Epigraphs

There’s always a hush in a theatre in that millisecond before the curtains open. Just one fraction of a moment where no children are rustling their candy wrappers or sniffly housewives coughing as daintily into a handkerchief as they possibly can. For a moment, just before those curtains open, the theatre is silent as death.

I would know.

They were calling this show Antique Epigraphs. I knew a few things about epigraphs as well. I had seen more gravestones than I could count. But for now, I was revelling in the darkness of the theatre. Jolene had dragged me out; saying this was a premiere I couldn’t miss, saying that I needed to get out of that cold office and into the lights of New York City. I was reluctant. There was something about ballets that bothered me. Maybe it was seeing all those bodies in motion, contorting, moving. When you spent five days a week, twelve hours a day looking at corpses, you got a little uncomfortable with bodies that were still functioning. For once, though, I wasn’t miserable. The darkness of the theatre was comforting.

The theatre hushed, and the curtains opened. A figure leapt across the stage, in silhouette. I smiled slightly as the music soared. It was Debussy’s “Six Epigraphes Antiques”, not some carving on a gravestone. Not everything, I supposed, was about death.

But the magic did not last, and my revelation faded. As the figures on stage twirled and leaped, my mind sank back to my work. As every ballerina turned her neck, swanlike, I couldn’t help but to think how they would look twisted and broken; their pretty heads bent at an angle they could not achieve in life. I couldn’t help but to think of how those dancers, so poised in their white gauze and frills, were as mortal as everyone else. How they too put on their legwarmers at the end of the day and went home; how one day I would be seeing them on a metal cart, pale as the whites of their eyes and the chalk on their slippers.

I stood up to leave, but Jolene’s gloved hand reached up to stop me.

“Where are you going?” she hissed.

“Home. I don’t like ballet.” I replied gruffly. A few people nearby turned to shush us, and I broke her grip.

Outside, the cool February air bit at my cheeks. A siren screamed nearby, and people milled about in the twilight. I started the walk back to my apartment, eyes on the ground, hands deep in my pockets.

No, a ballet isn’t a place for a mortician. Perhaps there is no place for my kind at all. No matter where we look, no matter how many faces smile and feet leap and fists punch, we are constantly aware of our work. Everyone goes off to death in the end. Life just reminds us that some people walk in, and some people dance.