Songs of Love & Death

“I told you you guys should work together,” she said lamely.

“Charlotte—” Dorian exclaimed again, a word that was a question, demanding explanation.

“Are you having an affair?” she asked him, because it was the only other thing she could think of.

“What? No! For God’s sake, what gave you that idea?”

He was indignant enough that she believed him, but she also wasn’t sure she’d be able to tell if he was lying. She watched actors on stage all day, and actors on stage did nothing but lie while convincing her they were telling the truth.

“It was all those late nights,” she said, and tried to explain all at once, to both of them. “All those broken dates and the evasions and I thought, I thought something must be going on. Then I met him”—and she still didn’t know his name—“and I thought, I don’t know what I thought. You both have brown eyes.”

He looked at the masked man, looked at Charlotte, and sounded a little forlorn when he said, “I told you, I was working late.”

“And how many men have said that to how many women? It’s like something out of a bad play.” She stopped. Here they were, three on the stage at the close of the curtain, a gothic postmodern shambles. The police lights flashed and didn’t seem real. She knew exactly what gels would make those colors on stage.

She walked away, upset at how disappointed she was and how foolish she felt. This all seemed so plain, so messy. Couldn’t we make it… prettier, she had said to Otto.

She got to the end of the block when the masked man appeared in front of her. That was what it looked like, he just appeared, after a blur of motion.

“The thing is,” he said, “I can’t take you out to dinner. I can’t be there for the openings of your plays. I can’t answer the phone every time you call. I can’t do any of that. But I can still… I can still try.”

She could have a hero, or have someone who was always there to take her to dinner, but not both.

He took off his mask, and she didn’t know him. He seemed young, but the faint stubble and even fainter crow’s-feet—laugh lines—gave him rough edges. He was handsome. He was sad. She knew nothing about him.

One thing he could do, though, was stand over her broken body, striking a pose and looking tragically bereft before he flew off into the night. And it would be pretty, dramatically speaking.

She leaned in, hand on his chest. He stood still, body tense. She felt his heart racing—much faster than a normal person’s. Faster than Dorian’s. He still smelled like rain. She brushed her lips against his, which trembled in response. Barely a kiss. More like an apology.

Then she walked home, and nobody tried to mug her. She was almost disappointed.

CHARLOTTE AND DORIAN split up. Dorian prosecuted the jewel thieves and talked to the press about putting in for DA in a couple of years. He started dating a painter whose gallery shows were making news.

Charlotte finished the next play. Otto liked it. Marta liked it. It needed some work. She would have been worried if it hadn’t.

This one was straight realism, which was a departure for her, and which meant not stringing the wires with lights when they flew the heroes in and out. She still had to have heroes, but this time she imagined what they said to each other when they sat on rooftops looking for jewel thieves. She imagined they talked about the weather and the girls they liked and how to avoid getting ID’d by the cops. The only non-superhero character in the play was the cop who was trying to figure out who they were. She never did.

A week into rehearsals, she sat on a chair at the edge of the stage, watching Otto block actors, listening to lines, following along in her copy of the script, making notes when she thought something else would sound better. She’d think something else would sound better long after the play had had its run and closed.

Otto had been on the same page for half an hour and was on his fourth try, arranging actors, repeating lines. In a minute he’d do something off the wall and unexpected and that would be the version that worked. All she had to do was wait, and wonder how it would all turn out.

Leaning back in her chair, she looked up into the rails, ropes, chains, and lights of the fly system, distant ladders and rafters lost in shadow, and saw a masked face looking back at her, smiling.

M. L. N. Hanover

New writer M. L. N. Hanover is the author of Unclean Spirits and Darker Angels, the first and second in the Black Sun’s Daughter sequence. An International Horror Guild Award winner, Hanover lives in the American Southwest.