Page 6 of The Opening Act is Death
Visha - The Girl Beneath the Floorboards
I buried her long ago. Why does he keep looking for her?
They all forget that I was once soft. Before the blades, before the rot, before The Carnival crowned me with its thorns, I was just a young girl. Small, fractured, human. I clawed her out of me with blood stained fingernails and locked her under the stage with the rest of the dead things. And still, somehow, he sees her.
Corvan.
The man with smoke on his tongue and guilt braided into his spine. The one who bleeds illusion and hope like they’re the same thing. He looks at me like I’m still breakable. Still real, and that is more dangerous than any weapon. Tonight I watched him again, hidden behind the velvet and smoke. His illusions trembled, imperfect, unraveling, buthedidn’t. He stood in the storm of his own failure like heknewI was watching. Like hewantedme to see him fall and keep watching anyway.
Why?
Why does he insist on peeling back layers I stitched shut with my own teeth? The Carnival has teeth too. It gnashes at him. The crowd grows restless. The mirrors crack around his name. Yet he dares, still he walks into fire and calls it redemption. Although worse because I let him.
I am supposed to be the warden. The executioner. Not a woman haunted by the way his hand brushed that petal to his chest like it meant something. I told myself I left it as a warning, but I know the truth now. It was a test, and he passed.
I return to my tent, alone…always alone. The basin is empty, the wine dried at the edges like blood. My ankle blades lie silent besides the torn satin. The ghosts do not sing tonight, it’s like they are afraidtoo. I am trembling myself, I touched my own reflection earlier and did not recognize the face, behind the knives in my eyes, something else blinked back.
Her.
The girl beneath the floorboards… the one who cried when the spotlight faded, who believed love could save anyone, who let her ballet teacher carve shame into her ribs and call it discipline. She bled, danced, begged and broke. She dreamed.
I killed her long ago, I know I did. I buried her with applause and rose petals. Yet he… he keeps searching for her in the way he looks at me. Not with pity, nor fear, but with knowing and recognition. And for a moment, just a small breath, I wonder what would happen if I let him find her
I pace the tent like a caged animal as The Carnival watches. The walls breathe as petals on the floor twitch like they remember being alive.
“You’re unraveling,” the Ringmaster says from the shadows. He doesn’t smile this time.
“Your illusions are slipping too,” I snap back.
He steps forward, face half lit, half ash.
“The difference is… hewantsto be seen.”
I bare my teeth. “Then he’s a fool.”
“No,” the Ringmaster says, voice colder than bone.
“He’s a mirror. And you don’t like your reflection.”
I go to lunge for him, blades flashing, but he is gone before I can get him. Only his words remain, curling like smoke;
You can’t kill what’s already inside you.
That night, I returned to the stage, alone. No crowd, no performance. Just me, the splintered boards and the girl I buried here. I stand front and center, the lights flickering above me, dust dances in silence and Idance.Not for vengeance, or for The Carnival, but for her. The one I killed, the one he sees. My blades cut the silence, my muscles scream and my visions blurry something I do not name. No, it’s not grief or regret. It’s something older, more primal.
Longing.
The floorboards creak beneath me and I swear, just for a second, I hear her move.
She’s not dead.
She’s buried, though, and maybe, just maybe, he’s the one digging.
* * *
When I return to my tent, I find a card on my pillow. Plain, no markings, inside only five words;
“I see you. Even now.”
