Work Text:
(short story based on The Moonlight, an online BoB RPG set in 1920's Chicago, Roe's POV)
I do not own these characters, with the exception of Madame Regina.
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I.
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"Ach, you give me bow-legged jailbird to work with? You don't pay me enough for job, I always telling you." Regina's cane taps on the stage but never rests, you cannot yet see its purpose.
Nixon is fond of her, you can tell, his eyes linger on the strong and simple beauty of her wrists with a respect you have not seen in them before. You know she will have yours too, soon, whether you come to love or hate her. "Yes, you are. And I always remind you that what you aren't paid in cash goes to your husband in his favored brand of vodka. He is a man of traditional tastes." A lick of the lips and you can feel the burning cold of it on your own tongue, as you imagine the other man doing. The flirtation, however, is nearly lost in your lapse of attention.
She snorts again, eyes removed from you and landing on Nixon without gratitude, perhaps dismissal. "Forgive me that I do not kiss hand that feeds," she snaps through the gravel in her throat.
Then, another new face by the curtain. He stands on the edge of its shadow as if leashed, watching you shiver in undress on the stage, a yearling being measured and priced. Nixon already seems pleased with you, a glance passes between him and the new man, dust-mote-slow and subtle. They both nod.
Regina stalks over to you like a cat, cane snapping before her, serpent quick and as iconically alarming. She slaps it from one leg to the other, up along in the insides until she reaches the willow-bent knees. "And where this come from, horse or prison?" You blush helplessly, feel six eyes and hear a fiddle string snap with a shameful cry.
"Madame, I won't tolerate such vulgarity with--"
The cane snaps between your feet, making you jump. A spark of laughter jumps into blue-background-eyes and ignites something. Nixon is silent, Regina isn't. "Is half of show, yes?"
---
"Here kid, put these on." Bill looks down at you with ever-present amusement--it tugs at your skin and demands entrance, soon it will crawl under and gut you like a fish, make you smile like skeletal teeth, make you hard like skeletal teeth. It's better for you not to know this yet, you are inconsistently soft and hard from the prison, like a babe's skull still aligning. You're young; he isn't, as such. The lightest lightening, save for sharp eyes. Dark, cold heat like stars that scrutinized you upon your arrival, deemed you fit for work and continued to watch as you learnt stage direction and ambled through the first steps of a routine, barefoot. He is not a teacher, it was another's voice and another's cane that rattled between your ankles and asked if your father was a plow-horse. You're not sure what he is, just that he smiled when you said nothing and tried again, and that he smiles now while holding the shoes fisted within the space you curl around. You've been outside for two weeks now, held in this between-time, this surreal ward of dressing rooms and instructors that explain your new life. Sometimes in the gentle way of one delivering death-news, sometimes in the blunt fashion of one who is already hard. You don't care for either, you want to go back to the streets but it is forbidden, you're to be hidden and groomed for a premiere. The word rolls around in your head like a glittering marble. A cat's eye to match his feline stare, distracting you from what he wants.
The shoes gleam like hard candies in the stage's lights, cherry enamel sugar-coating your unremarkable feet. Your hooves in moments when they fall too heavily, though from what you know of horses they are graceful and fluid creatures. Perhaps that's the idea, mimicry. Now you are to be shoed, perhaps branded? You look down at your feet as he fixes the straps, leaning away. Always too close, always with his hands somewhere, hovering. He is like the smoke in every room, he floats and lingers, his smell clings. He smells of smoke too, thick and addicting, a vicarious high from his presence that keeps you alert and soothes at the same time. And underneath there are other kinds of smoke, wood from fires, chimney-soot and boiling water, but not tea. He leans closer, you catch something exotic, erotic in the wisp of scent--something foreign and holy. You see him crusted in jade. His head lifts as in worship or to bear the sentence of a blade, the stars trace patterns and command you. "Stand up." You stare back, he must be kidding, the amusement tingeing everything yellow and green, but his eyes are still that glittering blue, you climb to your feet and haven't a moment to balance before he seats you again with heavy hands on your shoulders. "No, graceful-like, you know?" His voice is refreshingly gentle and sincere, you can't hear the interest beyond guiding that pervades your skin as he examines pale ankles. A soft slap against your leg so that the calf shivers and the short growth of hair stands on end. A suggestion to shave it again that makes you turn your head in shame, not yet come to terms with the condition. This time there's no hand on your cheek to banish it, he lets them burn and tells you to stand properly.
---
"Posture is good," her paper-cool hand in the small of your back, where the tail of your spine throbs. She pushes until you bite your lip, muscles of your back and legs trembling. "But at what price?" She sighs and runs her knuckles softly over the skin, where underneath there is a dull knot of pain from riding the bare backs of knobby beasts and being ridden. Your own fault, but how were you to know you would end up here and in need of a straighter spine? Her fingers trace over velveted skin in a shadow-puppet play of sadness. "Will cost more later," and the puppets gain substance and dimension, faces. You step away from it. "Ach! You," she exclaims suddenly. "So expressive when you move, yes--but so rough!" Angry piano chords on your ribs. "Is all you will be good for soon. All you ought be good for. We train your body to be like your voice, soon you will be breaking yourself like great men before." Regina's voice has become low and murmuring, like promises and threats. You half expect the hand that finds itself on your neck, testing all the bones with cold fingers. "You let me do all talking, makes you good student but boring person--have you nothing to say?"
You turn your head; she's caught you off-guard. A feline smile to match the way she moves and the way he looks at you, you wonder if you're a bird who has been let loose in a cat-house, will they even bother to pluck you before the teeth sink in....
"Come back Eugene," she snaps her fingers by your face and you turn again, muttering an apology. "Ah, that voice again. Is nice, should be used more than is rested. Too much rest makes things weak. You work it like horses or bones will get soft." She watches your silence unfolding, tries to fold it again. "Tell me of life. Is warm for you, yes?" Regina shakes her head as though warmth is foolishness. Many things are foolishness to her--you wonder if this is the way of all women. If they have all the sense and you are mule-kicked in the head as a boy.
You shake off all apprehension and feel it bubble like mercury in your blood, bend and kick into a sudden hand-stand, fingers splayed, back arched, legs together in perfect form, then curled and planted on your shoulders in trained flexibility. Your back does not hurt when you do this, you learned to bend only to escape it. "No' warm--hot. Hot an' dirty." You are nothing like her, in her cold cleanliness, her immaculate frost that she puts in your bones. You will be.
Purring in your ear like a hollow-chested bag of fur, her hand on your knee to steady both. "All that sun and dirt, and you pale as my own wrist. You are long way from home, child. It is scrubbing right off you." She looks down at the crown of your head with sad affection, then hardens, pushing the knee to topple you over, a pile of fishbelly in yellow lights. The cat hisses, "They will break your back, child. And your feet, and your fingers. Every bone they will take. Only freedom you have is to break them yourself--now stand!"
---
You climb to your feet, he pushes you down again. His thumbs have learnt the grooves of your collar and his fingers have special places on your shoulders, marked in white and then red like Alice dreamings. You grow self-aware and shivery under his touch and ask to be clothed; he gives you his own jacket; the smell of him is stronger on you now and heat spreads from your belly like a gorged dog laid bare in dust and sun. Yet the kindness will not leave either of you distracted. Again, again, you stand and are seated. He seats himself also, there is that nearness again which unsettles and smoothes back into place the powders of a moth-eaten sheet. "Kid, stop stayin' so safe, alright? Don't fight the heels f'r balance, stand like Regina makes you."
"I'll fall over." Brows creased, where is the grace in hard bones on hard wood? Perhaps in the sound, you imagine it and fear it all the more. Bill slips a hand around your waist. His grin is full of teeth.
"So what?"
---
II.
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"No bar, only pole--is good, they do not want ballerina." But she wants one, you can see. Her fingers make claws when she speaks as if she were picturing them within her grasp. Like Bloody Mary of tall tales, seeking to make them part of herself. She does not look hungry to see you, only sad. Hard and pitying like a willow. Branches wrap Autumn-cool between your fingers, guiding them to a metal rod from stage to ceiling, a different stage than you are used to. It curls around a wall and fans in a corner, poled and dimly lit. There is a shallow pit that demands visions of sacrifice, you grip a stake to be burned at, flames licking the sin from your flesh before a spectre crowd. It seems to burn when you touch it, sharp contrast to Regina's fingers.
Your cellmate stood like this, with one hand on a bar, staring out into the hall like a sick dog. You would curl into yourself then, and avert your gaze. Sick dogs are left alone for a reason.
Again, pale digits snapping before your eyes. "Pay attention! Now, grip with other hand. And hook leg like so--" she lifts you at the thigh and turns it out, wraps it around the pole at the vulnerable flesh behind your knee. White white white where you would burn in the sun, lain flat under cypress and his body, and you were nearly yellow underneath in a sickly quality that made him call you chink with affection. Did it crawl over your skin like ants and confuse a sense of decency yet unformed? You can't recall. Now you are just white and the sun is nowhere to be seen, and neither is he. You breathe a sigh of relief and when Regina says to swing you swing, and when she stops you and tells you to swing with your hips you swing again. You swing until your skin is rubbed raw by the metal pole, and still nothing.
"Trust the support," she says. But it hurts, your pinking flesh answers.
---
Bill's thumbs trace like a gypsy's over your palm, reading line and callous with muted fascination. He's as subdued as you've ever seen him, as if the blisters sent him somewhere else. You're familiar with somewhere else and leave him be, sitting quietly with your pulse suddenly held in one hand and offered up to him through your life-line, the softest anchor, a wafer melting on a hot tongue. He returns on his own with a quick smile, touching the rough tips of your fingers and sending sensation skipping over your skin with a stumbling refrain. A stumbling, questioning refrain. "Fiddle," you answer, miming with hands and arms to explain the hard pads.
With the lift of your arms returns the curl of his own, smile sharpening with a glance at your waist. He does not grip you, merely circling like a protective suitor, jealousies not yet rendered. Back on the main stage with light-harshness glaring down and whetting his features like blades; he is defiant of his appearance in gentleness and carefully stands with you, ever ready for the assumed twisting of ankles.
The first time he'd walked with you you'd held yourself stiff and away from his body, you were unlike yourself in discomfort, you were frozen with the mercury in your veins, bubbling through your skin in a layer of sweat. Then his hip to yours and a hand, pushing them, asking that they sway in a subtle mockery of female sensuality, that they be slight and alternating. Your back ached and your skin flushed from the unbreeching of it, the stripping of your safeguarded masculinity. And he in understanding held your body against his own and led by example, so that in your humility you were not alone.
Thus today a warming, and you lean on him when you cannot help but stumble; and you lean on him sometimes when you can. The smoke of him sweeps right into your bones and curls in the cold hollows between. Today the marrow of you loves him and hides itself from heart and mind, too deep. Too deep. The shake of a head and you take the next step for yourself.
---
"Regina, how y'know all this stuff?" With days of prompting you've grown in your voice, not hesitating to question the veneer of finery. A holder for her cigarette, a faintly shining line of silver along her cane, yet with color and shape conforming to a rigid simplicity that holds her separate from the world you now inhabit. She is cool and refined and supercilious, disdainful of all they would have you become yet molding you in spite of it. How did she learn of this which so demeans her?
Silently she pushes you hand-to-neck and contorts you around the pole like a rag doll, settling arms and middle just so before letting go and asking you to repeat the position, your body sliding around it. Elbows to one side, leg to the other, back arched so the carefully unwrapped clothe slips from skin. You hold the position a moment longer, then bend to retrieve it and find your hand smarting under her cane. Smarting and learnt. "Do not come to see boy dress himself. For that they pay extra and get room." You flush at the implication, and your cheek smarts as well. "You will get over this embarrassment soon, is no good." A quiet moment while you rub the red flesh, and she softens. "Same as you. Taught. I have good memory, so will you." Yes, yes, you will be all she is and more, the hungry pride crawling up your spine and dipping between the bones. "But I get out before work. Is two ways to live like this--live like told, or get married." She clucks her tongue at the slithering curve of your back and straightens it. It hurts. You know better than to break the pose. No one will care to see such a crooked back. She makes you feel ugly so you will rise more beautiful than before. In more pain than you can remember, make a choice, beauty or comfort. Without one you lose the other. "I am lucky, husband was quick to find me. Rich men marry who they please. Then he lose everything and I am doing this, for Italians no less. In old country they would shake themselves out of those stripes."
You cough, a trembling up and down your spine that threatens faults. "So qui'," you mutter. There's no tie to this place that you can see, not like your own. All that glimmers and gleams laid bare under your feet to walk upon, the sharp edges piercing skin. Venom, mercury in your blood. You rise in the sun crusted with diamonds and are burned. Lucy in the sky. Ashes. Regina gives you a long, hard gaze down her nose as if considering the advice.
You realize selfishly that you'd miss her. It surprises you and makes you vulnerable to her hand. It is coal from the depths of you, pressed into a diamond and joining all the rest.
---
The callous rubbed raw rubbed bloody rubbed further by a constricting shoe, you hardly wish to look at them with ripped flesh up your heel and cramped toes protesting. "Once around, kid," he says in his surprising sympathy that grows over your skin like ivy, greening. Like soft clover, velveting. "Just once and I'll get somethin' f'r your feet." It's a fair deal; you like fairness. You like, more importantly, him. Briefly you see yourself posed against him with a harsh grasp, and it is so; you stand and stumble in the weakness of your own flesh and he curls his hands around it, he curls his arms and holds you tight, as if for a moment he had panicked.
You hover with arms trapped and tangled against his chest. You look him in the eye and your feet are no longer firmly or infirmly on the ground, he has grasped you so quick and tight like an instinct that the top of your head reaches his own. He stares and a subtle fear co-mingles between you. "Bill," you start to ask, but he drops his gaze and some sharp defense returns.
"Never mind the heels today, eh? Just this once. Let's go find somethin' f'r those feet instead." You are lowered gently to the ground and an arm is laid tentatively over your shoulder, as one who has eaten his fill and nibbles at a second course. He held you against him and it was almost sweet for you--was it too sweet for him? To feel the warmth of your skin and the patter of your heart like thick rain on his chest. To know the slight weight of you and the delicacy of your bones. Too much, too fast, you think. He will distance himself again. Or he will do nothing, you don't pretend for a moment to predict his actions. Yet, he has caught and held you, he is sneaking you upstairs with an arm around you, he will be kind to the raw parts of you in a future moment. Is it enough, you wonder, to make him a friend?
---
A white night unfolding gently over the city in briskly bleak November, you tasted it through your open window, straining and shivering as it graced your sweat with chills. Dried and moon-fed, part of you screams for the sun. You will practice and train and learn for a chance to walk in it again, be you heeled and blistered or booted and blistered. Is there mercy in this time spent alone, you are aware that the door at the end of those stairs is locked. Your cell is large and many-roomed, but still a locked door. You will never escape them. Yet you must wonder if you are truly caged, if you are kept in or if something is kept out. The thought is alarming and soothing in turns, like two sides of a coin, one metal-cool and the other metal-hot. You flip it to decide how you feel. To decide if you feel anything at all, and with the cool side burning through your palm you grip the neck of your fiddle and coax the bleaching air into a shade of blue.
They' all backstabbers and murderers, yes? Like children sometimes. Eyes closed, you have an unfulfilling day with unfulfilling words rattling in your mind, change in a tin can. You can hear the poverty and ignorance in the empty spaces. The louder a jingling pocket, the less point in listening. No point in picking it. Like plucking feathers from a molting bird in this town, too much to spend it on and too many willing to kill for a silent pocket. You shiver and look out at brick fronts and long streets. There's more to see but more to block the view. In the street a head is cocked to your window and you retreat, still playing, notes suddenly sharp with apprehension. Your posture is hunched and folding, you duck your head against the fiddle and turn out your elbows at absurd angles, casting caricature shadows on the wall.
Your spine crooks and tilts, a hip dips to the side and you stand in cubist agony, waiting for the crack of a white cane to straighten you. It doesn't come, your mind tricks you as was intended, you are ingrained to punishment and the lonesome language of your body is tinted with a new accent, she reiterates in the tintinnabulation of memory, Is no one worth trusting, here.
---
No one worth trusting...
You shake your head and take his hand; dawn erases you like a wet sponge to slate. There is a slippery confidence between your fingers like slivers of soap lightly clinging, scenting you fresh and clean. His skin like strong tea and smoke. His glittering eyes. These things are constant and you feel a faintly creeping doubt like a draft under your door, perhaps its only bitterness she sews into your flesh.
He spins you playfully and you've been learnt well enough to plant the sharp heels and pivot on them. His hand at your back in a gentle straightening, a counter to her cane, means to the same end. This is a sublet warning that you don't catch, he is foreshadowing your life in shades of green and white, you blink and miss it. He's warm and you miss it. Walls collapse and shutter back into life a second later. He is toeing a line and changing its shape until you are blind sided by all he does. A dip and straightening. Old made new, and your soaped fingers hook and claw from want of your instrument. You would play and turn him in a soft dance without a single touch. You would weave him away and fade, become a mystery and he would cast about for what you once were and in the dark corners of yourself you would be pleased. The closest you come to sinister impulse, and you banish it with a stinging step in the heels. She's getting to you, but you adhere to your purpose and studies and in this lesson of debauchery are made pure again. A lapse to distract you from subversive clues. It would destroy your focus to know the future, you're abstracting and distracted, he pulls away and you flood back into yourself with sudden heat. His hand was on your cheek, or you imagined it was. The effect is the same and you stumble. The bones of your ankles crack and you feel the fall begin, nearly lean into it with the will that he would reach for you again, half-underhanded, half unlike yourself.
You pay for your attempted manipulation in the sickening descent, he watches you fall and smiles, he knows your game and knows to play you one better. He can bait you as easily as you do him, and his resistance is greater. Your will is small and fledgling, downy and squeaking for its mother. The wrap of your legs has ridden up in the fall, your legs are tangled and your elbows ache, your face registers surprise, not yet betrayal. You are classically and disgustingly sexual in the exposure, shame spreads through you--not that you would be in this state but that he would witness it. You are genuine again and his amusement with its tint of malice fades, he is suddenly a sad and complicated thing, unfathomable and unfamiliar, reaching down and putting the fabric back into place, smoothing wrinkles from it and pulling you to sit up. He stands again and there are all intentions inscribed in the blue vein of his arm, a road to Hell and back beginning from his hand. There is your lesson and your choice--the only one who can support you here is yourself, nothing else is for sure. The world is ever revolving and changing, tilting on its axis and throwing you to the ground. All intentions inscribed. All intentions.
You shake your head and take his hand, because in the marrow of your bones you love him.
---
III.
---
You twist and pirouette of your own violation, dancing over to her playfully in a sudden need for movement. A cartwheel by her side, twisting sharply and landing behind, you plant your feet and flip backwards and away, presenting a moving target. Something has left you nervous and frenzied and threatened, she gives you a withering stare before settling back to watch; judge. Her dark perceiving eyes tracing the lines of muscle and witnessing their jump and itch, you swing once around the pole not in slow sensuality but a prey's pivot 'round the hunter's spear, wild and terrible, jumping immediately into a somersault. You move too close and she sets out the cane to trip you, a feint and fall to avoid it, you roll with your crooked spine and revel in it, this is my body, I move it as I please, I know its limits and issue them a challenge you cannot teach or answer. She's unimpressed and you're unsurprised, you hardly care in the lightness of fight and flight mingling along the back of your legs. To kick and curl and swim over the stage with a fluid shift from move to move that denies thought and betrays coordination. You jump onto your hands and walk with back arched and legs cutting a horizontal line above your head. This world is a circus and you will find a place in the center ring.
The ringmaster raises her cane and reminds you of her place, picking at your skin until the mercury spills on the stage and gleams faint and full of hinting shadows. "Bill," she mutters as if in reluctant greeting, and you stumble suddenly with embarrassment at your antics. A single foot saves you, crooked and curled to the floor, the second following in a wheel of limbs. You note her game in the man's absence, clasping your arms about yourself and glancing sharply at her in sullen mimicry of a boy half your age. Cane to spine, a harsh prod that moves you forward and turns your head. "Think you are so quick," and yet with a hint of admiration. "I always know how to slow you down. Remember this, will keep you from falling for same trick twice." A wink. "But I have others." She walks around you in that way that makes you imagine a lashing tail flickering at the edge of her skirt. "So, this Bill--he is important to you, yes?" And you marvel at the difference it makes, that she would say yes instead of no. She might sound more familiar that way. You are uneasy that she would ease you into this conversation, like a babe to his first bath, so unlike herself. Your mistrust is rewarded by the dropping of a pin, coldly ringing in your ears. "Yes, but he should not be." And you see that her bias extends from her husband outward, a wide net casting just out of your range. She wishes to empower you and yet you wonder if it would only grant you her resentment, that she would make you part of that writhing mass what gasps for breath in the presence of her bitter gaze. A hand raised and you duck your head from it in sudden wariness born of thought, not the experiences she assumes you've had. Regina brushes the hair in a new direction along the line from neck to crown, ruffling it and standing it on end, then smoothing it back down.
Her fingers grow tight and you drop away from them, turn your head with a wary eye and slip through your newest routine, you drop into a curtsey that would mock the role she's placed you in with a challenging huff of breath, escaping neatly in a puppet-like dip and twirl through the lesson. You know the movements were in you before you were set upon the stage, she is not here to teach you how to move but how to survive. For your own good, it's always for your own good and ripping you away from what you want, as you rip yourself from her touch that she is souring. A sick grin over the tight and powdered face, she knows what she does and is glad to see it working. "Good boy, you are quick learner." She joins the dance and chases you across the stage, you move faster but refuse to miss a step. "Do not have to waste my voice with you, so much. You know what I am meaning." Rhythm, rhythm, it's sneaking into your bones and you snort like a young stallion in his first pen, coming up to his first fence and pawing the ground in disbelief. "You like to be pet and praised, they only use this against you. Means nothing to them." And you are angry that she would seek to take this from you, that she would harden you against all that make life bearable. Rhythm; your foot stamps and your arms are loosely held in a contained, Spanish passion--you are a spirited beast from Mexican devils rising from spiced sands and course grass to pass the borders and snap your teeth at rattlesnakes. Enough, enough she would make a fish of you and cast hate, for her love you would earn in weakness only, but to keep your head in the water you must stomp out this rhythm and change direction, you make a step toward her rather than away. You will not have her love save have it alone and it brings the mercury in your blood to a boil, it melts the ice in your bones and flows liquid and hot down your face in sudden frustration, you stomp with the balls of your feet, with the bone and the hollow echo punctuates French obscenities so that you dance and swear full circle round her in a string of nouns and take the cane from her hands--it never occurs to you that she has not moved and is letting you get away with something. You're an angry, babbling mess, fed coffee and cigarettes until you are a twittering fool on their stage.
Your bones love him and throw you into indignant fits of movement, you give a breathless wordless toneless scream and smack the cane down against the lacquered wood, then think better of it. Your bones, your bones, don't let them have your bones. The punishment of self that would halt her words and leave her with no reason to condemn this feeling you cannot understand but do not want to lose. "Break them myself," you spit at her, snapping the slim white length down on cramped toes, hardly a wince as they pale and sting, bloodless for a moment before the swell and throbbing pain. You dance three more steps to distract and impress, then the other foot, then your hand. She watches coolly and waits until you are near again, until you are circling and choking on the stinging under your skin and her unspoken demands, until you raise your hand as if to strike your own face. Only then does her hand move as quickly as you knew it could and take the cane from you; place a hand on your chest and push you away. Stumble, crack, stumble, crack, and you disappear quietly over the edge, a tangled pile of wounded limbs gleaming faintly with sweat. The floor is sticky with liquor and dirt, the smell weaving sickness through your body. You'd like to sob but will not suffer the humility of it. Just a cough and softly sighed release of boiled blood into the air. The brief and bitter wish that it be toxic before you reign in it, this spirited mount that has bucked you from its back and left you to crawl back on. It lacks malice and you are grateful, you aren't sure where it came from, maybe it was what she sought to warn you against. It doesn't matter, you won't listen now, she has made the greatest mistake a trainer can.
She is the one who led you to this pit and pushed you over the edge. She is the one who walks to its horizon and taps her cane against it, the one who strips you bare and refuses to love you until you would curl up under that gaze and bow to it. She seeks to tame you and set you free so that you can struggle with your reset mind. So that you can be hard and hurt always, so that all of you under the skin will be as calloused as the pads of your feet. She is the one who kneels and leans over you, pushing you over so that you are loose and untangled on the floor, who prods your ribs and delivers her final blow, unaware of her fault. "And what if it had been him what pushed you?"
The part of your heart that you saved for her closes like a night flower in the stinging sun. Your bones love him and you would accept it as something necessary and somehow playful. He would not push you with such cool calculation, you are sure. She has made the greatest mistake. She has sought to harden you against him and now you are his alone. The greatest mistake.
She has hardened you against herself.
---
Bill is taping your slim ankles without efficiency, going slow and holding your leg with a hand cupped just under the knee. You remember the wariness you held for the task, back at the racetrack. Sitting in old hay and dirt, staring up the wiry limb to a muscled chest and neck that hold all the power anything would ever need to break you. The animal's feet firmly planted and swiftly wound in white tape. You were never told what it did and assumed it was what separated them from work horses. His head is tilted toward his task, you smile at his crown and are glad for him that you are a gentle and compliant beast. Your breath is quiet and sighing with the weight of what has happened and you want to tell him, but when he saw the bruised line of your hand he misunderstood; he would take your explanation as a lie and perhaps it is better that he taped over it with a younger man's grin and said nothing. With all the infirmities of your limbs wrapped like gifts and strengthened by thick tape, he slips the equally battered shoes over the slowly forming point of your toes so that they stand red over white over white.
Then a hand checks the rolled edges of your trousers and another joins it, under the thighs and steadying you as you stand, then up over their sides, coaxing the hem of your sweater out of its sway, up over your head and into a gentle fold over his arm. He walks away and you stand in nervous contemplation, wary of taking a single step until his eyes at least return, and with them, the sky and its stars to point the way. He circles the stage with something new over his arm, your sweater seemingly transformed into a rich, stiff fold of whalebone. He circles and you lose sight of him but still do not move, waiting for the reassurance of his hands, a sharp contrast to the other day. Behind you he approaches, harbored in your blind spot and sneaking in to green you 'round the middle, jeweled hues and dark lace around your front and ribboned tightly in the back. You breathe sharply and the muscles of your back shift to move it but cannot. "Shh," he pats your wrapped side and the shock of it moves through you to the opposite, everything restricted and shifted to new places that you are afraid of relaxing in. Yet, he draws that gentle hand from bow to neck, persuading your body to loosen and settle. Your back is surprisingly straight without you holding it so--in fact, you are nearly unable to twist it. The weight of his hands registers on your waist, but you can't quite feel it through the green and black. "Now you c'n focus on keepin' steady, alright?" Something in his tone speaks of a blow softened or a motive sugar-coated, as if this were why he would wrap you in it, but that the decision was not his alone.
A newly cautious step interrupted, "Lovely," you stumble at the voice that should be familiar but is not, heard more often from another room. Your own voice dry like a long reed-whistle, Bill's like a snare drum pattering softly under all the others, then tapping over them with no more effort than before. If so, Nixon's is a viola, easily as sarcastic as it is sincere with the slightest tilt of the wrist. You've twisted it into a subtle strain between the two, shrinking into yourself as best you can with the unchanging planes of the corset. "Jewel tones, Bill? I see I've put him in good hands, then." A smile passes over you, from top to toes, and in the unconscious gravitation of bodies you see that Bill reads him in similar patterns, that he doesn't like the word put any more than you do. Didn't you come to him of your own free will? Indeed--you did not, but you like to pretend. Perhaps he does as well, it would warm you considerably to think it, so you do. It makes up for the illusion already shaded. And Nixon can see that he is an outsider on his own stage and moves between you both, if all stand alone none quite is. There's a promise in the way he moves--of changing this, of an intent to gain something. Circling you--everyone is always circling you, it would be too much to ask that they just have you turn, better a doll than prey--and his hand doesn't quite touch though you can feel in its passing the firm control, the idea that it has a right to, it has paid its due. You'll be used to that soon, many will pay and many will gain form that idea, but for him alone does it last and stand nearly true.
Bill finds a new face and ties the ribbon behind his head with china gleaming faintly over his features and the chipped enamel of teeth peeking through. "Suits him, doesn't it?" And he moves a hand to the nape of your neck and you imagine he means not to offend by speaking of you as if you aren't here--it's all part of the show. This too you will understand in time, though it's harder for you to play new parts. Roles will be made to fit you, then the mold broken and you're left nearly yourself on the stage, more terrifying than the view from the mask he wears, than the half-mask you will be given to hide behind. Not for privacy or protection but to hide you from them, the unpleasant weakness and discoloring of skin. But this is the present and you've no knowledge of any such things, you know only that Bill is touching your neck and Nixon hasn't quite touched you at all, only with his eyes and, somehow, with his voice. You wonder if something disallows him, and you like to think it's Bill, but as before it's been proven that such thoughts are merely fancy and aren't to be trusted, even if it feels better to trust them. They're moving like cats again--and yet, you think of the stray asleep on your rug, lying like a piece of sod and wonder if they aren't their own kind of predator, wondering if they aren't really just men seeking different things for you--Nixon would make you like himself, you're sure, where Bill would cast you in jade and coal to leave you as you are; just a boy.
You feel they ought speak more, perhaps leave you alone and confer, argue, debate some clash of principals, but instead it's a game of gazing from Bill to Nixon to you to the floor, look at those scuff marks punctuating every misstep, there's a history laid out in the foreign script of dance. In a flurry of impulses you point this out to them, your voice soft and without confidence, like a child's interruption though no one else was speaking. The mood of the room loosens as they find a topic they can agree upon--a mutual fondness that they drop upon the sudden black lines. It's easy to trip on it when you try to show what you've learned, but the corset demands you stay upright and is a real help. All the parts of you that would fly apart and drop you to the floor held in and restrained, everything straightened and tied in place. And while the curve of your spine has been made unnaturally feminine, it does not tilt and waver as it did before--they appreciate this, you believe, more than the curve itself. You are setting up a lot of beliefs in this moment, deem it necessary to your survival, imagining the good in everyone because this isn't prison--you don't dwell on the fact that these are the men who would be in prison were anyone to find out about this place. It wouldn't matter--you were just as guilty as all the others, the sentence does not make the man and you try to ignore the lingering eyes and walk as you have been taught, you think you ought not falter this time but your thoughts hardly matter to the worn soles of your shoes and the gleaming stage. The taped and enameled arches of your feet send a sharp cry up to your mouth, you stifle it and take the next step to spite the pain but in the corner of your eye see the concerned drawing of brows, and the violin string threaded through your body is struck so that you know you didn't imagine it.
---
"You have been busy," she says, to excuse your absences of late--and she's correct, but the brief insight is not lost in fact. A new absence presents itself today--your good opinion left at the door with your shoes. She watches you edge unnaturally to the center of the stage, resisting the urge to fidget though everything seems against you; the spare covering of lace and silk laced in the front for easy removal; the absence of rolled trousers to hide your thighs; the smooth stockings darkening your legs. You've yet to sweat or shake them off, glancing past her to the thick curtain you would fold yourself into and hide from the imagined audience--and the real one. The bartender cleans glasses behind his counter, employees shift in the shadowed room beyond the stage and you hunch into yourself, unable to see them clearly. And there you stand in fluorescent stillness, sharply white and bluing at the edges. You've been asked to strip, but the clothes make you wary of it--you would shrug and drop a pair of trousers, peel a shirt from your body without a second thought--but the expected skill and intent of your hands unlacing ribbons and your shoulders baring themselves suggestively tightens your back and knots your stomach more harshly than any corset.
You swallow, and you think her cane will snap against the bobbing Adam's apple, but the hand is trained, the power reigned in until she taps it lightly. "There is no rich man who will buy you away from this," she chides, remarking on the improbability of her own circumstances, "And if there is you would be worse off, I tell you now. So earn your keep." Later she adds for now and will explain, but at the moment she wants to see skin--no, she wants you to show it, she is not here for a free show. You don't know what she is here for, anymore. Whatever trembling bond had been laid in careful, silver braids has been broken, melted down, turned into separate rings you will wear around your necks on chains, chained, bickering like bride and groom behind the closed doors. Not even, not even such a social bond, she has the silver in her cane and they will adorn you with yours later. Objects without meaning, the first playing at the hem of your top and tickling ribs. You swat it away and reach for the clothe tied at your waist, and the snap you expected is delivered, your hip stinging. She is wary of your hands, the contrite witch. Contrite, contrit, conterere; to rub away as your thumb eases the sting from your flesh. "You go too fast," she reprimands. "Must be slow--make them want it more." More, more, make them want more than you can give, and strive to appease them anyway.
There are certain qualities you must manifest on this stage. Poise, grace, sensuality, dark, base humours; a consciousness of self and of your audience; sure hands, sure feet, humility and arrogance in revolutions; confidence, mystery, beauty, energy, control. And you only three years from the freckled teen; the abandoned half of first love; the quailing jockey; the crook-backed stable hand. And you ten years from the rag of a boy dragging himself out of muddy waters. Were you to find these traits in the small prison or this larger one? It's a matter of size, a scavenger hunt to fend off shrinking walls. You compose yourself with scraps, snatches of melodies heard over long, empty years. Like echoing halls, lined with rooms and magnifying singular sounds. You stand in the middle and watch darkness stretch to darkness. The lights flicker and go out, the music changes, you must hurriedly memorize the next piece of yourself. Regina's cane taps out the rhythm you will exist to. You carefully untie the bowed ribbon at your collar. The nervous perfection of it shames her into speech. "You should run away where no one knows you and be married," she drops like a glass bowl, the idea shattering at your feet and disturbing the moment. Deafening silence, muffled harmonies of the room, her piercing suggestions. "You are a kind boy, would do a girl good. And she would love you, I bet, and keep you safe." She is concerned with your safety, absurdly, you itch from it and remember the fall. How much damage it ought have done, shame her into leaving you alone, make you useless and let them throw you into the gutter where you would rot like a carthorse and be eaten by flies, multiplied a thousand times and crawled over every wall in this city. They would forget you then. You would be nothing but a half-painted poster in the back room and the artist would try to finish it but see no point. Throw it in the gutter as well, here laid the boy, here lays his incomplete effigy, perhaps it will burn to keep a beggar warm. For no beggar could afford his warmth had he lived. Your beauty is to suffer, your beauty is to do it against your will. He makes you this way, she makes you this way. And you bend backwards because you can, because it makes the planes of your stomach stretch and fall into place, because it looks nice, with the top slipping one way and the clothe slipping the other, the ribbon unlacing itself and hanging in asymmetric lines from your shoulders.
Your shadow is thrown in several directions and is a smooth echo of angular posture. You turn your body slowly, feet up, clothe falling, giving them a peek at what lies beneath, silk tickling your chin and mouth. Hold the pose without trembling, hold it with legs in complimenting angles, curl gracefully to stand again with your clothes falling back into place, the ribbons of your top loose enough for you to shrug it off somewhat. Enough. "I cain'." You can't leave, your bones would decay from within and poison your blood. You would drink to cure them and fuck to fill them, and remain empty. False, you would recover and move on, you would perhaps go home and find a soft southern girl to continue your name with. You would raise her children and give them the love that would otherwise poison you. And she would be grateful, and love you, and despair. But in the present you lie to yourself and think it would be much worse to leave. Part of standing is hating to sit. Part of stripping is learning to hate your clothes. You sway delicately out of the makeshift skirt, and flash a smile at the bartender when he whistles, the sharp, self-destructive rejection of an engagement ring.
---
Is that confidence lifting your head at this early hour? Is that determination bending wrists and ankles beyond their seeming able? You are too sore to be flexible, surely, you are too strained and thin to be beautiful. But these three kings--judge, jury, confessor--don't know these things. Exhibit A, your feet in fresh candies, sugared, carameled, coated and polished amber-green, gold tulle laced to the calf. Exhibit B, the straight and simple fall of red and gold silks like a flame from your insides, like the blood spilt from an opened gut, your skin blackened beneath, but unseen. Exhibit C, red lace, curling autumn ferns crawling up your sides on a gold-bone-frame. Prettied and praised, your skin flushes nicely, in an hour this will make itself known as a fever, and you will sleep for three days. Seventy-two hours, catching up. A string of notes will loop in your mind and when you wake it will be the first thing you speak, abaagaccdegegfedcba. They will say you've gone mad, and you'll disagree before the fever takes you again. By the time it breaks you will know the rest of the song.
You blink and the present returns, the sting of feet and swell of ankles and minute trembling of practised muscles. Still self conscious? Her eyes say, gleaming like wolf-lights in a dark forest. Full-moon-eyes. Not self conscious, self aware, no longer ignorant of how or why he moves. To impress, to integrate himself into their lives, a staple of their diet. Keep the moon full. Thoughts run back and forth, your mind is misplaced in time and the past looks like the future, vice versa, inferences feel like memories. You imagine their thoughts and for a moment believe that adrenaline has opened your mind to new capabilities. You're nervous. Your first steps for this man who will feed and clothe you until he decides to stop. He leaves you mildly terrified, the way benevolence always does, leaves you wondering how long it will last. This shall be the first test. Six moons rise and beckon you into the light, step forward our fortunate son. Rise and wake your followers. In the west they have red carpets and roped walkways, this is not that kind of world, it exists separately and is somehow favorable, downplayed, muted. Dirty. You tell yourself it is exactly what you deserve, young catamite, draw on your face and hide it from those who can keep themselves under control. Your revenge shall be tempting them, with a sweetness that quickly sours. Step forward and accept your fate, your card, the hanged man with his legs delicately crossed. You turn a cartwheel to mimic it, make it a joke, something you can handle--something physical to relax you and let them laugh away the inconvenience. They become a single entity in your mind, three fates measuring your string to be cut, admiring your legs, your arms, even the curve of your faulted spine. Nixon appreciates such attention but you find yourself wary of it, warier still of a touch, especially Regina's. And in the center, Bill, who you bend backwards for. It's easy and removes your gaze from theirs.
You stand and smooth your clothes back into place, a child in the dust-bowl-school-yard plucking at the errant hem, helter-skelter stitches of your own making and the dry wind whipping your hair from your face. Squinting eyes and dirt. A picture book memory, a dry season in your youth. They thought it was the end of the world, then the storms returned and it was the third time your house was sent to its knees in the muddy waters. You had shrugged, not like how you shrug now to loosen your body, but in the shrug of a boy with no opinion, a boy grown apathetic as only those without roots can be. And the wind had blown your hair, and spat rain into your face, and you seemed to cry without expression, grotesque in your beauty so that mama shook you from it. Then the gypsy life in a circular crawl through the town until the house was put back as it always was, the same shape in new timber.
For a second time your mind has slipped out of time, narrowed its consciousness to the inside, blossomed outward again as a night-flower at the first kiss of pale moonlight. Bill seems worried, Nixon faintly amused; a tone is set, completed by Regina's eyes, urging you to pay attention and fight for theirs, though they give it freely. You would rather disgust them, just to see if it were possible. To find the boundary you must cross only to escape. But it is early yet, and Bill is there, and there is a fox crawling the streets outside ready to pounce on a bird like you, a limp and tried prey. I suggest you start walking boy, it's a long way to the county line. And your heels don't pinch so much as constrict, force the bones into a new shape, threaten to break the joints beneath raw skin, beneath bandages, beneath lacquered hues. If you strip them from your feet and run you imagine the bandages and skin will unravel, and the muscles will cramp, strain, snap, and the bones will break on hard floors. You feel crippled and want to grieve, you are no longer nervous but agitated, mourning, afraid. What have they done to me?
"What are you waiting for," she asks sharply, the cane revealing itself to you like a riding crop in the peripheral of a horse, of a yearling who learned fear only and forgot the commands, forgot the beautiful feel of its hooves pounding the dirt and its lungs filling, heart beating, muscles straining. Who forgot survival and starts into motion at man's will. You are sick with yourself and just sick, your spare breakfast unsettled in your stomach, your skin flushed, sweat along your back, under the soft, irregular cover of your hair. Something--everything--disagrees with you and what your mind does not reject your body will, and soon.
A lurching step, a second. In this moment, to walk seems the hardest task you will ever perform. It is a folding, a surrender, proof that you have been trained. That bend to this collective will, regardless of your feelings about its individuals. Your body in defiance of balance, of pale, modern beauty with its straight lines and humor. You are rouged and red and bleary eyed, crook-backed, leaning, soft-lined and shifting, bedecked and bedazzled and then somehow upright, mind of matter, the cane becomes your spine and straightens you to stand and walk and sway, your hips sway, your clothes shift, you are lovely and decadent. You are falling. You have walked for them and now fall, Eugene, are you alright, fetch a doctor, and you, you should not have eaten, you are sick with yourself, sick with your success. You will write songs in your sleep, you will be mad and brilliant, brilliantly red and hot to the touch, your mind a machine that makes music without stopping.
Nixon lifts your chin, kisses the hot sweat of your forehead, brushes your hair back as your family once did in revolving shifts. "You've done well," he says, perhaps to reassure, to appease whatever cursed you with this fever.
You turn your face down, and offer your breakfast to his shoes; a tone is set.