I look at the black cherry color of Rachel’s dyed hair and the black polish on her nails. She’s been sucked slowly into darkness, like rainwater falling through a grate into shadowed sewers under the city.
Her small hands flutter as they lift her instrument. She’s a raven who’s about to be in the crosshairs of a vicious man’s gun scope. I’m terrified for her. For both of us, because I’d die if I lost her.
“Rach,” I whisper.
Her small hand grips my forearm and squeezes. “Go and do it. Be so good, it breaks hearts,” she says fiercely.
“I will,” I whisper, before hugging her. I’m shaking when I step back to leave her.
* * *
Connor
I realize before Frank where the story’s going. The play is a fairytale, but there are echoes of real life. I think it’s based on rumors about how he tried to kill his mistress when she decided to leave him, and of what happened afterward.
Frank, though, is leaning back like a boss, smiling and nodding. He even tells me that he paid for Zoe’s scholarship when she was in high school.
“Clearly, it’s paid off,” he says with a slight leer on his face as the girl leaps into the air in some sort of scissor split.
Is he fucking her? For some reason, I hate that idea so much my hand slides to my gun before I even realize it. I move my hand away. This is not the time or the place.
Another leap, and this time her back arches so much that her long hair brushes her back thigh. She’s incredible to watch. At moments, she bursts upward with so much power I half expect her to skim the lights with her fingertips. Other times she wilts to the floor so elegantly, she’s like a dying flower.
Right now she’s racing to warn the fairy queen of the troll king’s plan to kill her. A huntsman chases her across the stage. She weaves around the woodland set pieces. A violin’s sinister shrieks reach a crescendo.
She jumps, takes flight, and then a crack of sound and she plummets, landing with a slap directly in front of us. The audience gasps. Her slim body convulses, once, twice, three times to the knife’s edge of a violin bow across its strings. Then she is still.
When the fairy finds her and weeps over her fallen body, there’s no other sound.
Then the audience reacts to the emergence of the troll king behind them.
Next to me, Frank stiffens. With the spotlight on the creature, we can see the mole between its left cheek and ear, at just the spot where Frank’s used to be. He had a dermatologist snip it off and cover the scar, but I remember it from eight years ago.
The troll king lifts his blade and licks it with relish, then raises it to strike.
The fairy queen turns sharply and shoves an icicle of her tears into his heart. He staggers back several feet, slowly pulling the ice dagger out. He reels forward again, but before he gets to her, she drinks from a vial around her neck. The fairy queen falls onto the body of her friend.
A singer’s voice rises louder and louder as the troll king staggers off the stage, coughing up snowflakes.
In the final act, the troll king tries to reclaim the forest, laying flowers on the bodies and offering handfuls of flowers to passersby, but they turn away from him with his ashen skin and sunken cheeks.
There is a sprite in a tree. He tries to hook her leg, but her foot swings out of reach over and over as she reads from a book, singing a ballad to the spirits of the forest. The troll king turns to ice and falls dead.
In the final scene, the music is again powerful, but now joyful. The verses call to everyone to rise up and love life as the new dawn comes. The fallen fairy sits up, shaking off the flowers covering her, the spell from the potion broken with the troll king’s death. Other birds and fairies dance and the fairy who woke dances with the sprite from the tree. Twirling together, they lead the procession away.
People jump to their feet, clapping.
I stand and applaud, my eyes fixed on Zoe as she waits her turn. She is the last to take her bows and comes forward, blowing kisses and throwing something from the small bag that the fairy queen carried early in the show.
I reach up and catch one of the favors. It’s wrapped with ribbons. After a moment, I realize it’s a foil-covered chocolate violin.
She bows to thunderous applause. The crowd is wild for her, stomping their feet and shouting. She rises with a bright smile and waves, then puts a hand over her heart.
I stare at her until she finally steps back into the line of assembled cast members. I look at the wings. The musicians took their bows earlier, but not the violinist. We never see him or her. The fact that we don’t makes me think it’s a her, Rachel. If so, I hope she hears the ovation go on and on.
“What’d you think, Frank?” I ask.
He pushes past me without answering.
