Enters through the theater’s front door, runs down the aisle to center stage, and tricks a stick of butter out of thin air. She bows to the empty rows: rehearsal is over. Opening night, the director shouts in the dressing room, Turn down the sex on the modern dancers! The drag queen croaks back, You can’t, the dial’s broken. The dramaturge joins in, Merde! They need more mud-rouge. She can’t hear anything except the blowdryer orbiting her head, and the Italian stylist shouting, Tesoro! He plucks the hot rollers from her hair. She plays the part of a siren. When the microphone tilts to her lips, she speaks her one line: Sepulcher. Exiting, she steps on a thumbtack. It swells to a dramatic boil, a glacial moon filled with poison jelly. If she can’t stand on her thumbelinas, she’s finished. In the abandoned dressing room, a mouse skitters off with a lost bobby pin. She writes Terpsichore on the dusty mirror with a stub of lipstick. In the dark, she sharpens her teeth on the gold bones of an old dream
