Speaker 1: Hollo. I welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here,
Let's get into it. I woke with the taste of
dust at the back of my mouth and the immediate,
ridiculous certainty that somewhere Bella had told from me. The
dressing room smelled like old make up and cheaper cologne,
and fog curled along the boards as if it had
nowhere else to go for a BREATHA lay staring at
the ceiling, watching shapes of darkness move under a thin
film of life, trying to assemble a map of how
I had arrived. The ceiling knew nothing. The mirror said everything.
They hung on the wall like teeth, lawn pains cracked
and darkened, and below each pain of vanities, huddled with
their empty bulbs and tarnished trays. A dozen masks sworn
from rusted pegs, painted grins, frozen into mockery. They were
a read as if for judgment. Each one turned toward
me with an intent that felt like memory. I felt
washed in a way that was not merely sensory but accusatory.
The oirpressed small claims of culpability against my skin. As
I sat up, Westcoff caught on a jag of wood
and tore of red loose that I fingered until it
freyed in my palm. My first movement was small and automatic,
a hand toward the pocket watch. It had stopped between
two beats and lay like a wound in my jacket.
Its face was dark, the hands nailed where time had
given up that stopping. More than any mirror or mask,
had the absurd power to make the whirl tilt. I
rubbed at the thin scar over my left eyebrow, trying
to unhook the logic of the night. There were no
footprints on the dusted floorboards near my boots, no skull
of a note, no scrap of explanation. There was only
the weight of the room and the hush the clonto
old props. I rose on legs that felt like memory
rather than limb. The light up of the central vanity
flickered with a pulse that made shadows Breathe musts hung
in rose, porcelain, smiles, painted lips, glass eyes that caught
the weak deeal wash and returned it in shots. One mask,
set lower than the wrist, hung out of place beneath
the cracked mirror, Its surface crazed with haraline fractures. I
could not say what drew me. The call curiosity would
be to misplace the urgency that felt more like compulsion.
The air tighten, and beneath the porcelain come came a
faint sound, a ripple of coaxing, like a toy wound,
and left sigh when I lifted that man. Thus the
room answered with a memory that was not mine, and
yet wore my weight. The pegs scraped under my fingers.
The mask was heavier than it appeared, cold against my palms,
and its inner linings maled faintly of sweet rot, lime, candy,
and rusted paint. The feeling of the mask in my
hands made a sentence of thought assemble and then brake.
People were better at pretending than at remembering. The mask
did not accuse with words. It suggested, with the slow,
inexorable promise of an image, that neglect and omission could
be cataloged by porcelain and paint. I moved through the
vanity row like someone counting casualders. Each mirror held a
different geometry of my face. Hail tied, the hazel of
my eyes doled underteal lighting, the eyebrows scar a pale
punctuation at the center of vanity, A shaft of mere
split any attempt at a single truth in one's liver.
I looked like me, long face narrowed all the man
who kept a thread bescarf and a watch that had
stopped at some unbearable eye in the adjacent chardigrin lived
where my cheek should be. A clown jawed at flex
with intentions I did not recognize as mine. The reflection
shifted like tide. I realized that the room had the
shape of a question, and that its edges were closed.
Whispers threaded the wood like termites. They were not whirrs
at first, but a texture of sound that suggested names
and incidents I had folded away. The whispers made me
feel smaller and somehow more exposed, as though the masks
were cataloging things I had chosen to bury. My fingers
tushed toward the pocket watch in my pocket, a memorial
to the refusal to face what needed saying. The watch
was a reliquary of stout moments. I found my hand
exercising itself in the chain, as if to make momentum
when none existed. I tried an inventory betrayal could be
a simple geometry, a decision to look away, a bargain
struck in the dullness of fear. Or it could be
vishly complicated, a braided thing that had been curated three
years of polite silences and half answers. The masks knew
which braid to pluck. One of them. The laughing clown
had a presence that felt separate from the others, like
a knot, of course, that would not fall silent it.
Paint was cracked around the mouth, and a second scene
ghosted along the cheek, as if another face might open there.
It was not the largest mask in the room, but
it looked as if it contained the entire business of
accusation inside its Grin the room contracted the last clowns
bells tinkled faintly, a sound that should have been ornamental,
but landed like punctuation. The sound gathered a cadence and
suggested rhythm to the small muscle in my chest. There
still hope for uneasy acted. I walked toward the mirror
of the scent of vanity, and the shods multiply my
movement until it felt as if every step repeated my mistake.
The air tasted of all paint reflections. Blit made away,
a blade split through it. I watched halves of myself
that had never agreed until that night'stand intense, accusing opposition.
Denial behave like a garment that runs to Red's windy tuk.
My first response was a slow practice smitting of the fabric,
small gestures that were meant to reassure me that nothing
had changed. I pinched at the pocket watch and told
myself I could leave. That a a step and a
muddle in memory did not amount to a confession, but denial.
Fraze went under close light. The masks whisper sharpened, stealing
the cadence of recollection until I could not stop seeing it.
A face I had turned away from, a night I
had slipped into a mission, a Hannah had chosen not
to take. The room did not force a story, It
suggested the contours of one, until I could not disbelieve
his shape. The laughing clam moved or it my eyes.
A shadow sloose behind the mirrors, and the bells at
its collar, charmed with the slow and dissipatory joy. The
air around it smelt of candy and rust, and the
faint iron tine that lives on all guilt. It tilted
its head in a way that a living thing might,
watching me through the showers, as if freehearsing apart where
it should have spoken, There was a sound like a
cracked horn. Somewhere between invitation and threat. The mask in
the peg seemed to hum against the loneliness of its
own paint. Memory images pushed forward, an argument folded into silence.
The small practicalities of looking away, the way a person
trims in other's importance into manageable pieces. Fass of people
I had thought for giving, clustered without consent, and expression
on a ride are refusal to hold a hand, a
door closed with the polite finality of someone who have
already decided. These images were not full scenes. They were
the way smell can bring a childhood kitchen back in
a single blinding second. They pressed like thumbnails in the
skin and wanted something from me, recognition, apology, truth. The
compulsion to put the mask on arrived like a memory
I could not decide to trust or reject. It presented
itself as inevitability. I thought of the watch in my
hand and the stopptire as an omen rather than accident.
The mask seemed to promise clarity. Where this sin, you
will understand the implication went, or else the mask will
answer for you. There is a peculiar terror in being
offered a painless route through consequence. I had spent a
life cataloging small evasions. The idea of a mask making
the confession for me was both repulsive and seductively clean.
Hand tremming, I lifted the mass to my face. The
lining was a cool seal for a heartbeat. There was
no boundary between me and the painted grain, and the
world narrowed to the weight of porcelain. The images came
not as memory, but as insistence. Where I had sidelined Blaine,
there was a hand that had been pulled, a laughter
I had let pass unremarked, a choice I dressed in
excuses where I had permitted small cruelties to calcify. The
mask shon, reflecting the rawness back with the clarity I
had tried to avoid. The mask did not elicit confession.
It insisted on it with the metallic patience of a
lager closed and reopened. When the grin settled, clarity arrived
like a blade. I saw myself as others might have
shrunken by cowardice, bright moments excise. To preserve the quiet
life I preferred. The masks whispered the ledger's entries, without malice,
without theatrical condonation. They simply read what had been done.
The laughing clans Belsun did in time with my heart
until the rhythm felt austrated. I felt my chin tilt
and involunt reaction, as if the mask had muscles of
its own, nudging my posture toward honesty. Confession in that
room was not at aclamation, but a small, violent process
of unlearning. It took shape as the admission at silence
had been a form of harm, that the convenience of
not speaking had compounded into a claim against another's life.
The mask offered me a true fasand with it a
demand tourn what I had hidden. There was no stage
for redemption in that demand, only the requirement that I
see it clearly and accept its weight. I tried to
measure the cost. The answer arrived with a clarity that
was almost too painfully simple. Truth would not restore what
had been taken, but avoidance would let the taken calcify
into something permanent. I reached for the pocket watch again,
as if ritue could steady me. It stopped, hands reflected
the vanity bulbs into small suns that did not warm.
There was an image of the person I had heard
and injured by my refusal to act, standing beside a
carnival fence, waiting while I toned my back. The soundscape
of that memory was thin, distant, mechanical music caught in
candy rabbers, a child's laugh, far enough away that it
was almost a memory of a laugh and not a
living thing. The mass breathed against my face, and the
mirrors multiplied that instant until it occupied the room. At
the center of the dressing room, the light started, and
the laughing clown's porcelain seam ghosted open like the press
of a thought. The bell's rattle with such a precise
cagence that I responded as if to a conductor. I
felt the masks grinnerre my own mouth, finding excuses, and
for a terrifying second I could not tell which was
leading control and stitched along the edges. My hands moved
with a mind slightly may own, understood, with the brutal
anguish of someone who learns a truth too late. Where
the mask had been cultivating the willingness to wear another
face to avoid the h of confession. I let the
mask go on fully. The world narrowed to the curve
of pained against skin, and the sound of my breath
sharpening into the rhythm of the bells. For a fragment
of time, I felt separate, observed as if I had
been instrumental to demonstrate culpability. The mask'd smile forced a
clarity so unbearable that tes came and manner hoss and
silent against the porcelain edge. The masks on their pegs
took up a murmur that sounded like satisfaction and not remorse.
The laughing clan watched with a practiced contentment of something
that had been fed. I felt the seams of my
face rearranged themselves in with that alteration, a new painful
honesty slide in behind my eyes. When I fumbold the
mask off, the reflection lingered. My features seemed to remember
the pressure and keep a trace of faint scene that
did not belong. The room felt smaller, not because of walls,
but because the space of denial had collapsed. The masks
quiteted until a low sound like distant under the laughing clowns.
Bells ceased to ring, but left an aft daste of
echoing laughter. The mirror offered me a version that bore
marks of both selves. The man who had erred in
the clean bone thing that had forced him to see
It was not reconciliation. It was an accounting. I thought
of leaving, then stepping out into dawn and letting daylight
wash the smear of gilt off like a stubborn stain.
But the mirror held me in the way in unfinished
ledger holds a reader. There was still work to be done.
Asks had not demanded a speech or a ritual. They
had only placed a mirror under my skin and shown
what had been paused in me. The choice left was
not dramatic. It was simply to find a person and say,
with as little excuse as possible, what had been withheld.
The idea of that small real work felt heavier and
truer than any theatrical absolution. I walked past the vanity drawers,
where old powders slumped and cracked pots, and the hooks
were Other faces hung in patient silence. The fog followed
like a loyally sorrowful thing outside the dressing room windered.
The faires wheel esue so lowly framed skybruise between night
and on. It seemed a ridiculous object to imagine salvation on,
But the Carnival's lazy prairie carried the sane trade of
illusion and truth as the room inside. I pressed my
hand flat to the cold glass and felt the seam
of the world that had divided me from another. The
laughing clown as shadow lingered beyond the pane, as if
in ensuring that the choice had been set in motion.
I left with a stop watch in my pocket and
the memory of the masker's pressure against my skin. The
reflection kept it seem The mask's whispers receded into a
satisfied rumble. The laughing Clown's promise hung in the air,
like a vow that would return if I chose a
vasion instead of mending outside. The world held its usual imprecisions,
as street link guttering, the distant rudens on of a
city that believes in its own. Small merses inside some
part of me bore the clarity I had taken from porcelain.
I would have to find the person I had wronged,
and give them, If not restitution, then at least the
clarity of ownership. There was no grand reconciliation waiting at
the end of that night. There was only the knowledge
that truth, one scene, the man's action, the laughing clime,
would remain a silhouette in the periphery of my days,
a measure of the cost of turning away. I walked
from the dressing room threshold with the understanding that masks
could be instruments of revelation as easily as they were
of deception. Behind me, the dressing room exhiled the fog
that calved back into itself and kept his secret for
a little while longer. The mirror kept its seam, the
laughter kept its promise. The truth waited, patient and sharpened,
and I carried its weight like a small, necessary wound.
The room would haunt me in ways that ordinary memory
could not. In quiet moments, the scene would surface beneath
my skin, and the belts would jar at the corners
of ordinary days. I had been given no absolution that night,
only the instruction tact. The carnival lets met blur into
a curious relic in the days ahead, But the sound
of porcelain bells would not let me look away. If
the masks had done anything from me, it was to
remove the ease of convenient forgetting, and to force me
into the slow, correct of labor, of confession and immense.
That knowledge was worse than any phantom but suer comfort.
I tucked the thread biscoff closer and felt the pocket
watch escored against my palm, a small, honest motion. I
walked toward the place where the person I had worn
might be found, and began the awkward work of being human.
With a seam against my face and the memory of
a grin that had taught me to see. I wake
to the sound of my own hesitation. For a long,
a sough a minute, I cannot decide whether the room
remembers me or I remembered the room. The dressing room
tastes of alt, make up and rust, a place that
keeps its breath shallow and folded into the seams of
its curtains. Fogg curls around my feet, as if the
floor itself exhaled, and somewhere beyond the vanity, at las
pressed in and stretched through a broken speaker, tugs at
the edges of memory. It is the kind of sound
that makes the mouth want to form words I cannot say,
which is how I know the hook has already found me,
and impossible accusation with that language. A painted eye naming
a moment I had convinced myself was buried. The masks
haundlight comes along the wall, small punctuation marks in a
life that has learned to speak only in fragment. One
slips first from its peg. It tilts as if to listen,
and then leans again, as if to speak. The painted
eyes are glass cold, reflecting not only the vanity lights,
but catalog of faces that have toured through my life,
like performers paying for a seat without any human voice.
I feel the rumor range itself into an audience. A
dozen masks inclined toward me, and the space between their
teeth becomes a court room where I stand defendant, and
the charge is something I had convinced myself was buried,
the moment I chose quiet. The accusation lands like stones,
dull and precise, striking the part of me that had
learned to look away. Movement feels like an honest currency
in a place build on appearances, So I move towards
the vanity mirrors frame me in shorts. A hair line
crack runs down the largest pane, and where the fisher
passes over my mouth, the gloss arranges a second smile
and echo compromise between the face I show and the
face I hide. My reflection likes and then refuses to
mimic a simple toli of the head. Slovers of a
different self appear in the cracked glass, brief and stubborn,
like photographs that do not belong to the body that
holds them. Each shard insists on its own lighting, its
own angle of guilt. I press my pond to the cold,
to ground the argument between reflection and fact. The mirror
answers with a set of half truce, shifting the vanity
light so that my hazel eyes goad all beneath a
teal shadder. My fingers leave a smear. At first, it
looks like condensation and like a fingerprint left by another hand.
I pat it the shelf, a useless attempt to clear
the evidence of whatever else has been here. The wood
around the door frame swells as if filled with breath,
the scene closing until the latch will not catch. The
pocket watch in my jacket battered, the copper face told
by years of being carried like a promise brokens. It
stopped in my palm, Then without permission, it begins to tick, small, stubborn,
a pulse against my ribs that reads like both count
down and accusation. The room is a mechanism for remembering
what I have tried to forget. My hands find the
masks the same way a lost traveler finds a path.
You do not so much chuse the next step as
follow the ground. Itself a poor and things slides along
the rail toward me without hand guiding it. It glides
as if it completes a centers I was too timid
to finish. Pale with faint heline cracks spidering from its mouth.
It bears a painted smile, small and practice, the exact
grin I used to hide the trimmer inside. The laughing
clown waits at the edge of the light. Its paint
is rumor until it is not a shadow gathering shape.
When I left the mass, memory pushes up like an
unwanted photograph. Faces I had kept at the margins come
into frame. Someone falling, the whirlike fracture on pavement, the
sensation of a hand that did not reach in time,
each image is jacked, its corners shop and, refusing to
be smoothed by the tidy narratives, are kept rehearsing. The
painted grim becomes a lens bending recollection until it fits
the curve of the mouth. For the first time since
I learned what regret feels like, these memories are no
longer mine to arrange. They are being exhibited, sighted in
a voice that suggests they have always been evidence, waiting
to be read aloud. The laughing clown approaches not the
clumsy step of a hunter, but the slow, purposeful events
of an examiner who prefers confession to punishment. Its voice,
when it arrives, is not a sound so much as
a layering of Syndrome's childlike contralto, folded into a slow,
metallic reverb. The room answers in course with its own
skeletal music, metallic creaks, as if some one were testing spotlights,
the whisper of sequin cloth, the distant sigh and grown
of a ferrous wheel veils I had not noticed tinkle
whenever my thoughts stray toward defense. The chain of porcelain
charms round its neck, catches and fractures the vanity light,
and together they insist the thing I am avoiding is
not simply a deed, but a face I have been
practicing on. I tell myself to step back in order
I give with the authority of someone who has rehearsed
excuses until they sound near persuasive. My fingers were of
the bridge of my nose, the habitual motion of a vasion,
and I feel the room catalog that motion as if
it were a signature. The mask in my hands weighs
less than the truth and more than my capacity for denial.
It fits into my palms with the same exactness that
Gil fits into memory. And for a moment I imagine
turning the porcelain toward the mirror. Watching it reflects a
single small absolution. The mask patient, as a thing made
for patients, tilts its head the way to laughing clun
tilts its head too far, as if the neck where
a hinge never meant to settle straight. The more I
hold it, the more the mask becomes porous. The painted
grin seems to breathe inhaling the air of my lungs
and exhaling. Image is not strictly chronological, but mordune enough
to form an argument, faces crowding the person I let
fall the moment it shows the safe story, the clumsy
effort to repair shame with the better narrative memory rearranges
itself into seems where the past can be read as motive.
The laughing clwan does not shout. It hums an invitation
into my peripheral hearing, coaxing theatrical, then sharp as a
finger nail on glass, the bells on its costume ring
as if they punctuate every confession. There is a narrowing
of the room, and with it a narrowing of choice.
The exit is not only blocked by swelling wood in
the ticking watch, it is transformed into a luminal place
that oscillates between two faces, the one I have practiced
for the world and the one that slipped into place.
If I allow the porcelain to claim me, my hand trembles.
The mask edge is close to my face of its
own volition, as if it has learned the geometry of
my skull. For an instant. I resist with the force
of shame made physical. I do not speak. There is
nothing to be said that will satisfy the voice cataloging me.
Then the porcelain slides over us skin. There is no
dramatic tug or heroic wrench of fabric, only a cold
placement and intimate seal the whale it fits onto a jaw.
The painted smile takes its place along my lips for
the first half breath. After it settles, I think perhaps
I will peel it away, discover it as costume, and
reveal myself intact underneath. Instead, my fingers find a new
architecture to my cheek bones, a foreign set of muscles
engaged where my own should be. The face in the
mirror does not belong entirely to me. It meets my
eyes with a grin. I have practiced in private, now
widened in public, as if some one had cut away
the cut in between pretense and identity. The change is categorical,
not merely cosmetic. The mask rearranges memory as it rearranges flesh.
My privateself becomes public. A thing will located rather than explained.
My hands moved with choreography learned long a ghost, small
calculated gestures, the half smile that deflex questions, and the
mirror answers with fragments that amplify rather than console. Each
chiud reflects a betrayal I had flaid away into silence.
The lie left and toll is show when a stading
hand might have found a grip, the cautious retreat that
at the time read is prudence. The laughing clown watches
with a tenderness that is almost clinical. It catalogs each
frature like a curator police, with the integrity of an exhibit.
When I stumble backward, the mirror shatters in an artful way.
It is not loud so much as a scattering of
clear judgments. Fragments of myself scatter across the vanity, like
currency that will never be exchanged. In that prismatic ruin,
each sharred names a moment I dodged. Each offers a
micro judgment, a small history that coagulates into a verdict.
You were witness and you were silent. The room ceases
to be archive and becomes inventory. The mask has performed
its function. It has not condemned me so much, has
translated my avoidance into a visible dialect. Memory blooms into
particulars I had kept up to weigh like spoils. I
am returned in flashes to the rainy evening to the
smell of oil and cold metal, to streetlam compromised by drizzle,
to the way the well clothed soft and one landslike pavement.
I see the figure one shoulder higher as they slipped,
the hand that reached but did not reach far enough,
and the small precise gestures I made out afterward, the
way I turned my head to some neutral horizon in
the dressing room. These moments do not exist as narrative
so much as evidence presented in a forensic light. Each choice,
refrained by the Porcelin grin rereads not as contexts, but
as calculus. The angle of sight, the weight of my fee,
the tempo of my indecision. Outside beyond the slitter door,
the fairest wheel breath is slow and indifferent. Its silhouett
pulses with a light that looks as if it measures
seasons rather than seconds. For a breath, I imagine the
doors in exhalation. The promise of air and company stepping
through it implies a new equation trade. The mask now
adhered to my face for a public, a new role
in a larger theater, where a recognition will be easier
than the self knowledge required. Inside these walls, the masks alon.
The rails still whisper. They do not shout to be
wielded or removed. They murmur their voices, the small rustle
of fabric, the clink of costume charms. They gesture toward
the fact of being seen without the consent of the
one who is seen. The laughing clown tilts its head
and its throat bells sing a sound like punctuation and applause.
Stitch together. I find myself at the threshold the porcelain,
a cold fat pressed to my skin. The watch in
my pocket ticks with the rhythm as shits from countdan
to metronome, marking the tempo of what must come after.
Outside strangers will read me quickly and make bargains, invent
stories that fit the grim my lips snabitry. The masks
whisper in patterns that suggest a bargain has been struck.
Your private self now an exhibit. Every one will have
an angle on it. The fog presses in with the
same indifferent patience that attended every law denial. It does
not comfort, it organizes. I want to know what the
mask knows, not the letter, All marks and crusters are
plain enough, but the small calibrations are prisons, the way
a smile can be an armor and a map simultaneously,
the way in expression tray to privacy for pausibility. I
remember the first time I learnt to perform a smile
on command, a childhood memory like a press follwer, a
teacher who asked us to look at one another in
imagine happiness, a photograph taken too soon, the slow practice
of hold in my mouth in a way that hurt
less than the rest of me. The mask pretends that
old pedagogy to me with a hard integrity, if fits
how I learned to survive, and in fitting it and
does me. There is a cruelty in being recognized before
you recognize yourself. To be legible is to be simplified,
and the mask simplifies with an efficiency that makes me dizzy.
This face equal story. I could step out and let
others supply the narrative they prefer, except that the grim
will be read by impatientiz and incorporated into shortened I
could let the world make bargains about my motives and
the price of my silence. Or I could pull the
mask away and face the slow and gainly work of
reassembling the person it has made legible work that would
require more than apology, more than explanation, more than the small,
predictable confessions that satiate onlookers but leave the marrow unchanged.
The dressing room gives no easy mercy. The door opens
only to u slith. The ferris wheel pulse is on,
unbothered by the re arrangement of one person's face. Outside
the world will accept or refuse in your expression in
a dozen impatient judgments. The masks continue, the soft accusations.
The laughing clan remains in almost tender presence. I stand
with a smile that was never fully mine. The cost
of being seen hangs heavy and immediate. I have been
stripped of my denial and catalog, and the tally wreaths
like an inventory of small betrayals. I think of all
the times I chose silence because the alternative felt like
violence to myself, to the fragile shape of my life.
Then I think of the way silence can be a
kind of shelter, a room within a room where shame
is moved over and the world keeps giving you the
benefit of a practice story. Here in the dressing room,
that shutter is dismantled gently and with merciless focus, Each
mask alon seems to be at tool not merely of deception,
but of revelation. They set out the geometry of whom
we appear to be, and name the gap between appearing
and acting. A memory surface is small and unglamorous. The
staying of my hand as the other fell, the internal
calculus that justified it delay. There is always a story
about why I had told myself I needed to be
sure to assess whether reaching would worsen things, to measure
the physics of intervention. Those rationalizations feel thin now, like
paper shields against a bright light. The porcelain grin reads
them as the neat compromises they are in the mirrors fragments.
My own eyes look surprised to find themselves implicated. The
laughing can tilts and keeps tolly with an almost clinical pleasure.
I do not step fully into night now back into
the room. I remain at the threshold, caught between two
geometries of existence, the interior spase of where identity is
slow work, and the exterior, where identity is performance, where
a smile is an immediately legible cost. The max settles,
the mirror keeps at shards scattering a hundred small exposures.
The pocket watch against my chest slows its insistence to
something breath like. The fog clings like memory, refusing to
let me be simply one thing again. The last light
catches in the porcelain in a way that makes the
mask look like something both mask and face, both tool
and inheritor. In the reflection, the new expression is read
by the world before I have a time to understand it.
Decisions that require time, remorse that must be learned, Apologies
that must be earnedder a risk of being as restored
a people's topologies, to gossip, to glance, to the short
hand of carnival observers. The choice remains unresolved. Confession or concealment,
true apology or comfortable deceit. The laughing clan amids a
laugh that is only just a promise, and the door
yawns like a mouth that will accept what deata face
I bring to it. There is a knowledge here that
is not kinder for being true. Recognition comes easier than understanding.
People will see an expression and fill in liking chapters
of character out of expedients. They will not want the
work I would need to do to make my face
and my history compatible again. The step forward is to
seed authorship of my narrative to strangers. Step back is
to continue living in a room that will not let
me forget I vote. The dressing room stands behind me
like a theater curtain, waiting to fall on. The thought
that the laughter might follow is a cold comfort and
a harsher warning, all at once. The mask's murmur as
I cross the threshold, their voices like pages turning somewhere
in the dark. The fairest wheel turns with deliberate interference,
its lights passing over faces assembled for cheap enchantment. The
last impression addressing room leaves is not of villainy revealed,
but of an identity forced into delight before its owner
as loaned how to live with it. That is the
price of the porcelain and the party favor of recognition.
The world will wear this smile for me long before
I can decide whether to keep it. I step out,
with my feet still fogged, with the taste of all
make up at the back of my throat. The watch
at my chest keeps a slow, sturdy beat. The laughing clowns,
bells tinkle as if in benediction or in applause, there
is no principal difference. The masks behind me returned to
their hooks, into their business of hanging, like punctuation waiting
to be read. The door narrows to a slit, and
the carnival light presses like an audience. I do not
know yet whether I will pull the porcelain a way
to morrow, whether I will try to reassemble the shods
into something coherent, whether I will accept the dressing room
worked me the way bad memories waky, slow and patient,
like a hand pressing into the hollow of the chest
and waiting for the breath to return. I opened my
eyes to a darkness that tasted faintly of paint and dust,
a darkness threaded with the coal teal rim of light
that bled beneath the cracked vanity mirror. Fog curled around
my feet, low and deliberate, as though the floor itself exhaled.
The peg rode to my left, held faces that leaned
with me, not a sympathy, but an expectation. One new
hook bower mask I both knew and did not. It
hung from a rusted peg, like a promise or a verdict.
The porcelain was hairline cracked, paint flaking at the cheap bone.
Its smile was blunt to practice, so familiar it felt
pluck from the edges of my own photograph. The grin
was not mine, but it answered to something in me,
a remembered currency of laughy used to grease awkward exits
and smooth over bruce moments. The room felt smaller than
it showed, the walls bending inward under the weight of
so many eyes bound hucks. The mirror caught me in
half light, and my reflection lad behind bare fraction, as
if the glass were catching up to a motion I
had already made. I moved toward the vanity, more be
habit than will. The fray ate the light and left
only a band of cold along the glass where the
bulbs had burned down. Stops masks crowded the low shelf
in a clusted loaf, like gulls that had found the roof.
They leaned forward, as if listening for secrets in the wood.
The new masks seemed to tilt when I stepped closer,
small koy tilt that suggested breathing in hunger. My reflection
smiled when I did not. The smile arrived to be
too soon, and remained when mine faltered. The reflections Hans hovered,
as though reheusing a gesture my body had not yet
agreed to perform. Whispered accusations derided the still air. They
were not worried so much as the shapes of words,
the tidy syllables of excuse, the ragged edges of admission,
the syllables I had swallowed over years and stitched into pauses.
They skimmed the glass and pulled at the base of
the vanity like water. Names and dates were unnecessary. The
masks already knew the ledger in my chest. The compulsion
to lift the mask rows like heat under the skin,
an appetite that wanted no explanation, only proximity. I let
my fingers trace the edge of the vanity until the
sensation of polished wood steadied the trimmer in my palm.
The masks and the hooks watched with painted patients, each
face scene chosen to accuse a different thing. Papperance trials
grew in that recalled a small cruelty, muttered to get
a laugh, a chip jest to whose painted eyes suggested
private betrayal, and a cloak, krimlawneger, a maid painted sadness
that hinted a neglect I had smooth of the shrug,
shadows lengthened between them, and in those surface of room
began to take back my memories one by one. A
joke told at the wrong time, for promised rephrase into silence,
a name omitted at the crucial second. They were not
merely reminders. There were the currency by which the dressing
room measured me. I moved down a narrow aisle between
hooks because the act of walking felt like confession. The
masks leaned as if to hear better, and with each
deputy tail slid out of me. An explanation I had
used to soften the edges of roum. Reason I had
given when my absence had mattered, A posture adopted to
keep peace in a room that later needed more than
I quiet. The hooks glowed with a dim teel sheen,
broom light catching crack paint, and the dust motes that
floated like slow falling ash. I tried to clutch the
practical things, the threadbare scarf in my pocket, the stop
pocket watch that had been mine longer than the face
that were but the masts were efficient thieves. They did
not only accuse, They offered ready made alternatives, where this
inner burden becomes theater instead of memory. The crack newcomer
did not need to speak. A hail line scened suggested
where a second mav might be. The suggestion was so
precise it felt anatomical. The idea of wearing it landed
in me like a needle, delicate and persistent. The laughing
clowns present, some fell from the shadows, a smear of
singed red hair and the metallic gleam of a crack horn,
until the room smelled of sweet rot, candy, sugar braided
with rust. The clown did not so much approach as
expand the air, the way a chorus fills a hole.
When the conductor lifts a hand, it coaks with a
crooked invitation, barring porcelain smiles and tiny bells that chimed
on promises. I found myself pressed to the mirror, palm
splayed against cold glass, as if anchoring myself to a
world that still had rolls. Paddic came gradually, at first
at tide, finding its footing. Then it rendered me animal. Still,
my lips ticked the grin of the mask came alive
somewhere behind my jaw and threaded into muscle with the
slow insistence of roots. My mouth began to mimic the
porcelain smile before I had consented to it. The vanity
lights pulsed in a rhythm that mash. Someone even beat
in my ribs, and the room braided my intention with
the masks will until the two were indistinguishable. Mimicry became theft.
My hands, guided by a will not quite my own,
reached for porcelain. The metal teeth at the mask edge
caught the skin of my chin, like a toy that
holds because it knows the soft places. The seam at
its jawslit and closed with a sound like paper folding shut.
Coal spread along the contact points, and a com settled
over my thoughts, the alien calm of someone who has
learned to be charming, because charm keeps the world soft.
The quiet was not peace. It was a practiced hush
that did not disturb the surface. When the mask, latch, clarity,
and horror arrived together, the other mass seemed to click
into place, like gaze, a lining. Accusations no longer whispered
at the edges of the glass. They resolved into one
unbearable clarity. I felt every omission and every polite lie cataloged, reorganized,
restated as a performance. I had perfected. The face I
had kept in the dark. The practice smile used to
suit the hide was wearing me back. It slid into
public space with ease of whale worn clothing and with
a cruelty that felt surgical. My reflection returned as a
foreign thing. The face that looked back at my jaw mascarf,
a faint, permanent shadow beneath the eyes. But the smile
was an actor's instrument, easy, precise, designed to make others
look away. My thoughts arrived with or distance, cataloging memories
with the clinical curiosity of someone going through another person's pockets.
Regrets read like props. The stop pocket watch in my
palm became an index of pauses and a fir truce.
Each tickler second told me what I traded for a
clean exit, the honest weight of apology, the clumsy work
of restoration, the risk of owning a mistake. There was
a ridiculous ease to the mask's methods. Where I had
once rationalized it were packaged where I had once evaded.
It smiled and deflected. When I fumbled for an explanation
in the hollow behind the joline, the laughing clan charmed.
The cluster of tiny bells had only rang when a
lie formed, and the sound was both melodic and predatory.
Laughter followed that was not wholly human. It came layered
like a recording plate at different speeds, a child's thin
contralto undercut by a mechanical echo that stretched like a yawn.
The sound settled into the room and made the hook
stand straight over approval, I could leave doors still existed
hinges that squealed in complaint rather than permission. But the
corridor beyond to have rules of its own, and the
mask had already rewritten mine in mirrors. I would be
more useful on streets. I would be more palatable to
where this face was. To gain a map of social gage,
as I could deploy with the ease of muscle memory.
To keep it was to trade the map for the
true geography of myself. The choice tidy the world into
a simple binary truth and comfort comfort rebetter in public.
I tried to force a porcelain a way to peel
it from skin and bring back the small and convenient
person who inhabited my rip gage. My hands across painted
surface and found anchor. The bond was not merely a
tisive but contractual, as still soldered with edges made of
every tacit omission I had ever offered. Hannick shifted gears.
My throat clenched. A memory after memory, flair faces waiting
in hospital corridors, a child's hand outstretched in the rain,
the quiet of a kitchen where the apology was never said.
Each image was a razor of possibility. The mask answered
each regret with a practice charmed so perfect. The winds
looked for a moment like costume. I thought of the
hospital corridor with fluorescent lights that stung like truce, and
chats too small for the weight of waiting. I remembered
the feel of a bracelet slipping from a wrist while
I looked away the conversation I interrupted with a laugh
because silence made me uncomfortable, the misbad day where I
offered a late call that did not repair anything. Both
scenes came with the clarity of broken foam frames I
had skipped over in daily life to preserve the story
of myself, I preferred to tell. The masks did not
let me skip. They rewrote the footage in slow motion
until even some more cruelty showed their edges. Time changed shape,
night fractured into pre dawn, and the bulbs harmed with
a frequency that matched the new gerin for a moment
and of nariss all. The wall tilted in an identity
I had kept folded in a pocket, return the favor
by pressing its outline against the inside seam of my skull.
The laughing clown watched its head cock too far, an
audience made of an idea. Its horan breathed out a
distortion that made the room sound as if someone had
loosened the spool on a phonograph. The bells chimed whenever
my thoughts bent toward denial. When a mechanical calm settled,
my thinking returned in a cataloging tone. I processed the
scene as if I were a clock counting evidence. The
mass latched, The mirror became a friendly instrument. The costume
offered tactics regret shift to shape where it had been
hot and jagged. It became a bullet point list, each
item actionable and therefore removable. I ran my fingers over
the stop pocket wart and felt a foreign satisfaction at
the neatness of the lodic. The masks renounce at each
prick of conscience with a small, credible lie that smoothed
the skin. The world outside the dressing room would not
see the harm. It would buy convenience as if it
were charity. I thought of the people I might betray
now that the clone lived on my face. A friend
who trusted my prisons during a long season of illness,
a lover who learned to settle for partial truce to
keep me. A parent who gave me the softest thing
they had and asked for clumsy repair in return. The
mass made the options tidy. It also made betrayals inevitable,
because tidy betrayals are easier to enact. To the world,
I would become the person who says the right words
in the right way at the right time, in size
as seem hurt. There was an odd intimacy to the exchange.
The mass did not only cover it, instructor its hort inflection,
the precise tilt of the head, the small pause before
a confession that invites absolution instead of accountability. I practiced
in the mirror with the detached interest of some unrehearsing lines.
It felt efficient, economical, even where I at once spent
real I was stitching apologies together that might never hold.
The klan offered a repertoire of gestures that stitched immediately
and cost nothing in the currency of discomfort. The bargain
was elegant in its cruelty. I stepped toward the door
with the weight of new equipment strapped to my face.
The hooks behind me held thus islands like a guard.
Then the small shards reflected through the cracked glass, the
laughing clans soul, whit drifted like a water mark, or
reminder that the transaction had been more than physical. Something
in the room had remembered me in a way that
made scape less possibility than eroting. The masks watched as
if entertained, their painted mouth softer now that the main
performer had assumed his role. Beyond the door, the corridor
promised faces that would light me more easily, favors negotiated
with a practice deflection instead of messy contrition. Yet a
part of me, the part that still registered the cold seamund,
may join you. The bargain's cost, Who would I betray
now a memoried person enough the mask made the options
tidy and the betrayals inevitable, because tidy betrayals are easier
to enact. I nadgined the slow corrosion, small emissions compounded,
the patchwork of polite lies, forming the bedrock of a
new identity I would grow into. Because habit is a
stronger archetect than intention. I paused at the threshold hand
and the knoll, and let the dressing room fog rise
around my ankles like a final argument. The laughing clowns
bells chanted up my hesitation in the mirror shods, the
clowns eye flicks on, and crimson gleaming with a hunger
that had nothing to do with malice and everything to
do with mathematics. The more denials fair to it, the
larger it became. I thought of returning the mass to
the peg, of peeling it off and watching it fall
back into porcelain sleep, the seam aged with the pressure
of obligation. I imagined walking out with the face intact,
moving through polite rooms and polite pologies, never once making
the honest, clumsy corrections that could have been the slow
work of repair. I breathed in the dressing room one
last time and felt the air trace the hollow of
my chest. The sound of my breath under the mask
was unfamiliar, a small wind in a foreign cave. The
corridor smelled of rain and old posters, The well beyond
tune to pragmatic concerns. The dressing room folded itself behind me.
Pocket closed with a satisfied click from the vanity mirror.
Shard held the clown silhuette until the overhead lights swallowed everything.
The choice had been made in a room that remembers.
The corridor would remember to it would keep the ledger
for me. Now the pocket watch remained stopped where it
always was, a small proof that time had been traded
for a smoother path. The nightmare did not end, It
had simply moved. The last thing the dressing room offered
was neither forgiveness nor condonation, but a pair of hands
fit the contos of nwsin like bespoke gloves. The laughter
that followed me as I walked was quiet and certain,
A thread that would spul slow and lam outside the
world greeted the face and moved on inside a smaller
light poles beneath the porcelain. Patient and hungry, the corridor
would file away the details for the next act. The
mask had given me refuge and taken a map that
trade would show up in small habits. I had always
mistaken for personality, an easy smile to deflect a question,
an excuse fashion to stitch over a wound, the precise
cadence of apology, to smells of rehearsal. Those around me
might never see the scene. The masks in the dressing room, however,
would keep a clear account. They would hang, patient and ready,
waiting for the day the theater grew within and a
true slipped through the stitches. Until then the grin would
open doors, the laugh would smooth edges, and the corridor
would remember everything I tried to misplace. The fog that
curled at my feet receded like a satisfied animal behind me.
The hooks held a silence that felt like a promise.
The laughing clown spells tinkled once, as if in benediction.
My reflection, in a passing shadow of glass, caught the
corner of the news and answered the world with practiced charm.
I moved on outward, and obliged. With a knowledge that
the dressing room's ledger is patient. I would be allowed
to forget in public and remember in private, and the
corridor would remember everything for me until it chose not to.
The NIGHTMA did not end. It re shaped the days
I had left to wear it, and that is the end.
Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
the next one.