Bowing in the Footlights
(I wrote this two days ago as part of a writing workshop that I attended at an organization for women on the autism spectrum in NYC. Any and all feedback is welcome and appreciated!)
Sharp and hot and fast and loud.
These were the days, the last days of Eden Slocumb’s acting career. It had all gone by so quickly, much in the way that time does when one has fallen in love. The crumbling feather boa was draped over a chair, white and limp as an aloof cat’s twitching tail. Half-empty makeup jars litter the vanity, rouges and lipsticks creased and faded with leftover kisses. Several decades’ worth of cards from opening night well-wishers frame the mirror, dust collecting in the vacant pools left by her clutching thumbs. She couldn’t bear to read them again, the finale and its music still ringing in her ears.
Nothing had been given or promised. All alone she’d stood on that impossible street corner, ragtops whizzing by, not knowing which way to go.
“Wait for it,” they said. “It will come.”
She didn’t listen. She lived. The heavens opened and sang her praises nightly.
Live today. Live forever.
She would be immortal on the stage, in her dressing room, in Playbills lining collectors’ shelves.
In the dreams of the young, starry-eyed girls who would always want to be her.
