Denouement

Even dust motes bother Tabitha today.  She knows because she caught herself swatting at a few suspended in a beam of light.  

And now she looks at a tic at the edge of Greg’s mouth and wants to swat that too, bat it right off his face.  He blabbers something about how his friends call him “Aerial Ace,” a reference to that pokemon move - she’s heard of it?

“No,” she says, aiming for composure but landing in icy rage, “now would you please shut up?”

“Whoah, Tab,” he says, hands in the air, “we need to be on stage in, what, four minutes?  Please don’t try to kill me by then?  Pretty please?”

“I’ll come just as few centers away from kicking you in the face in the middle of my routine as always,” Tabitha says.  She curses inwardly at the awkwardness of her wording.  Her headache doesn’t need to get worse.

As she waits the minutes before leaving this stuffy room just to enter one filled with the breaths of strangers, she almost bites her lip.  Stops herself because of the lipstick.  God, her makeup’s barely less ridiculous than the clowns’.

“Is there something wrong?” Greg asks, last minute.  

She wouldn’t have time to tell him if she wanted to, so she just says “yes” and walks right out onto the stage.

The audience is too far away to read her expression.  But what should it matter if her eyes are distant while she tumbles to centerstage, where the ribbons hang for her to climb up and dance in like a strangely tethered angel?

It’s instinct for her, even when the music that drives her like an automaton seems to pierce right through her head.  The drums throb more than they beat.

Some grace remains in her ascent, in the placement of her feet.  Greg is on the other ribbon, looking more bird than human.  That’s part of the artistry, she’s been told.  How stupid.

She begins to swing, to place herself in awkward positions she is well-paid to make look natural.  It’s not a moment she’s meant to think during.  Yet, she’s reminded of her endless hours in gymnastics classes as a child, parents goading on, siblings clapping.  There was determination even in the joints of her fingers, then.  And now her fingers grasp the ribbon only because they must.

The music becomes louder and she wants someone dead, she fantasizes blood in her hands.  This frightens her and she almost falters.  It makes no sense for her to want to open a coffin when there’s already another she can’t bear to close, just waiting for her a city away.

There’s a name she’s not thinking.  She turns upside down.  There’s a face she’s not thinking.  She splays out her legs.  There’s a funeral right at this moment.  She holds on tight.  

No one in the audience knows.  They are not aware.  Nor is management.  Not her friends here, distant or close as they may be.  Even the currents of air around her have never heard her brother’s name.

Her brother is dead.  She begins twirling.

The air.

Swirling.

There’s gravity.

She’s not holding any-