Everything else is props. Sunlight is only good for walks through parks and smiles or for sunrises filtering through bedroom windows and for sunsets on warm sand beaches with murmuring waves. Moonlight is necessary for love scenes and sweat and skinny dipping. Storms are the most dramatic of props, with the juxtaposition of silence and flashes of light and explosion of sound. Countries, seasons, the color of walls, the position of cups, the show on T.V., at a certain moment, all of it, are props: The grain of a piece of wood, the lines of a fingerprint, the material of clothing on a body, the color of the hair on the face of the story. The use of props makes the story more real, more true, by rearranging them, placing them at an appropriate time, an exact place, by staging meaningless things to add meaning. All in all, they’re just props that cannot be hung if there is no nail, no story, on the wall for us to see.
Everything else is props.
He sits and we see him.
We see a stage and it is empty, except for the chair he is sitting on and the chair right alongside him, so close that his arm is touching her arm.
We don’t know who she is, and at this point, don’t care but even that isn’t important. What’s important is that their skin barely touches, just as their lives barely touch, just at the edges, the limbs.
She gets up, walks behind the chairs and he follows her with his eyes. She stops, looks at the wall, then touches the nail “What’s this?”
Leaning over the back of the chair, he replies, “The Story.”
“What’s the story about?”
“I don’t know,” he frowns, turns and faces us. “I think it’s supposed to be about us.”
She goes behind the chairs and leans her elbows on him. “Are we lovers?”
He smiles, “No, not yet anyway, maybe.”
“Maybe?” she stands, raising an eyebrow.
“I’m not sure, I think we want to be, but the story isn’t about that.”
“Is this real?” she sits again next to him.
“Depends,” He replies, crossing his arms across his chest.
“On?”
“Do you mean if this is Real, the story or real, like, if this is really happening?”
She thinks about this, almost pouting.
“Both,” she says.
“Yes,” he says.
“Both…,” she ponders this and looks at him, looking at us and still we don’t know what they look like.
“What do you see?”, she asks, looking past the stage.
He leans back, stretching his legs. “Well… it changes.”
“I see what you mean,” she says, squinting through us, at us, leaning a bit forward.
“You do?”, he’s surprised, not because she does see, but because he is asking her instead of her asking him.
“Yeah…”, she turns to him, curling her legs beneath her. “At first, there was the narrator, but behind that, you can almost see the author, when the story was being written, but they’re not the same person.”
“Wo, wait a minute.”
“-ssh, you should know this,” she turns his face towards her with her hands, “but after the story was written, all you can see is the author, who now is rereading this-”
“Oh…” he says, sitting up, looking at us again, “you can even see the reader, when the reader is reading this and…”, he waits, staring a moment, then adds, “are we just words on paper?”
She shrugs, “does it matter?”
He looks at her again, “no, I don’t think so.”
They look at one another and we wonder why they know more about the story than we do. Are we reading this at some desk underneath the neon lamps of a classroom or are we in an audience, watching a play with the barest of props or is this what the story is about, the wondering.
“When I asked what do you see,” she looks downward, “this is going to sound stupid… I didn’t mean out there,” pointing past the stage, “I meant me.”
“What you look like?”
She nods her head.
“Well, there’s this yellow-green boil on your nose and it’s blood red at the edges-”
“Shit!”, she covers her nose and tries to turn away.
He stops her, facing her, getting off his chair and kneeling in front of her. “Relax, I’m kidding… ?trying to brush her hands away from her face.
“No you’re not”, resisting him.
“I am”, he pulls her hands away gently, then studies her. “There’s nothing wrong with your nose and it isn’t too long or piggish and you don’t have big nostrils.” He pauses, studying her a bit more, finding the words, “you have big brown eyes-”
“Do I look like a bug?”
“No!” he laughs.
“I won’t need eye make-up?”, she asks, “honestly.”
“No, but I think you’ll wear eyeliner just to piss me off.”
“I’ll be wearing it because I don’t want to look like a bug.”
“You don’t need any make up…”, he looks around “…I wish there was a mirror here…” then gives up, takes her face into his hands, “look, you have this really long silky hair and this smooth white skin…”
“I’m pale aren’t I? Casper the friendly ghost-”
“Will you listen?” He smiles, “and you have these beautiful,” he touches very softly, “lips, full and…
“Thank God”, she sighs, “I hate chicken lips-”
“If the Titanic had your lips, they wouldn’t have worried about life boats.”
She laughs and messes his hair “jerk…” she says affectionately then she asks, “am I tall or short?”
“Daddy Longlegs”, he replies.
“I’m an Amazon.”
“You’re beautiful”, he says and she frowns. “What?” he asked.
She looks away, “it’s not the first time I’ve heard that.”
“Does it make less real?”
“When you’ve heard it too often it means nothing.”
“Okay, I’ll say it only when a reader reads that line in the story.”
“That might be often.” she pointed out.
“But only I’ll be saying it, me”, he takes her hands, “will it still mean nothing?”
“If you’re not who you seem to be.”
“Then, well,” he pauses, looks downward, rising, still holding her hands “who am I?”
“I don’t know”, she stands also and they are facing one another and she squints, “you’re a bit of the author, you like to write.” She backs away, letting go of his hands, crosses her arms when she reaches stage left and squints some more, tilting her head. “Your father was an alcoholic and he used to beat you and your mother.”
He takes steps towards her, angrily, “is he still doing that?”
“No,” she shakes her head, “the bastard— he left when you were four.”
“Relax,” he holds her at a distance, “it’s behind me, happened years ago, right? How old am I?”
“You’re going to be twenty one.”
“See happened seventeen years ago, don’t be upset..-”
“It’s shaped you,” she says dropping her arms. “You drink, but you’re afraid you’ll drink too much and you hide it behind being obnoxious. You’re scared of your own temper and you want so desperately to be a good father-”
“Wo, I have a son?” his eyes light up.
“No”, she says and touches his chin, “but you want one, you cry about it, you think you’ll never be loved…”
“Will I?” he asks.
“Will I?” she asks and walks back to the chairs and sits. He joins her and they stare at us. He doesn’t have an answer to her question or he is thinking of something to say. It’s almost as if they’re waiting for an answer from us. Are we part of the story? Are we real?
“Yes and no”, he replies.
“What?”
“The narrator asked if the reader was part of Real, if the reader is real,” he turns to her, “but yes and no to you too.”
“What do you mean?”, she asks.
Then he says, putting it kindly, “you had or have been loved, but it’s not working out, it’s been through the ringer too many times,” he pauses, pushes her hair behind her ear, “I can’t make any promises.”
“Neither can I,” she takes his hand, “we tried this once before, remember?”
He shakes his head, “don’t remind me, I got too carried away…”
“And I…”, she looks down at their interlocking fingers, “I…ran away…”
“Are we ready this time?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe not”, he smiles, plays with her hair, “let’s just let the story happen…”
“But the story is ending here, isn’t it?”
“Yes it is, the narrator is going to end it but we can just go on with this”, he says.
“Will this be in writing?”, she asks, touching his neck.
“The end?”
“No the ‘us’?”
“Does it matter?”
She smiles and tilts her head, “Is this real?”
And the lights go out.
Do we want to read the story? What would it look like, sound like, where would the props be, how? Who would they be ? He, she or you? Then we realize, filing out, questioning into the open air, that we never wondered why a curtain never fell.

A: What are you doing?
B: Writing a story.
A: What’s it about?
B: Writing myself out of a story.
A: How do you do that?
B: That’s what I want to find out.
A: Are you in a story now?
B: I don’t know. Sometimes.
A: How can you be in the story when you are writing it?
B: What if I was writing about myself?
A: Okay, then you would writing about yourself and not the story.
B: Couldn’t the story then be about me writing about myself as a story?
A: What do you mean?
B: I mean that the story would have to be about me writing about myself writing my way out of a story.
A: Meaning that the story that you were trying to write yourself out of would be the writing of yourself as writing?
B: Or of me writing a story about myself writing a way out of the story, which is about myself writing about myself.
A: But at no point could you be writing the story then, unless you weren’t you. That would be a story.
B: Yes. That’s right. You’re absolutely right.
A: Then who are you?
B: A story trying to write itself.

on a bed of simple springs
she pulled him
,to just before her thighs,
with her hand
and smiled,
“should we bring him home?”
he pushed into her
and she breathed sharply
looking at him as if he was,
‘suddenly someone different’ ‘
when it was she who shaped herself
around him tightly
in the opposite direction
of where he once was, fracturing him
into the use of a language
he had longed to learn with some
-one, in that silence.
he went headlong
to fashion her hips, her breast, her face, her hair
and, ‘the soft wet that he was engulfed in’
into the remaking of her
,of himself in loving her,
dissolving each previous one,
into an ‘Only her’ so strikingly real
that with each breaking
he would be whole.
she clung to his shoulders,
leaning over as she rose and fell onto him
in and out of this place where he found himself
without words and so much to say.
he disappeared
into the motion and friction of her
reopening a newly made world
and sealed himself in it.
she laughed afterward, “..think of it:
in a couple of months
we’ll have done this hundreds of times.”