The mirror is framed with bulbs, the old theatrical kind, and she has been sitting in front of it long enough that the light has stopped feeling like light and started feeling like weather. Something she's inside of, something with a temperature.
A year ago he'd sat across from a man in a casino booth who spoke the way people speak when they've already decided, and he'd listened, and the arrangement described had been simple: a debt, a number, a job. She is trying now to picture the man who sat in that booth and finding she has to work at it. A year will do that. So will everything else.
The corset is the thing she remembers understanding first, and understanding wrong. He'd expected restriction, something punitive, and what he got instead was architecture. The stays taking his weight and redistributing it, pulling his shoulders into a line he hadn't known his spine was capable of. By the third week he'd stopped noticing it except as absence when it wasn't there. That absence now bothered her more than the wearing, which was its own kind of information, and she'd filed it away in the same place she filed all the other information she wasn't ready to do anything with.
His body had changed in ways he hadn't been prepared for. The hormones had done what hormones do, slowly and then all at once and then slowly again, and the clinic off the Strip had done the rest. Procedures he'd told himself were an investment, a way to work faster toward the number, toward the end of the arrangement. Whether the end of the arrangement was still the point was something she'd also filed away.
What she was left with was a different set of facts about herself, facts she encountered fresh every time she moved. The unfamiliar weight that moved a half-step behind her when she turned, that swayed slightly when she walked, her hips swiveling with each step. She didn't fight it anymore. She wasn't sure when she'd stopped. Her skin, smooth and tanned and maintained with a discipline she'd come to think of as occupational. The rhinestones and feathers left most of her bare, and where the fabric existed it was mostly transparent. Her fishnets pulled faintly against her thighs in a way she no longer really registered, which said something she wasn't going to think about right now.
She leans toward the mirror and begins on her eyes. Renata had taught him, tilting his chin without asking, correcting without explaining, until one night he'd done it himself and Renata had watched and said nothing, which was Renata's version of approval. She knows the face now. She knows what it needs and in what order, and her hands move through the steps with a familiarity that no longer requires thought, which is either competence or surrender.
She'd tried, recently, to reconstruct the list of what had been good about before. A job. A routine. A series of things he'd been fine with. Fine had always seemed like enough, and now she wonders what he'd meant by it. The list had come up shorter than she expected and she hadn't known what to do with that, so she'd added it to the file with everything else.
Renata drops onto the bench beside her and starts telling her something that happened last night, and before the first sentence is even fully formed she is already laughing, and Renata is laughing, and their shoulders are together, and she catches herself in the mirror mid-laugh and holds it for just a second before she lets it go.
The woman in the light looks like someone the mirror was made for. She thinks that maybe that is what she has been trying to figure out whether to be afraid of. Then Renata grabs her arm and there's more, apparently, and she stops thinking about it and picks up the headpiece instead, and settles it, and feels her posture adjust to take the weight the way it always does now, and stands.
The corridor to the stage is too short. She feels the music before she hears it, coming up through the floor and into her feet and her legs and everywhere the costume leaves her bare, which is most of her, and then the stage lights find her at the top of the stairs and it is weather again — something with a temperature, something she is inside of — and she lets it take her.
This comic is the product of me having way too much fun with Gemini's new image generation model, which I am absolutely not sorry about, though it has slowed my work on the next novel a little. My dear friend Almost Lisa saw it and challenged me to write flash fiction to go with the comic, no more than 1000 words. Given my typical verbosity, this is basically a haiku, but it turns out the constraint is kind of fascinating? No room to build, just arrive somewhere and leave.
Let me know what you think!
xoxo, Paige