Prompt

By E.S. Taillon

You are attending a friend’s play for the second time. It is the last show of the run. You are in the front row wearing his mother’s soft, sheer black sweater, but this is important: she is not seated next to you. She is somewhere in the last rows with a friend.

(Correction: in the back rows, that’s simpler.) Consider the semantic field of the word “last,” all that it grows. It means final: there will be no more attempts to capture the script in breath and motion; it also means enduring, actors lasting the hours, weeks, emerging not as derivatives of derivatives but as participants in something newly, wholly, roundly alive (we will return to this later). These opposite meanings, held together like identical poles of a magnet, repelling, recognizing. And then: it means the previous (last night—rolling fever; last night—gentle hands on you and the beauty of tendons), it means the last dance and the last supper, echoes of a lost list, a lust for more. Hold all of these meanings, and single out individual memories for them to evoke. Search for synonyms, parse homophones. And hold them all, weave them together, every last word and every other one.

Do not consider anything but the superficial significance of the fact that you and your friend’s mother are sitting pretty far apart in the theatre. It is because you failed to coordinate with her to buy tickets. In the glow of the laptop, fingers perched on cold keys, morning so far off, you decided it did not matter; you must adhere to that decision now. She is so kind, and so like him.

Once, over tea in her cozy living room, you told her the story of the young student you met on the train from Madrid to Barcelona a decade ago. How the student wept over a breakup and you, powerless and teenaged, passed them a napkin and a bag of chips. How you honestly, earnestly could not determine the student’s sex or gender and found that breathtaking-groundbreaking. How she (his (your friend’s) mother) sipped her tea and her blue eyes, his blue eyes, darted imperceptibly over your face. How steam condensed into microscopic droplets at the end of her nose, so like his. And she said, “Yep, it’s complicated. Love is complicated.” And you both just let that hang there, wondering after the other’s mind, seeking the patterns in its wake, and what they might spell.

Anyway: you are seated farther (further is figurative distance) from her now than you were then. By a few good metres (meter is the instrument or the rhyme). She gave you the sweater for fear you would be cold and you accepted it because suddenly being in the front row looking as you do, in a dress, with makeup, seems like a bit of an exaggeration. A rude side performance. (Gender is always a performance.) You didn’t plan it that way. You didn’t think that far ahead. So you refined your strategy. All good. Swaddled, swallowed, sweater. You feel the urge to glance her way and study the wrinkles around her brow (so like his), to watch her watch her son. Your friend. Imagine a line from her to what happens onstage, but careful: it’s a matter of timing and logistics. You would have to choose what you miss. You have to choose what to experience, and experience leads you to the choice.

Disregard the problem of where to look: she is not in visual range. Avoid eye contact with the place she would have been. A loud, boisterous couple sits to your right. Do form an instant moral judgement on the fact that they are flouting (not flaunting) the gathering dark. In many places, it is common courtesy to lower the volume of speech in response to those preparatory clues such as an announcer waiting in the wings, microphone in hand, trailing wire.

The lines begin, and the lines are familiar. You were here on opening night as well, with your partner (a word that behaves as a bullet, in the right context, becomes a gunshot), and it is engraved exceptionally well in your memory. This does not mean you can recall it without distortion. There will always be distortion. It is in the air. Actors bustle across the stage in a double layer, now and then. Ties slightly askew. Emphasis on a syllable that was not stressed before. Your heart overclocking again with joy at the craft, the pretense, the ridiculousness of what is happening, the dearness. Palms sweating on the polyester of your dress as though you were up there, falling in, into yourself, your memory and the text, while also expanding out, out to the other actors. (You know some of his lines by heart, so it is easy to imagine.)

Ensure your response is in chronological order, concise, and at a grade 12 reading level. Act as though you are a theatre critic, focusing on the objective merits of the play, its direction and interpretation, the performances of the actors (all good, great). Opening and closing night, same lines, same gestures, and yet so utterly transformed. This last time, the subtext lights him from within (Jack-o-lantern, every man Jack, Henry, Beau), the very subtext you talked over in his apartment, turning, considering, nudging as far as ink on paper can be nudged. The little piece of yourself shining back. A hair, a sliver. So like you.
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What would you ask of yourself?

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​E.S. Taillon is a queer, neurodivergent writer based in Tkaronto and former managing editor at PRISM Magazine. Their French-to-English translation of Scenes from the Underground was shortlisted for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers. She is currently crocheting new covers for some worn-out chairs.