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

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  There were no problems with the first half of the show. Yet during the final scene before intermission Patrick's nerves began to set in a bit. He still had just over an hour before having to pull off his lighting stunt, but it felt a lot closer than that.

  As the audience streamed out of the house and into the lobby below him, Patrick stood up to make his way downstairs to grab a cookie and use the bathroom. He noted his costume hanging there in the dark space at the top of the staircase. He clunked his way down the stairs, out the door in the back of the house and into the lobby.

  A few minutes later he stood in the green room with a mass-produced grocery store cookie in his hand. He had not taken a single bite.

  "Nervous about your big moment?" asked one of the actors. A tall, gray-haired jovial sort. Patrick looked up at him.

  "Not really," Patrick said. "Not about giving the line anyway. More worried about pulling off the technical side of it, to be honest."

  "Worked fine when we rehearsed it," the actor said.

  Patrick nodded. "Yes, at least there's that."

  "Don't worry," said the actor, "I'll find a way to bow in the dark if I have to. My ego will insist on it."

  Patrick laughed, though he found nothing at all funny about it. The actor slapped him on the shoulder, and exited toward the dressing rooms.

  He threw the uneaten cookie away and then checked the table near The Funnel for the third time. Both his costume shoes and his cell phone lie next to each other, near the actor's coat rack. Right where they should be.

  "Ten minutes," Asher called to the actors and crew gathered in the green room. Everyone thanked him for ten, and he vanished back into The Funnel to do whatever it was Asher did at that moment.

  Patrick walked toward the Funnel on his way back to the lighting booth to change into his costume. As he did so, his arm reached out and grabbed the door frame, stopping his own forward motion. He glanced at his shoes and phone one more time. He was seized by an impulse to move them around on the table, though he wasn't sure why. Just as he moved to do so, he ran into one of the actors.

  "Sorry about that," the actor said. "Just wanted to grab my coat. It's always freezing back here. Next minute I'm burning up."

  "Theaters," Patrick said with a shrug. It meant nothing at all, but he was too nervous to care as he made his way back to the lighting booth.

  He changed into his costume in the small area at the top of the stairs. He wasn't a modest man, nevertheless the idea of changing right in front of the lighting booth window where half the audience could see did not appeal to him. He slipped into the pants tied up the tie, threw on the jacket (complete with stupid hanky arranged exactly as the costume designer insisted), and put on the non-slip slipper socks. He didn't like being without shoes up in the booth. It felt like a major safety breach. But the time for arguing that was long gone.

  "I'm going to burn up wearing all this stuff up here," Patrick said into the headphones.

  "Can't you hang the jacket over the back of your chair until it's time?" Asher asked a moment later. "That's probably the hottest part."

  He hadn't even thought of that. Nothing obvious was getting through to him since intermission. He hated this whole idea more and more with each passing minute.

  "Good point," he told Asher as he slipped off the jacket and draped it gently over his chair.

  Patrick again began to wipe away non-existent dust from the work area in front of the lighting board. With each swipe he felt more in his place.

  "Booth 60 seconds," Asher said through the headphones.