Page 27 of The Opening Act is Death
Floorboards warped, rain on the windows. My mother was dying in the other room while I practiced card tricks to pretend I couldn’t hear her coughing up blood. I tried to look away, as the mirror to the left shattered.
The next illusion forms.
The war.
Not the fantasy version, the real one. Mud and rot and magic used as currency. My hands trembled as I pulled an illusion of peace over a field full of corpses just so I could pass unnoticed. Blood seeps through my cuffs again. I taste the metallic truth of it. Another mirror fractures, I’m breathing hard now. My chest feels too tight.
The third illusion rises.
Visha.
The moment I left, her hands were covered in blood. Mine too, as he reached for me, and Iran.
Not to protect her. Not because I had to. But because I couldn’t bear what I’d become standing next to her. This mirror doesn’t break.
Itburns.
“You think love absolves you?”the Ringmaster in the Shadows breathes.
“You think showing up now makes you worthy?”
I drop to my knees. The Carnival begins to twist as velvet folding in like lungs inhaling.
One final illusion.
The one I’venevershown. Not even to her. The stage shifts, a body lies before me.
Small. Still. The boy who followed me during a raid, begging to learn tricks. Begging to be like me. I taught him one, a simple vanish. He vanished too well.
I buried him in silence.
Told no one, just kept walking. That was the first illusion thatcostme. That was when I learned: it’s safer to disappear than to confess. The Carnival roars now with mirrors shattering all around me. The illusion won’t let go until I say it.
And I do, my voice breaks and shakes, but it comes.
“I ran because I didn’t want her to see this part of me. The part that lets people die for the trick. The part that doesn’t stop performing even when there’s nothing left to save.”
“I didn’t deserve her.”
“I still don’t.”
“But I came back anyway.”
The stage stills. The mirrors fall, and for a heartbeat, The Carnival is silent.
Then I hear her.
Visha.
Her footsteps behind me.
She saw.
Sheknows.
And now?
Now The Carnival does too.
