Regrets and Fury

Rose has come to look to her performances with great excitement. The opportunity to improve and practice before an audience, and the looks on audience members’ faces at the appearance and disappearance of their articles. The taste of the unimaginable that leaves them aching for more.

Even in her earliest performance times before dawn, with few patrons filling her tent, Rose expends her efforts to the point where she must rest as soon as the last patrons has filed out of her tent for the morning.

There is also a thrill in the weaving of magic from thin air. Exquisite transformations and illusions in fire and ice, wind and metal.

There is usually little that diverts her attention.

However, Rose is distracted through her performance tonight, scheduled just before midnight, by a woman seated in the front row. She has encountered apprehension before, fear and outright disbelief by non-believers, yet the lady currently sitting to her right does not exhibit the same fidgeting and agitation so often accompanying antagonistic patrons. She is watching the illusionist’s movements with a precision that makes her seem suspicious of Rose, as though the woman is not sure where or not the illusionist is real.

Her eyes scan the tent in the moments Rose holds an illusion still and presents it to the audience, searching and grim. She has a haunted appearance, a weariness indicating more than caution.

It is not the first time she has seen a weary gaze, but it is the first she perceives as haunted.

Rose is levitating a watch, one belonging to a patron who watches with rapt attention as it hovers and spins slowly in the air, cogs flying from its face in blurs of silver, coming apart and together, when the woman in the front row moves.

She stands, her eyes fixed on the illusionist, hands trembling by her side.

Rose falters, the watch face shattering apart, causing the audience to gasp when shards of glass stop inches from their faces, as though hindered by an invisible force field.

There is shift, a sudden surge in the air.

The air ripples. In the Origami Tent several Persian cats revert to folded paper without warning; the flames dancing atop long sticks held by fire breathers in another tent sputter and spark, plumes of dense white smoke making them cough; and acrobat posed on a tightrope loses her balance, tumbling toward the floor before being caught by a trapeze swinger, only inches from the floor. The pieces of pocket watch tumble to the floor, scattered between patrons/ feet. The illusionist stumbles. She turns pale and sways, slumping forward, toward the trellis of snow-white roses.

Several audience members move to catch her, lowering her gently to the platform in a flutter of silver and lace. Blood begins to form around her, dripping off the platform.

A woman screams, a patron runs for help. Rose’s heart beat slows. They are all too distracted to notice the roses, red as blood…

Text by Lucie MacAulay