Another premiere. Another night in the darkness.

The words of the psychiatrist murmur still in her ear. She can hear his soft voice still speaking low. She can still taste his spit in her mouth, feel his hands on her skin. But he is nothing to her now. He is nothing anymore.

"Sophia!" How ravishing. Breathtaking. Mesmerizing. Truly beautiful. My darling. My darling. You are a true angel.

She will demure no longer. She has grown weary of them. They paw at her, to take her arm, to kiss her cheek, to possess her. She hisses, she waves them away.

"Oh, come now, Sophia!" Fat fingers wrapping round her wrist.

She bites him, sinks her teeth into corpulent flesh. He shrieks, he pulls away, shaking his great paw, tears springing to his eyes. Blood pours into his palm, streams from his fingertips. She stares at him with cool disarray, blood on her lips. She does not smile. He stares, cursing under his breath. "Fucking crazy bitch..." They shrink away from her, piggy eyes clouded with fear. She sweeps past them, deeper into the darkness. This is not for you to touch. Your power and your money have not bought me. You are nothing, one of the faceless gazing upon the icon. You cannot touch the creature of the screen.

They are the dead and she alone living.

She does not sit. She stands in the center of the aisle and she gazes into her mirror while the crowd breaks around her. She is wreathed in fur, ermine and fox. Wrapped in death. The skin of the world. Diamond glint on every finger and from her ears and in the depth of her pale eyes. Plain coal crushed to hardened beauty, a thing to see and to adore. A thing to cut.

She sees herself in the screen, and it is like watching a dream half-remembered.

She watches, that other self playacting opposite her now. Her lips draw back, peel off rictus teeth. She laughs, standing in the center of the theater as the faceless men murmur and shiver about her, she throws back her head and she laughs. This is nothing. They are nothing.

He follows her from the darkness. Prowling after, dark eyes lidded and half-grin cocked across his mouth. She does not look back, but she can sense him here, hurrying behind. She leads him deep into the old building.

Memory hangs on the walls. Gilded faces trapped in red velvet. She moves through heavy curtains, her fingers trace brass polish and chrome plates, her feet treading over thick crimson rugs and on black marble tile. The theater is like a great showroom coffin, like a memorial to itself and to its dead. Old movie posters framed behind glass, the faces of those who remain in the tomb.

She walks into the depths, and he follows.

She passes through a heavy cedar door and into a great cavernous space. A high balcony over an empty theater. The empty seats watch the dead screen; they wait. Like tombstones standing.

He crawls through the doorway behind her, chuckling.

"My goodness," he said, his voice in low conspiracy, "My my."

She turns. She looks at him. She the imperial figure, the hewn woman in the square, over the door, on the altar.

"Whatever are we going to do with you, love?" He rubs his fingertips together. There is sweat on his brow and the smell of it is in his fine clothing.

She does not know him. He has no face. Is this the young actor who mocked her, the old actor who insulted her? Is this Lester followed her from the asylum? Is this the great director creeping jealous in her wake, the corpulent producer who named her? Is this Freddy come to reclaim her? Husband, brother or father?

He holds her, his hands on her, his fingers squeezing her upper arm, his breath on her cheek. "You really have gone mad, haven't you? A mad woman. Crazy crazy. Are you crazy, love?"

She smiles. She wraps her long smooth arms around his neck. She pulls him close and she presses her mouth against his. She opens his mouth. She tastes him cool and fallow on her lips. She tastes him thin as a waif and fat as a king. She licks his lip, his face and his hands.

"You _are_ crazy," he says, and he strokes her hair and strokes himself through his trousers. "You're a mad woman."

"This is a place of madness," she says back, "this is a crazy world."

He pulls at her clothing, slides the straps of her pale gown off her pale shoulders. It falls with less than a whisper, pools at her feet like a puddle of liquid gold. Her body is silken in gray light.

"Look at you, you busy boy. My jackrabbit, eager to be going at it again."

"My mad march hare," he murmurs back, and kisses her shoulder.

She steps back and she spreads her arms out. He stumbles forward a little, snatching for her just out of reach and he looks.

In the silver twilight light before the blank face of the dead screen he sees her bare as a bloody calf and spread-eagled.

"Jesus," he murmurs.

She laughs.

Her ivory fine skin is bruised from the neck to the thigh. The mark is on her, teeth show like ripples in the winter sea, black crescents mapping her form close as ink beneath the skin. Upon her neck and her shoulders, her breasts and her ribs and her waist and her wrists and her arms and her thighs and her buttocks and her back and her stomach and her pubis and her hips. Painted flesh, no breaks in the skin but the two bites at the sides of the neck, still bleeding raw.

"Who did this to you?" he asks. Revulsion twists him, but he cannot look away, the swirls of swollen tissue like a hypnotic maze before.

She laughs softly. The laughter builds. It rises in her, it turns raw and horse, turns black and dark. It bursts from her, violent and cruel. How can he ask this? How can he not know that he himself has done it? Now his creation, his child, his thing. Now she turns on him. She has surpassed him, eclipsed him.

She comes to him in darkness, and he cannot hide nor turn away. She wraps her hands around his throat and she squeezes.

She sinks her teeth deep inside. She enters him, she takes possession. And he is now bent to her at this long last. He is in her power, and her power is in him.

### The Tenth Age

You must wake. You cannot sleep any longer, fair child. The time has come at last to rise. And to become.

"Wake up."

His voice through the gloom. She starts, she tumbles trembles. "Mark?"

"Mark." His voice a cold smile.

"Mark, where have you been?" Panting in the darkness, stumbling scrabbling. "I've been worried. I've been _frightened_."

"There's nothing to be frightened of, Kate."

"I've had terrible dreams."

"Terrible."

"Why are you _talking_ like that, Mark? I don't like that."

"I don't like that!" He parrots her, mocking high girl voice. He laughs. Amused at her female existence.

"Mark!"

And he is on her. He has crossed the darkness, he has her. Wrists in his clenched hands, his face against her. "Kate! Kate! Kate! Don't be frightened, Kate, don't be frightened. This is only a terrible dream."

And she is crying. The tears spill from her eyes, fall like breaking glass. Not this again. No more. In this room filled up already with so much.

"No no no," she is saying, "no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no

He touches her cheek with the tips of his fingers. "Don't cry, little thing. It's alright. I have you now. Don't cry."

She buries her face against his cold chest, the hard knot of bone, the ribs like fingers about to lace together, about to close over her. She sobs. "Mark, I'm frightened. There's something wrong about this place. About these _people_. They're not _right_ , they're _not_."

He strokes her hair. Shh, shh. Quiet now, love. Quiet, child.

"I've never felt this way, Mark. I feel like I'm outside of myself. I feel like I'm losing myself. I've been in this room, in the dark. It feels like _days_. How long have I been here? I sleep, but it doesn't _feel_ like sleeping. My dreams feel more real than this. This feels false. Or is this a dream. Are you real? Who _am_ I, Mark?"

He takes her cheek. Caresses it with the back of his hand. Smooth pale skin. He looks into her eyes and she feels that he can see her clearly though he is but a shade in the darkness, a figure of no detail or depth but the gleam of his damp and shining eyes.

"You're just a spoiled little girl, Kate. You're a fool, only a reflection. You're weak. Pathetic. So cold. Dead already. How could you ever think that I loved you? Nobody could, and you know it. You've always known it, Kate. Your mother hated you. Your father died to escape you. You've never been more than a prop in other people's stories. No one respects you. They tolerate you, set you on a shelf or hang you on the wall. If you weren't so beautiful you would be nothing at all. And even your beauty is false. We both know it's not real. You're ugly beneath this. I've seen you, I've seen everything in you. I know your face when you think no one is looking. You're ugly when you sleep. I can hardly stand to look. Someday soon people are going to realize what you are. They're going to see inside you. I know how much that frightens you. It keeps you awake, doesn't it? When you dream everyone in there knows what you are. They see the real you, and they hate you. They hate you, Kate. You're just an ugly stupid girl hiding inside."

She is trembling in his arms. Nothing. A doll in his grip. His voice level and even, coming at her like the steady wash of the tide that destroys slowly, erases everything.

"I can save you, Kate. I can deliver you from this."

His hands are wrapping around her throat. Drawing tight. Closing on her. This is the way she dies in the darkness and alone.

"You should never have left home, Kate, should never have left the womb. This world is not for you. You should have strangled inside your mother's body."

And he squeezes.

She tenses, her whole body taut. She will never learn. Her mother told her that she would never learn. She would always be a child and a fool.

She screams. It comes out choked and weak. She shoves at him, she draws her knee up and hits him, she pushes. Anything to be _away_ , to get him _away_. He slips, her heel catches his sternum and he is driven back in the dark and falls with a growl and a hurt grunt and a snarl and crunch and a whimper.

She scrabbles up, stumbling over herself, and she claws for the doorway. She opens it, and the light of the hall seeps in. She pauses. He is silent behind her. She turns.

Mark is lying twisted beside the bed, motionless in the place where he fell. The brass bedpost, at waist height and sculpted in the shape of a golden phallus, is driven into his skull through the cracked eye socket. Blood pours out, puddling on silk sheets.

She wants to scream, tries and fails.

She backs out of the room, silent. She shuts the door. She sinks to the floor. No more no more. She holds her head in her hands and squeezes her eyes shut tight. This cannot be happening. This cannot be real.

She rises. She descends. Step by step down the long marble stair sweeping away as if hewn from the shelf of the world.

The house is empty. What time is it? Through one window a blood red sunrise. Out another, moments later, the cool blue-black darkness of dusk in descent. She holds her head, squeezes against the skull. Come on, Kate, come on.

The house is empty. The great mansion. She walks slowly through it, aimless. All the lamps are out. Scattered in darkness the detritus of ecstasy's remains. Clothing abandoned, draped like the dead on every chair and over every door. Crumbs of food, plates half-full and wineglasses half-empty. She picks up a corset. Black silk and red velvet, torn down the middle, rent ragged between the breasts, open like the mouth of a wound. She thinks she can still feel the woman's warmth within, as if she had just stepped free of it. Sophia's heel driven through the red shell no expression on her face.

Just keep walking Kate.

Silver pools of shining sexual liquid on the marble.

Her naked toes cool on gloss hardwood.

On the balcony a sea of broken buttons like a thousand pearl eyes.

A broken clasp twisted metal brassier.

False nails painted deep red scattered like the fingers of a smashed toy.

A bottle of lubricant open dripping colorless fluid off the edge of the glass table.

She passes beneath the stone arch and into a green place. The leaves sway in cool breeze. They seem to fawn over her, fronds caressing her face and arms and legs. The growth is thick and wild. She looks up. Through the tangle of leaves she can see the smooth glass ceiling and the colorless sky beyond. An endless starless night.

Through the green an open doorway leading into the boathouse. The scent of the old wooden building is rich and complex. A smell of life, of ebbing water and worn lumber. The odor of gasoline and metal. She feels small and safe inside the boathouse. She sits on the edge of the dock and trails her bared feet in the cold water. The great doors are open to the lake, and the gray reflections of dark cloud roil on the water. She lays her head back, rests her ear against the old wooden floor, and she listens to the murmur of the lake. She shuts her eyes, and she waits.

She waits for some time. The light ebbs and flows, colors shifting as they ought not. Day and night seem to bleed into one another, fighting for ownership. A thin mist builds on the surface of the water, and turns to deep fog. The light that moves through it moves slow and dim. As if seeing the world in a mirror clouded with breath.

She looks out over the lake, as far as she can see in the murk. There is something on the water. Drawing close.

At length she determines it to be a form of watercraft. A small silver boat of ash-gray wood. It drifts slowly towards the boathouse, silent on the surface. There is a single figure seated within, motionless. There is no engine, and the boat's passenger seems to possess neither oar nor rudder, and yet the craft moves steadily and precisely closer. It slides into the boathouse, an animal returning by instinct to its home berth.

Sophia stands, and she steps lightly up onto the dock. The boat does not rock or even sway beneath her weight.

She looks at Kate without surprise, and Kate looks back.

The elder woman settles herself, and the two of them look at each other over the surface of the water, their toes trailing.

"You've done something to me," Kate says, and her voice sound harsh and raw in the silence of the lake. "You've done something."

Sophia's dark eyes glitter.

"You're not a woman. You're not. I can see it in you."

Sophia turns her head. Like an owl in the night, listening.

"I... I think you have some power. In this place. Or over it. I don't know what you are, or what you've done to Mark, but-"

"What have _you_ done to Mark? Not me, but you." She smiles.

Kate stammers. "I-I haven't..."

"You destroyed him."

"How could you know that? If you weren't here, how could you know?"

"I know a lot of things, little girl."

"I'm not a child! I'm not a child!" She rises, stamping her wet feet on the wooden dock. Her voice a sudden snarl.

Sophia laughs softly. Her speech is worn, stretched like old parchment paper which, when held up to the light, glows translucent and bare. When the words have faded from the page and only scratches remain. "Little girl, little girl. How could you know what it is, to be a woman? You are still an open flower, a sweet little honey pot for every bee to step in. For you it is enough to lie still and to wait. Just to be. The sweet taste and the blush. It is enough for you to be adored, and not known. You are not a woman until you have tasted the true fear."

"What fear is that?"

She smiles. "You will know it."

"You're full of shit!" Kate spits, a fire bursting suddenly from within her, a clean hot rage. "You don't know anything, you're just a sad old crone! You're just bitter and lonely and hateful. _You_ killed Mark! _You_ , not me. You _did_ something to him, made him something he wasn't."

"I let him be what he was. Did he hurt your feelings, little girl? Did he make you cry? Is that why you broke him?"

"You weren't _there_! I don't know what mystic voodoo bullshit power you think you have, but you weren't _there_."

"Power."

Neither of them speaks, and for a moment, the word hangs in the air between them, almost a physical thing, a planet in whose gravitation their thoughts both turn.

Sophia licks her lips. Her eyes are gray and wet, running with something like tears but not tears. These do not fall, and there is no feeling in them. "I used to think that my beauty was power enough. That it was a strength which might endure. It didn't matter how I was treated, who touched me, what I did. Not if I had that power left in me." She reaches down and draws up a silvery cupful of water in her hands, then lets it fall through her fingers. "But it does not last. It is not real. Beauty is only an illusion of power. When you know that... when you truly experience it. Then you are a woman."

Kate stands there, and she looks at the old woman for a very long time. Her hair is spider's threads, her skin loose white silk, her mouth a red ruin. "Why did you do this?"

"I do nothing. I have never done anything, little girl. I am the one to whom everything has been done. And they do it still through me, through my hands." She holds her hands up before her face and considers them. The nails long and thick, they seem now sharp as the claws of a hunting animal. Her lips are peeling from her teeth, and her tongue is running over the sharp white surface of them. In her eyes alone there is a sadness and a fear. A doubt. But it is nothing more than a flicker and a gleam.

"They will do it to you too, little girl. With these hands, they will take you and they will open you up. Like a flower." Sophia smiles, her dark eyes glittering, and she gestures. She points her fingers against her stomach, and she twists them, as if ripping open her own abdomen, as if slicing it to spill out hot.

Kate runs.

Her feet pound on the boards, on the cool slate of the greenhouse, on the hardwood floors. She runs with naked feet from the doorway, into the woods. Her soft soles tear on rocks and broken branches of the forest floor, every step a jolt of pain but she does not stop such a fear is in her.

Such a fear that she can not stop.

She runs blind. She cannot find the road. She cannot find the cars. She cannot find the lake. She turns back and she cannot find the mansion. The wood seems to go on forever. She is an animal in the great forest of the world, an animal to be preyed upon in the vast wild.

She can feel that she is being hunted.

Her feet and hands are bleeding when she staggers into a wide low clearing, a shallow depression like a bowl in the earth. The grass is soft and cool as she stumbles to her knees. The sun and moon whirl above, day and night having made an accord to share the sky, light and darkness swirling and tearing at each other.

They come from the darkness of the dappled leaves, naked and without expression. They come in a wide circle, surrounding the whole of the clearing and stepping slowly closer like a noose cinching.

They have all come. Even he has come, one of them now with his face in ruins, with his eye socket shattered and broken.

Their eyes flash, all turned to her, devouring. Like the snapping of camera shutters.

This is only a dream. It is only another nightmare.

They have formed a tight ring about her, and Sophia is coming. She sweeps through them in long black lace like a broken kite falling. Her pale skin glowing in starlight is the moon through the darkness of black trees. Her mouth is open.

The sky is opening, bleeding and broken, weeping over her.

Something terrible is happening.

### Ugly

The old woman rises from her bed. Her bones ache, her breath rattles in her throat.

* * *

The young actress is talking on the telephone. Love and beauty. She laughs. She twirls her blonde hair around her finger. The man flirts with her, unaware even as he does so. Her clear high voice fills the wire.

* * *

The old woman walks down the hallway. She holds a hand against the wall to steady herself.

* * *

The young actress rises from out of the bath. Hot waters streams down her. She stretches, and steps out one foot light on the mat, toes first. She runs her hands over herself, feeling the smooth damp skin, the taut shape of her curving body, the line of her hips.

* * *

The old woman opens the door. Her hands tremble on the knob.

* * *

The young actress is touching herself in bed. Her hand works slowly between her thighs. Every circle starts a tingle like an electric shock in her bones, and she twists. She pushes two fingers together between the lips. So wet and ready it drips down her wrist.

* * *

The old woman enters the washroom. Dry as cured meat, her skin an old rag stretched across her face.

* * *

The young actress is alone in the great house. She looks out over the lake, into the woods, sipping coffee. The heat stings her tongue.

* * *

The old woman removes her nightgown. She looks at her body, and she feels in her a heaviness, a sinking down.

* * *

The young actress sits behind the wheel of a very old sports car. It sings and revs beneath her, it roars down the dirt road. Her scarf blows in the wind, and she points her face towards the shining of the great city.

* * *

The old woman holds the sides of the washbasin. Her grip trembles.

* * *

The young actress is walking down the street. Strangers in the road gawp after her, blinking like they see god. Men salivate and whistle, women gaze with moon eyes. Hands clutch at her in the crowd. She lets them grab at her, lets them have all of her. Oh how they want and desire her, oh how beautiful she is. Her name on every lip, and her image in every eye.

The crowd parts, swirling like the sea breaking about her. Through the masses she sees something. There in the alley, there on the side of the road, there in the shadow. She sees an old woman hunched and ugly, broken on the edge of the street, a withered thing crawling. Her bony fingers rip little scraps of an old beauty magazine and bring them to her dry lips. She trembles, chewing, and she looks up. The old woman's eyes meet the eyes of the young actress, and she freezes. She stops where she is and she begins to cry. The old woman is crying, and hides her face behind a scrawny claw. The young actress weeps; she weeps and laughs through her tears as the crowd swirls around her. As the crowd surrounds her and swallows her.

* * *

The old woman looks in the mirror.

What is this thing which looks back at her? What creature mocking her with its perversion of her true shape? She touches her skin, feels the weak folds, the wrinkles and contours, the shape malformed in the great hands of time.

Her fingers! How the bones and veins stand out, raw and spotty on her haggard skin. Who could bear to be touched by such a hand? They are but vestigial appendages of a former life.

How low her breasts hang. They are empty and drained of life, badges now of shame and disuse. Likewise her buttocks and thighs, her arms, all flesh in revolt and melting off the bone.

This face in the mirror before her is a death mask of her true features, the simulacra of a faded self. This is not her. She is not that thing. Who could love such a thing.

She touches her face. She pushes a gnarled fingernail against the spotty surface. Presses hard. Come away a crescent crimson moon. How quick this discoloration might fade from young skin, pink to white and gone. Here to linger angry carmine, violet-black bruise.

She places each nail upon her face, fingers splayed ten points to the skin, and she digs down. The old skin tears easily when tested, rips wide and peels in jagged strips. She feels a fury rise in her as she cuts, and she goes deeper. The cheek comes away, off the teeth and twisted muscle of the jaw. The nose raked, eyelids peeled. Her upper lip torn in two like a child playing with a fat old slug. Skin of the forehead peeled down off a shining skull, skin of the chin pulled like a noose.

Her face disappears by inches. In the mirror nothing but a ruin of flesh, seething mass shapeless, lidless and drooling blood. She grasps the graying hair in a great fist and she pulls back. It comes away with a sticking sound, like Velcro torn back; it hangs a wet moment and falls to the floor.

A finger through each eye, watch them burst as she slides into blindness. Gripping the sockets of the skull, pulling hard. The old bone crumbles like chalk, breaks easily and falls clattering into the washbasin. Teeth cracked out, tinkling as they land.

She stands, a broken thing, an old woman without a face. A dead thing dying.

And she blinks.

Her eyes flutter open, flinching from the light and shy as a newborn's. She looks, vision swimming from a dull blur back into focus. Bright blue eyes looking at her from inside the mirror glass. A face dirty with gore. She lifts a trembling hand, and she wipes her cheek. The blood and tissue comes so easily clean. Beneath a smooth cheek, soft and firm. Both hands full against her face, she smooths away what remains.

The young actress is living beneath, looking back. Her face. Her long flowing blond hair, her firm high features, her shapely jaw and diamond mouth. This is who you are.

She licks her full lips, tasting. Straight line of clean white teeth bite playfully at the pouting lip. She spits and smiles.

She looks long and slow in the glass.

And she smiles.

She will not stop now. Her body is trapped beneath the old flesh of a dead woman. She digs her nails in and she cuts herself free, one tear at a time, one tear after another. Peeling away the old skin to show smooth and beautiful beneath. Keep cutting, keep ripping, beautiful beneath, do not stop. Keep cutting, keep tearing, keep cutting keep ripping keep cutting keep tearing beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful
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