Blood & Flowers Read online

  I laughed and said, “Just trying to do my part.”

  Floss said, “Umph,” but I could tell her mind wasn’t really on her response. She was off in creativity land. Getting her out of there was even harder than getting her to talk about Faerie.

  IV

  “Total chaos and incredulity.”

  We all pretended that Lucia hadn’t said anything about venues, and we moved ahead with plans for The Bastard and the Beauty. We worked like devils. We worked like crazy. Sometimes, when Floss was particularly amazed at the amount of work being accomplished, she said we worked like brownies.

  “Brownies,” Nicholas would echo, “or beginning law students.” He only said this because he was stuck on a case involving a plastic surgeon and a previously wrinkled old man. When anyone asked how it was progressing, he just sighed and then said, “Please let me be the evil villain. I just want to pummel someone. Or something.”

  This always made Tonio laugh until Nicholas glared little shooting stars at him, so Tonio finally gave in. Nicholas was now spending every free minute rehearsing the part of the Bastard.

  I was completely on Nicholas’s side because I’d been picked to play the Beauty. Don’t get excited here, even though I was. I wasn’t picked because I was so stunning. I was picked because I was the least stage-inhibited female around.

  Lucia would work any puppet in the world or be in any kind of costume as long as she didn’t have to be very verbal.

  Floss preferred, and was needed, to adjust costumes and make trees walk and fish fly. People who came to our shows as Outlaw virgins were consistently amazed by Floss’s artistry, and rightly so, because although she used magic to bring things to the peak of their goodness, without the artistry all the magic in the world wouldn’t have made a difference.

  PUPPETS THAT MAY MAKE AN APPEARANCE AT AN OUTLAW SHOW

  Walking mountains

  Floating planets

  Suns the size of marbles

  Sparrows big enough to be ridden across a stage

  Frog heads as large as supersize helium balloons

  And, of course, fish that breathe

  Think of all this visual overload happening at once and you’ve got an idea, if you haven’t seen us yet, of the scope of an Outlaw production. It all made something that was wonderful, magical, and, more often than not, highly political and rude. Previous Outlaw shows include Rape and Ruin, Flirting with Foster, Quotes They Say They’ve Never Said, and now, The Bastard and the Beauty.

  Once Nicholas became Bastard, I became even more committed to my part than normal. We got an onstage kiss, too. I worked toward that, and then worked it for all I was worth, even though it was obvious that the kiss would end in certain death.

  So what was The Bastard and the Beauty about? Tonio started a lot of our plays with fairy tales, those stories couched in hidden messages about the proper way for people, especially young ladies, to behave. Moralistic little tales about people who don’t do what they’re “supposed to do” and how they pay for the fact that they ignore consequences. For this particular production, he gave magic free rein. Viewers would watch the Beauty try to make the Bastard do the right thing, watch him ignore her, watch people turn into animals, and watch everyone pay for the mistakes of others.

  Tonio’s imagination, perspective, and worldview constantly amaze me.

  And the giant chicken? Well, in a tale with this many turns and detours, who better to have for your narrator?

  Remember, though, Lucia was in that costume, and Lucia, gifted as anyone I’ve ever seen with comic timing and pratfalls, didn’t like to talk onstage. So Tonio played the voice and Lucia acted out the narration.

  Total chaos and incredulity.

  I love the Outlaws.

  COMPLETE EXPLICATION INTERLUDE

  The Bastard and the Beauty, a Cautionary Tale

  He’s a lawn boy at a golf course located in an exclusive country club, the one with the chicken mascot. His job is to spray noxious chemicals on everything. One day he meets a rich, lovely young lady (me!) who begs him to stop. “The fish are dying,” she says, pointing to a pretty incongruous koi pond near the sixteenth hole.

  “They’re fish,” he tells her. “Just fish. If these die, the owners get more. Besides, I’m only doing my job.”

  He’s rough and he’s tough, but it’s plain to see that he thinks she’s pretty hot. Still, no matter what she says, he won’t budge.

  “It’s my job. I do what they tell me.”

  As you’re picturing this in your mind, imagine those breathing puppet fish worked by Floss from a rigging, flying and dying all over the stage, and small puppet golfers stepping around and through the golden orange bodies.

  Beauty points out the carnage. Bastard turns away, just like the golfers. But she keeps working at it, at him. He’s more taken with her every time he sees her, and to reflect this, her costumes get more and more dramatic in color (shades of orange and gold) as the play progresses.

  Finally he gets up the nerve to ask her out for dinner at the golf course clubhouse. Of course she says yes because just as he’s attracted to her, she’s attracted to him, even though she hates his job.

  During dinner, dead koi float by the window like fish on parade. He pretends not to see. She almost cries. When she’s so upset that she spills her soup, he tries to dab at her thigh with a damp napkin. She screams, leaps up, and runs outside. He follows. She’s heading straight for the sixteenth green, for the pond. He yells, “Stop! Stop! I sprayed just today. Don’t go near the water!”

  She throws one anguished look over her shoulder and then stumbles as her legs disappear and become a split bow tail.

  She throws herself into the pond, her golden dress torn off to show scales, but as soon as she hits the water she rises, gasping, to the surface, then turns belly-up and dies. (I don’t have to do all of this—thank goodness for Floss’s puppet magic.)

  The last scene is the lawn boy destroying all his spraying equipment.

  “I like to think of that as being similar to the last scene of Hamlet,” Tonio always said during rehearsals. Then he’d grin while we kind of groaned because, really, a koi compared to the Prince of Denmark? Everyone knows Hamlet was pretty nutty, while I, as the human koi, was only pointing out the dangers of antienvironmentalism.

  While Floss perfected her puppets, I made books. This was something I did in my spare time. And why? Because I loved how they looked and felt in my hands. I loved the possibility of the blank pages, the anticipation, I guess. But here’s the most dax thing about it: I loved the usefulness. It was like a tool that I could customize to do almost anything.

  My hobby had morphed into something I did for the Outlaws, too. One of my contributions to any Outlaw production was true, bound programs. This was something I’d never seen in any other troupe—little hardbound books that passed through the audience before they got the paper programs that they took home. I always made at least three of these books and then designed the take-homes around my original. My books held cast lists, behind-the-scenes stuff, the plot line—things like that all wrapped up in a unique little package that looked and felt special. Most people seemed very impressed.

  I had the board that Knobbe III gave me on the night of rain and pizza. I had atmospheric singer-songwriter music strolling through Max’s apartment. I had two mismatched pieces of cloth, filched from Floss, a pot of glue that was nothing like the paste we use to hang posters, and I was planning the programs for B&B (that’s Bastard and the Beauty).

  When I was done I knew Tonio would look at my books and say, “I knew you had vision.”

  Max would say, “Beautiful, darling.”

  Lucia would say, “I like it. Really. But I wish you could do those accordion things,” which I was working on, but they were trickier than you’d think.

  Nicholas would toss one in the air to check for structural integrity and then approve when it didn’t fall to pieces.

  And Floss? Floss would say, “I h
ope you didn’t cut that cloth off of anything. I hope you’re using scraps.”

  So no matter where I got that cloth, I always nodded in a fierce and positive way because no one messed with Floss. No one.

  V

  “Sage and Damen.”

  Our flyers said “Place: You’ll know it when you find it.”

  Tonio and Max were on the prowl, looking for the Place. Nicholas had already scouted his campus and found a lovely little grove near the bridge over the Tamsan River. Nicholas tried to convince him, but Tonio wasn’t sure about staging on the campus of a private school. “But the bridge,” Nicholas told us, “is perfect for those scenes when Bastard strides forcefully into the distance.”

  There are many quotation marks here, both internal and external. “Strides forcefully into the distance” is a stage direction. Nicholas loved to speak in stage. When he did, it was very cute. When anyone else tried it, I shook my head and sighed. But even though Nicholas had used stage talk, proving he was deeply involved in the production, Tonio said no. In a way I thought this was too bad, because I knew that bridge. It had a Japanese air and seemed like it would be just right dangling over the koi pond.

  Floss had scouted Faerie. So far, we’d never done even one day of a production there, but Floss always looked. She’d come back with oblique comments. “I found a good spot, but there was too much blood on the grass.” Or, “I thought the stream under the Musical Bridge would work perfectly, but I’d forgotten about that hole in the middle.”

  When this happened everyone looked at Lucia, because sometimes she went along on Floss’s scouting expeditions. Lucia always just nodded. Floss said, “Internecine wars,” shook her head, and wandered off to look for something. Possibly green rhinestones.

  I stayed away from location scouting. I didn’t think I had what it took since most chosen sites, when I first saw them, scared me by their complete uselessness. Later, with everything in place, the lights on and the moon watching us, the damn spots were perfect.

  This baffled me, but it was okay. I’d rather make programs.

  On Wednesday, though, Tonio and Max came back to the apartment right around dusk and they both looked excited.

  “Great, great place,” Max said.

  Tonio slipped his hand into the crook of Max’s elbow and beamed. “Absolutely perfect,” he agreed.

  “Quiet. Out of the way. Spacious.”

  “Huge,” said Tonio, and he almost crowed.

  “Quiet. Out of the way,” Lucia echoed. She sounded doleful. “Nobody comes to out of the way. Quiet, maybe. But not out of the way.”

  “Yes, darling. We know what you think,” Tonio said, but he smiled when he said it. “Really, though, this is absolutely right.”

  Lucia looked doubtful, Nicholas looked interested, and Floss looked at us all through a handful of pink felt and red feathers. I raised my eyebrows and tried to look encouraging. When nothing happened I said, “Do you think you could maybe tell us where this perfect place is?”

  “Sage and Damen.” This was from Max.

  Nicholas frowned. “There’s something at Sage and Damen? I can’t picture a thing. I mean, I can’t picture a thing we can use. Really industrial.”

  “Perfect place for a romance,” Tonio said. “Look at Max and me. We met at a rave in an abandoned warehouse.”

  “You were probably the only ones who came out of the experience intact,” Nicholas muttered. He was wise enough to know that everyone accused of buying or selling wasn’t necessarily doing either of those things. He also knew that the sellers weren’t always fey. But that didn’t make him approve of the users who were so often attracted to rave events. He was no fan of drug culture.

  “You wound me,” Tonio said, high drama in his voice.

  “We weren’t drugging, we were clubbing,” Max said, his voice dry as old wine. “You know we don’t do that stuff.”

  Tonio took pity on us. “Location: old factory. Not too big. Lots of electrics.”

  Nicholas perked up, his love of lighting shining through.

  “Easy enough to get to, and get into, but close to a dead end…”

  “It’s legal,” Max added, and he grinned. “We can actually afford it for a short run.”

  “Wait,” I said in triumph. “I know. Sage and Damen. The old chocolate factory?”

  “Point,” Tonio said as he tapped me on the head. “Best of all, it smells like heaven.”

  “Chocolate.” I grinned. We’d come home every night with our clothes wrapped around us like papers twisted over truffles.

  “We now,” Tonio said in his announcer voice, “have incentive.”

  Floss sniffed. “We always have had, dear. I’m done. Or I would be if I had three long socks and some Popsicle sticks.”

  Nicholas put up surreptitious postings from a bogus ConnectNow account at school. Lucia and I put up more surreptitious flyers around town. Max and Tonio wrote a check for the chocolate factory owner, absentee landlord that he was, and before I was ready—way before I was ready—it was space rehearsal time.

  The first time I’d heard this term I’d said, “Dress rehearsal, you mean?”

  “No, sweetie,” Tonio had said. “That comes after. Most people rehearse in their space from day one.”

  “Which we obviously haven’t been doing,” Floss had said. She’d pointed to the east and added, “Could you get me a golden sword, please?”

  Early in my time at Outlaws questions like this would wallop me. Now I just get the golden sword. Or whatever else Floss wants. The difference is that now I know she means a prop, or a puppet.

  WHAT HAPPENS AT SPACE REHEARSAL

  We meet the space. While this sounds silly, it’s not.

  We get used to the space, and it gets used to us. This sounds a little cosmic. Maybe it is.

  There is much flurry of activity involving lights and electrical magic and, of course, real magic, too. Obviously, that’s Floss.

  We get things hung and strapped and sequenced and then start to work on the play.

  So, space rehearsal in the chocolate factory. Working there was akin to having someone put dark chocolate creams on your pillow every single night. The ceilings were high enough to hang things and low enough to be acoustic. There was a lovely space where we set up the long, old rows of seats that we’d rented from Fly-By-Nite Theater Supply. There was even a little atrium where Max could set up a box office.

  If we hadn’t had the heavenly smells and those prime little touches, though, working there would still have been a treat. It was like having a permanent place to set up shop. After a few days I noticed that we were actually leaving flotsam and jetsam in our wake instead of gathering it up and carrying it all home every night.

  One night Floss left a few pieces of Lucia’s chicken suit behind. Nicholas, who was doing something wonderful and strange with an electrical hookup, yelled, “Floss. Costume.”

  She looked at him over her shoulder. “What? It’s fine. You’ll lock up before you leave. That takes care of most of the criminal element on your end. None of my relatives really like breaking down doors. Too much work. That takes care of most of the criminal element on my end. We’re fine.”

  That last bit made me say, “Floss, what does your family do, exactly?”

  She shrugged. “Rule things,” she said, and I didn’t even think she was being vague.

  This exchange between Floss and Nicholas, though, was the first time that I realized that we were now involved in a very different kind of Outlaw production. I thought back to the night of rain and pizza and wondered if Lucia’s comments had made a difference, after all. I glanced at Tonio, trying not to be obvious. He looked happy, maybe happier than I’d ever seen him. Max walked past me just then and, as if doing some mind-read thing said, “It’s good to see him this way. Lucia had a point.” Then he went toward Nicholas and threw him an extension cord that was wrapped in so many spirals, it must have been the length of the Amazon.

  It was probably th
e most relaxed few days of space rehearsal we’d ever had. It’s amazing what that proper home feel can do for you. When we started dress rehearsals, we already felt two weeks ahead.

  Then it was opening night, in only two days. While we hadn’t changed our flyers, word was already leaking out. People kept coming by, people we’d never seen, which was gratifying. While we loved our core of Outlaw regulars, new people meant we were doing something right. These new-to-the-Outlaw-experience folks peered through the windows, their fingers and breath making smoke whorls in the dust on the glass. They pushed open doors, and when we asked what they wanted they looked at Lucia’s feathers and Floss’s clouds and grinned.

  “Just checking,” they said, and still smiling, they disappeared like snuffed candle flames.

  VI

  “The reporter from Nighttimes is here.”

  Opening night. Jitters, jitters. I jumped at the slightest sound. I ignored Max’s divine lasagna, a big pan of which was sitting backstage on a plank supported by three milk crates, a pile of wood, and six old books. I ignored pretty much everything except for the vague, sick flutter in my stomach and the desert in my throat. I drank gallons of water, drank so much I was afraid my costume for act 1 (very beauty queen) wouldn’t fit, and I was still parched.

  Nicholas passed me at one point, stopped, took the pint glass out of my hand with gentle fingers, and said, “Persia. You know it’s going to be fine.”

  I grabbed the glass back like a drowning woman grabbing for her life preserver, gulped more water, and nodded. “Right. I know this. I just thought it’d be good if my throat didn’t close up. Because of dryness. I thought I should be able to speak.”

  There was wonder in his eyes. “I don’t think I’ve seen you like this before. You usually project calm and level. Sort of mellow, even.”