Thank You for Ten: Short Fiction About a Little Theater Read online

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  Alicia sniffed as she paused for a moment in front of the empty stage this time. A wall and a rudimentary staircase of some kind accompanied the now smaller pile of lumber. All of the wood appeared to glow as it reflected the dim illumination of the single floor light on stage. (This, she had been told was called a "ghost light".)

  Thunder dragged across the sky outside as she sloshed in boots up the aisle of the house. She had her equipment in one hand and a wad of tissues in the other. She sniffed again and pushed the lobby door open. The sizzle of rain filled the lobby as the precipitation pounded the windows. The curtains covering the painting, along with the rest of the lobby seemed to reflect her melancholy state in the dusk-like light of the stormy early morning. Whereas the green room, the creepy hallway and the stage had merely been indifferent to her presence, the lobby felt like a passenger on a long bus trip that just won't stop staring at you.

  She set down her equipment in front of the painting, and blew her nose again. She walked behind the ticket counter, switching on the lights of the lobby for the first time during her visits. (The sun was of no use today.) Once back there she discovered an unopened box of tissues. Glancing at her own well-worn wad, she took the pristine box, dropped a few dollar bills carelessly on the ticket counter, and moved around to begin her work.

  Alicia parted the curtains over the painting by a few inches, and stopped. Instead of flinging them open in her usual exuberance, she eased them open as though waiting for a wild creature of some kind to come flying out from behind them.

  None did.

  She set up her paint table. Then she went to the ladies room and moistened her brushes. Afterward she blew her nose several times and looked at the painting without seeing it. With a sigh she began to mix a few colors together to match the blue sky in the upper left-hand corner of the piece. All this she did in silence.

  And in silence she remained for ten minutes. Fifteen. The splotch of repaired sky in the painting mocked her, burning a hole into her eyes as the off-mixture and inexact brush strokes testified to her distracted state. She put down her brush and backed away from the painting. After a moment she sat upon the floor and leaned her back against the ticket counter. The Dionysus image, near-grinning as always nonetheless looked sympathetic today.

  The protracted hiss of car tires outside crawling down the rain-drenched road, and vanishing around the next corner. Rain pelting. Sporadic thunder. Her own sniffling.

  "Not my week," she said in a voice that would have been too soft for another person to hear over the white noise of the falling rain.

  "I told Jack about the internship," she continued. "He was upset I didn't get his approval before accepting it. Like he's some custodian of my time?" She blew her nose again. "I told him he wasn't. He said something about it being time to start sacrificing art for the sake of who I dated."

  She let the thunderstorm do the talking for a few minutes as she crawled over to her worktable to retrieve the box of tissues. She then returned to her position in front of the ticket counter.

  "And now this cold," she said, waving the tissue box at the painting. "That's why I'm sniffling, by the way. Not because of Jack. Not today, anyway. I let him go, you see."

  Dionysus seemed to express approval of this choice.

  "Oh, I know he was right there on the edge of doing it himself," she said. "I get it. But he hadn't jumped yet. I guess I pushed him over it in a way, instead." She laughed a bitter, phlegm-producing laugh that became a small cough. "I wanted to make the decision this time. He looked more surprised than hurt when I told him I was going to choose art instead of him. He always kept his toiletries in this little leather bag in my bathroom? He walked past me, grabbed it, and walked out the door. Didn’t even slam it."

  Through the glass lobby doors she could see one of those people who seemed to take pride in lollygagging through a downpour make his way down the sidewalk in front of the building. Hands in his pockets, shoulders stooped, head watching his feet, he vanished around a corner after a minute.

  "It hurts a bit," she said. "Eight months. I guess it hurts him a bit too. I know it does, actually. But it's like an old sweater."

  She looked at Dionysus and laughed at the silliness of her statement. His never changing grin laughed with her.

  "Hear me out. Sometimes you have an old sweater and feel so comfortable in it. You wear it all the time in casual places. Even once a few holes appear, you keep wearing it because it still works; it's like an extension of you."

  She blew her nose and tossed the used tissue on the floor near her. "Then one day you put it on, and it's still great, but your eye catches one of the holes and you see that it's bigger than you thought. You keep wearing the sweater though. You go about your day, but you realize that when you take it off that night, you'll probably never put it back on again. You might even it wear it a bit longer than you normally would once you get home that day, because you know what's coming."

  She wiped her eyes. Not because of her cold this time.

  "So you take it off and toss it on the floor and it sits where you dropped it for a while. You get used to it just being there. Like there’s always this potential of putting it back on. Before you know it…it's warm out and nobody's wearing sweaters. Then, one day when your cleaning your house…" She didn't finish the thought, but added, "And you realize you're kind of okay with it. Even though some days, you still go to your closet to grab that sweater in a mad rush out the door on an autumn day."

  Rain continued to pour, and thunder came more often. Alicia stood up, went to the light switch behind the counter, and shut off the lights. She returned to her spot once again, and watched the rain. She neither said, nor painted anymore that morning. Still, the painting grinned at her. She found comfort in that.