Icarus

    Smoke blooms from my lips, masking my balmy changing room in a blanket of grey. An amber glow soon pierces through the fog, painting my wan skin and auburn hair like a sunset – I do not recognize myself. I cannot recognize myself without her, without my Melissandra — she said she’d be here by now. We agreed that we’d allot thirty minutes of practice before our performance. Now, the show is planned to start in seventeen minutes, and I am the only one slumming it in this wretched speakeasy known as The Blind Pig. 

    The Blind Pig is a place where the rowdiest and sleaziest of men thrive—just the other day, there was a fight that only ended after a wannabe gangster's jaw was smashed into the curb right outside. Harlem is a festering blister of illicit activities; yet the cops are too busy drowning in booze and bribes to do anything about it. I shouldn’t complain too much; their filth pays the bills. Greasy clientele and corrupt cops are just the price of admission to my paycheck.

    Sporadic tapping jolts me from my daze, and a nasally voice reins me into reality. 

“Hellooo? Ms. Annette, are you in there?” 

He tentatively turns the doorknob without any regard for what my response could have been. The gilded mirror that lies in front of me reveals the peculiar man loitering at the entryway; he’s scrawny, and half of his face is a mess of charred crimson skin. Other than that, he’s a kind fellow, just inexplicably annoying.

“What? What do you need me to fetch for you this time, Tony? Jones doesn’t pay me enough to perform here every night and deal with your insistent nagging.” The venom in my words soured my mood, but Tony is agitating, and men like him need to be bullied–just to keep them in line. 

“Yes, yes, my deepest condolences, ma’am—” he drawls sarcastically.

“Quiet, Tony! How many times have I told you not to call me, ma’am? I’m only two years older than you, certainly not old enough to be referred to as ma’am.” A sneer tugs at my lips, but I quickly stifle it to a cool glare. Guilt sullies the moment as his face turns sullen, frown lines wrinkling his skin.

“Jeez–– Annette, I didn’t take you to be a lady insecure about her age.” After a brief lull, Tony continues. “Uh, anyway, Jones needs to know where Melissandra is; they have business-related stuff to attend to before the show.”

Of course, it was something ‘business-related’, that’s what it always is. I personally believe that is their poor attempt to conceal that they’ve been awfully close despite Jones being happily married. Thinking of them in compromising positions makes me woozy. Jones is grotesque — Melissandra could surely do better than a piggish old man. She probably only partakes in intimacy with such a deplorable meat-bag because he’s ritzy, but if that’s the case, I would happily take on ten jobs so she’d never have to look his way again.

“I haven’t got a clue where she could be. Maybe she took one too many shots of whiskey to prepare to deal with the imbeciles here, then, in her drunken state, had a moment of clarity and realized that lazing in her apartment is a far superior option to singing here for scraps of money.” Melissandra never fails to make me seethe.

“What crawled up your ass and died? You’re in such a piss-poor mood. Never mind, I don’t want to know.”

Tony sighs in an immensely dramatic way, hanging his head low as he exits. The door only gets halfway closed before he peeks his head back in.

“You wanna get paid, don’t ya’?’

“...Yes.” I mummer.

“Can you do the show without Melissandra? Because I’m damn sure that you can’t. So, go find Melissandra before you have a problem with the boss and your payment.”

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