The Bereaved

The Bereaved

(a one-act play)

GINNY and ROLAND, hosts

HANA and JACQUES, guests

TRINA and ANDERS, guests

DR BREMAN, guest

FRANCESCA and RADKA, guests

LUDWIG, neighbor

BIRGIT, belated

i. Hietzing, Vienna. Saturday in spring, 7:13pm. The front door of a handsome brick house opens.

GINNY: Welcome! One-two-three—is Anders with you?

HANA: Finding a parking spot.

GINNY: Not so easy on these narrows. Come, come in—wait! Don’t take your shoes off yet—I almost forgot our first order of business.

JACQUES: Business? We’re at a business party? I have chosen the wrong suit!

GINNY: No, no, no—you look perfect. ‘Business’ is just a manner of speech.

HANA: Good, ’cause you or I would die of boredom speaking about my job.

JACQUES: Your profession. How many times have we gone over this?—a job is something you have to do, a profession is—

TRINA: So sorry, Ginny, could I use your bathroom—nature’s been calling since Donaustadt.

GINNY: Of course, of course—just this way, that door there. The rest of you, shoo! We’re going out to the backyard.

JACQUES: Through the front? That is an interesting skirt.

HANA: Are you flirting with our host, mon’ami?

JACQUES: I mean to skirt the house—that is how is it in English, no?

GINNY: I’ll wait for Anders and Trina. There are some already assembled, and Roland should be there with shovels and instructions.

JACQUES: Shovels and instructions? I have chosen the wrong suit!

[exit, with HANA

GINNY (checking her phone, speed-dialing): Hallo, Birgit, this is Ginny… Yes, yes—you must have forgot! No matter, time is understanding… We’ll be here all night… Ha! No, not quite a vigil, unless you’d like to… In fact, candles are burning right now, up the steps, into the living room, through the kitchen, out the back door, where other guests are right now… Sure, we can use more candles—don’t bring anything more. Wine we have much of… and that, too. Yes, come as you are! Sure, like Kurt! (singing, spontaneously) ‘No I don’t have a gun’… No, don’t bring that, for sure!.. Okay, see you, Tschüss!

ANDERS (coming up the steps): Hallo—

GINNY: Oh, Anders! Here, kiss-kiss-kiss. Now join the others in the back—not through the house yet—you’ll see!

ANDERS: I’ll see?

GINNY: You’ll see. Sunlight’s getting longer, you know. Roland is back there already.

ANDERS: Okay. I’ll see.

[exits

GINNY (inside, knocking on the bathroom door): Trina, Anders came—I sent him back… Trine, everything okay?

TRINA (muffled): Um, okay… Do you, um, have—I forgot at home—

GINNY: Of course—check inside the mirror. Or the upstairs bathroom for sure. Shall I—

TRINA: No, no thanks. I’m good.

GINNY: I’m in the kitchen. (going there) Ah, Dr Breman—I see you’re sneaking in for some cake.

BREMAN: Well, actually… I could use a little cocktail.

GINNY: That’s in the works—eventually. Have you finished your dig?

BREMAN: Roland released me, if that’s what you mean.

GINNY (laughing): Hardly a hostage situation!

BREMAN: Oh, but it is captivating, seeing shovels in the hands of the unearthed.

GINNY: ‘Unearthed’—that’s a term I haven’t heard on a day like today.

BREMAN: Like today?

GINNY: Our annual Holy Saturday.

BREMAN: Is that what we’re celebrating? Had I known, I would have told you,.. it’s not my inclination, as a man of science—holding nothing against those who—

GINNY: Fret not a bit, Dr Breman—we’re a gathering of all stripes. Even Roland and I are skeptics when it comes down to it. We pick Holy Saturday every year for its extended weekend, its middling weather, its blend of equinox and heritage—the physics and the metaphysics, if you will.

BREMAN: The physics and the metaphysics as a party theme! You have me interested, though a cocktail in hand would make it more interesting.

GINNY: Dear Dr Breman, you’ll just have to hold your horses! A little procedure goes a long way! Just like an apple a day—

BREMAN: That jingle has changed through the years: I’ve traded apples for schnapps, which keeps guys like me away…

GINNY: But may bring in the hearse too early?

BREMAN: The hearse or the ambulance—that’s your physics and metaphysics in vehicular mode.

GINNY: Could be! Can you save that thought for our open-mic?

BREMAN: An open-mic, tonight? Seriously?

GINNY: Keeping it mum—I’ve probably let on too much already.

BREMAN: Tell you what: point me to the bar and I’ll gladly keep mum.

GINNY (pinching his cheek): Bending the rules! Well, seeing as we’re friends.., there’s the serving cart.

BREMAN: Bless you, truly, without meaning to blaspheme!

GINNY: Sshh—hurry, I hear the others, making moves—

ANDERS (outside, moaning): Owooooh, confound it! Just knew I was in the wrong place at the—

JACQUES (also outside): Oh, my dear Ders, what have I done?

ROLAND (leading ANDERS in by the arm, others following): Come, now—let’s get you to the sink—

ANDERS (holding his forehead): Maybe a little ice and a band-aid, should be alright…

JACQUES: Oh, my God, I’m such a klutz—raising a shovel like a golf club—

HANA: If it were only so graceful—more like an ape throwing—

ROLAND: Now, now, let’s keep things calm. Gin, you have some crushed some ice at the ready?

GINNY: Why yes, I was just going to get that for Dr Breman—

ROLAND: He’s also hurt?

GINNY: No, no—oh, Anders (peeling up his hand to inspect), I do believe this may need some stitches.

JACQUES: I am so sorry, my friend—I wish we could trade fates.

ANDERS: Relax, Jacques—it isn’t so bad, a ‘flesh wound’, as Monty Python would say…

JACQUES: But that knight was chopped to his core! The allusion is salt in the wound.

BREMAN (tumbler in hand): I should make myself useful. Come here, my man, into the light—if you trust my retired instincts, that is.

ANDERS: Of course, um,.. Doctor—

BREMAN: Breman, ob/gyn in my previous life.

GINNY: Best in the business, I’ve heard.

BREMAN: Now, now—just that I’m old enough to have treated babies of babies of—sometimes even a third generation of babies. Keeping folks healthy is a doctor’s delight, though some scrapes here and there have to pay the bills. And from the looks of it, Mr—

ANDERS: Not much of a mister; ‘Anders’ is fine… The looks of it?

BREMAN: You have a gash that will heal cleanly enough, provided you get to the clinic. Let’s see your eyes: look this way…, and this… Any strain in them, or pain beyond the point of impact?

ANDERS: No, not really. A touch dizzy, though.

BREMAN: May be a concussion.

JACQUES: A concussion! O, why couldn’t it have come on me?

ROLAND: Hard times come on all of us—let’s see each through his hour in need—

JACQUES: I will drive you, Anders, like a bullet train—

HANA: You? I’ve never seen you drive!

JACQUES: O, but I shall! I will own up to—

ROLAND: Nonsense, you shall stay put. I put the shovels in both of your hands—now I’ll take the helm to correct our course!

JACQUES: I insist!

ANDERS: It’s only a flesh wound, no big deal. I am not worth such a tug of war.

GINNY: But do get yourself checked, Anders. Dr Breman is right, and Roland will drive with quick calmness.

BREMAN: A nice phrase, that—the quick and the—

GINNY: In the meantime, I’ll fetch the others remaining outside; we’re due for stage two!

[exits

HANA: Was that stage one?

[confused, following GINNY

JACQUES: I need a drink. Doctor, if I may inquire of your glass.

BREMAN: I’m hardly the host, but (waving adieu to ROLAND and ANDERS) in the spirit of looking out for each other, (whispering) we’ll extend a ‘keep mum’.

[exit to the serving cart

~~~~~

ii. The lush backyard of GINNY and ROLAND; the former joins three others who have apparently finished their digs.

GINNY: No need to rush—we want to take full advantage of the light!

FRANCESCA: To be sure, no rushing will be had. Unless you’re describing what suddenly happened, blood-letting and all—

RADKA (laughing): I must admit… Is he okay, after all?

GINNY: Who, Anders?

HANA (entering, disconcerted): Of course, Anders! and of course he’s not okay, if your threshold for entertainment needs some sort of satisfaction—

LUDWIG: Listen, lady—we didn’t have a chance to meet, but—

HANA: ‘Listen, lady’? Are you addressing me? Do I know you?

LUDWIG: No—just the point I was trying to make. Sorry to say ‘lady’—that wasn’t meant to—

RADKA (handing HANA a joint): Here—a peace offering; didn’t mean to laugh. I’m Radka.

HANA: What? Why—I don’t… Ginny!

GINNY: Well, we’re not prudes around here, Radka, but, having just met… Maybe—

LUDWIG (lighting his own and passing the lighter): I guess I’m the not the only newcomer here, then.

GINNY: Kind of the nature of this annual. Roland invited some of you, I some others, and last year’s list is part of what we’ve mixed in the potpourri you’ve been burying.

HANA: The—what have we been—

GINNY: James Joyce might call it ‘the same anew’.

FRANCESCA: James Joyce? Are we prepping for some exam?

LUDWIG: That’s cool, man. I wondered about the mix…

GINNY: There are crocus petals and even some fresh bulbs to give the garden a boost—you can see bits of evidence from last year’s party over there. Yes! They were gorgeous by September. And corn husks all diced, and pomegranate seeds—no chance they’ll grow, of course, except in the imagination! And—

HANA: eye of newt and hemlock? This is rather spooky…

RADKA: Sounds fun. (assisting HANA with the lighter) I noticed some croutons, too, like breadcrumbs we used to throw to the swans back home…

FRANCESCA: When you grew tired of playing Hansel and Gretel?

RADKA: Yeah, we did that, too. We didn’t bury anything like tonight, but the last day of April we burned the witches of winter—

LUDWIG: Actual witches?

RADKA: Effigies, at best. Mostly a night to get drunk, really.

GINNY (musing): We’re bound to keep it a little less rowdy, as experience goes. Neighbors, you know!

LUDWIG: I do! I’m one of them, actually.

GINNY: You are? I’m sorry I hadn’t noticed.

LUDWIG: Kind of a night owl, me. I was going to meet my mates at the pub down the street when your husband—Roland?—asked if I’d help with the firewood. Easy ask; easy pickin’s for a party.

HANA: My! you sound like a spy.

LUDWIG: Worse—more like a mooch!

GINNY: Well, I trust Roland’s judgment; he’s made good use of you… In fact, we’ll need a roaring fire round about the time he’d be coming back with Anders—

RADKA: Oh, then we will burn some witches!

FRANCESCA: I thought I was dating a feminist—look at the flames already in her eyes!

LUDWIG: So you’re a couple, then… And I’ve been hitting on the both of you all this—

GINNY (with affectation): No talk of hitting! You must consider Jacques…

HANA: Anders, you mean. My jackass husband needs no consideration.

RADKA: Now, now. We’re here to love one another—I could tell that from the get-go. As far as feminism goes, Franny, don’t bail on those witches—I’m burning away what they weren’t! Sort of like cauterizing a wound in history: one has to do away with the looks of a thing to stop all the life-blood from spilling.

FRANCESCA: Oh, does one! Exhibit A, if you may?

RADKA: Well, neighbor, if you roll me another I’m sure I can come up with—

LUDWIG: Pleasure, though I don’t have a clue what—

GINNY: I think I’ll go check on hors d’oevres,… if Hana, you also might check on Jacques?

HANA: I’m more engaged with Exhibit A…

GINNY: So to speak! Perhaps you’ll debrief at the open- (swallowing the syllable) mic.

[exits

RADKA: Okay, so I got one: Milada Horáková, executed by Czechoslovakian communists for speaking against them—“without hatred”, as she said before hanging.

FRANCESCA: That’s your example... of what—cauterization? A necessary casualty so that the hangman can feel... guilty? As if?

RADKA: What was his name?

FRANCESCA: Whose?

RADKA: The hangman’s?

FRANCESCA: Umm, Dick?

RADKA: Precisely. You don’t know.

FRANCESCA: Yeah, but I also didn’t know... Milada Hor... —whatever her name was.

HANA: Horáková—I was listening!

RADKA (still to FRANCESCA): To you, then, she died as they’d have it. Barely a name. Ostensibly a cause.

FRANCESCA: And you knew her for the person she was. Like she went to your school.

RADKA: Maybe. She died thirty years before I was born. But I think of her as alive.

FRANCESCA: And her witch-self is dead.

RADKA: Precisely. Every imposed-self dies one way or another. A true self survives.

LUDWIG: I’m not so convinced. Her true self seems to have died, too.

HANA: Somebody like you might have been her hangman...

LUDWIG: That’s not fair—I’m no dick!

FRANCESCA: Okay. Exhibit B—and this time, someone from your school.

RADKA: What’s your hang-up about my school?

GINNY (entering, followed by JACQUES and BREMAN, all hands full): Hors d’oevres!

JACQUES: And booze—

BREMAN: Spirits, we like to say. I can make someone a cocktail if—

LUDWIG: Oh, I could go for one, Christkindl!

HANA: Kris Kringle? Is that anyway to address a doctor?

BREMAN: Ha, ha—or maybe ho, ho, ho! There’s amity here and perhaps, if we look in that potpourri,.. a little leftover mistletoe! Ha, ha…

JACQUES: Digging is done, I hope!

GINNY (placing the tray near the potpourri): Digging is never done, definitively, though we can afford a fair segue. (pulling out her phone) Speaking of! Excuse me…

[wanders to the side

FRANCESCA: Oh, thank God—I thought she was going to do a mass-selfie.

LUDWIG: Requiring us to mash?

HANA: You wish, you lout.

JACQUES: Ma femme amicale! The man just mashes in jest!

LUDWIG: Well,…

GINNY (not very hushed): What can you mean, you’re lost? You know these streets like the back of your hand!... Don’t tell me you’re giving up!... Good—that would, um, throw a spanner in things… A spanner? a twist unexpected… Yes, you could say a twist of a twist, in that case… Well, take things in stride…—another metaphor, I apologize! Of course you’re not going by foot. But you can go with the flow, if you will… That’s better?... Wunderbar! See you as soon as… that, too.

[gravitates back

FRANCESCA: Roland is lost?

JACQUES: Oh, say not so! I knew I should stick with my ‘insist’!

HANA: Your instinct?

JACQUES: Don’t mock my English, or I shall break out in tongues that will lash!

GINNY: It wasn’t Roland, anyhow.

RADKA: Another soul lost?

GINNY: Birgit, a friend from way back, who— (startled by a faint scream from inside the house) What’s that?

~~~~~

iii. The winter garden, a narthex of sorts for anyone entering through the backyard door.

GINNY (rushing through, turning to others behind her): We were going to harvest some items for iced tea—start with the rhubarb, if you don’t mind, Dr Breman, while I check on—

[exits

BREMAN: Of course. Rhubarb—why not?

JACQUES: This won’t involve shovels, I hope.

FRANCESCA: Matter of fact, here are some cute little trowels—I think we’ll be safe.

BREMAN: Shall I call in the others?

FRANCESCA: Looks like they still want to smoke. Besides, if we’re here for the rhubarb, there’s only enough tools and space…

JACQUES: It’s curious, this rhubarb—I’ve never seen such a thing growing inside. In Avignon, as a boy I remember going to Epicurium, a botanical garden not far from the centrum. It was summer, and I was obliged to attend a stupid camp for kids whose parents couldn’t take time off of work—

FRANCESCA: What about your famous four-day work week?

JACQUES: Bah! It would never pay the rent. Not for my parents, anyway. So the camp used an afternoon to set us free to bother the usual patrons of the place. It’s an interpretive centre, Epicurium, so we were encouraged to do that—interpret. Perhaps how I got my start in fashion magazines—

FRANCESCA: Oh, is that what you do? Like for ‘Maxim’, or—

JACQUES: I review—I interpret—fashion trends as a free-lance writer. Hana would say I should land with Maxim or some other ‘big’, but to what end? I want to be free.

BREMAN: You want to be epicurean, perhaps—the result of that summer camp?

JACQUES: Funny you should say. I almost died that day at Epicurium.

BREMAN: Died? Doing what?

JACQUES: They told us the house rules, so to speak—not to trample off the paths, not to molest the koi fish, not to chat too loudly, not to burp or fart, not to, not to, not to—

FRANCESCA: Sounds like a good time. So you decided to break all those rules…

JACQUES: I decided to tempt fate. There was one plot with rhubarb and nightshade—some would say ‘poison blueberries’—and various strands of ivy and jimsonweed. The point was to look and not touch—the point with most all displays, but particularly here: the poison plot.

BREMAN: Ah, the ‘poison plot’. That rogue rabid llama at the petting zoo…

JACQUES: Rabid llama? That’s more to imagine. We just had rhubarb to regard, and the guide took a stalk, just like this, and cut pieces by the centimeter into his cupped hand; he dropped the crown of the stalk to take up his hip flask and flush water on his cache, then offered us raw chunks of rhubarb, fresh as can be—

FRANCESCA: And sour?

JACQUES: No, no, no—‘tart’ is how I’d say. Sour is food gone bad; this morsel was—what had you said outside, ‘Exhibit A’?—of acquired taste. The French invented that, you know.

FRANCESCA: Acquired taste?

JACQUES: Oui.

BREMAN: So how did you almost die? Too young to acquire—

JACQUES: Oh, say not ‘too anything to’—I was in the prime of my joie de vivre. The guide pointed down to the large leaf he had cut and said something like, “never eat more than the stalk. Somehow it’s safe to this spot,” tapping the neck of the thing.

FRANCESCA: You ate the leaf, didn’t you.

JACQUES: I waited until we were free—most of my campmates were intent on molesting the koi, which wouldn’t be deadly, but I wanted to taste why a leaf could deceive. I tore a piece as small as a postage stamp and let it lay on my tongue. I chewed a bit of stalk, like this (cracking a piece with his teeth) and, (chomping, then swallowing) looking around, decided no one had seen. To call it delicious, well—

FRANCESCA: Don’t you dare try it now! Tempt fate on your own time, not at a party!

JACQUES: I never said it was delicious. It just didn’t deter. You’d think something poisonous would never be palatable…

BREMAN: Did you stop with that postage stamp?

JACQUES: I ate the whole leaf!

FRANCESCA: And obviously lived to tell the tale—

JACQUES: But for an ambulance ride, a pumping of stomach I don’t wish to tell—

HANA (entering, with RADKA behind): What? My husband, perchance, is saying something he doesn’t want to tell? I married an oxymoron!

RADKA: Now, now—he’s charming with his little toy shovel!

JACQUES: You have not heard my context! I am here to protect others from eating the leaves of rhubarb.

HANA: Wow. A first-responder. May we never take them for granted.

RADKA: Why rhubarb, anyway? Is this the next stage to the scavenger hunt?

FRANCESCA: Well, now that you mentioned it, I think I can figure out Ginny’s design: she told us to ‘harvest some items for iced tea’—fresh items, obviously. And rhubarb is where she told us to start. I see over here ginger stalks, pretty tall—the bulbs would go well in iced tea—

HANA: Okay, I get where you’re going. Dig up some ginger—anyone but my two-left-foot husband—

JACQUES: I assert, I am a green thumb!

HANA: —my two-left-green-thumb husband;.. and I see some mint leaves, and chamomile—petals rumored to have waded sometimes in iced tea—and—

RADKA: —here we have a lime tree! Do you think she meant it picked for this occasion?

HANA: Bring it in, honey.

FRANCESCA: Honey? Is that what—

BREMAN: I think our harvest is complete. I’ll go see how Ginny desires these to be sautéed.

JACQUES: Oh, but there’s your oxymoron! One cannot sauté ingredients for iced tea!

BREMAN: You’ll forgive my ignorance. All more reason for me to slink back to the cocktail cart…

[exits

FRANCESCA: Why is Ludwig still outside?

RADKA: Are you asking me, honey?

FRANCESCA: I’m not asking so snide.

HANA: He wanted to conceive the campfire, so to speak.

JACQUES: ‘So to speak’—my favorite way of speaking!

FRANCESCA: I’ll go help him, seeing as the iced tea has so many hands on deck…

[exits

HANA: What do you think she meant by that?

JACQUES: I think she meant… I do not know what she meant.

HANA: Typical. I married an interpreter of the unknown.

JACQUES: There’s merit in that! But I’ll go and gather what we have to make this destined iced tea, with your permission, mon amie.

[exits

HANA (calling after him): Permission granted, and don’t dice your fingers in the mix, please.

RADKA (digging up more ginger bulbs, and brushing them): Do you love him?

HANA (turning, nonplussed): Are you talking to me?

RADKA: ‘Me’ is all who’s left here—with you, it seems.

HANA: You’ve been flirting with me…

RADKA: What do you want me to say?

HANA: That you’re sorry for flirting with me.

RADKA: But I’m not.

HANA: But you should be.

RADKA: Because?

HANA: I’m married—

RADKA: to a guy you’d just as likely shove from the shore. And I’m just as married—

HANA: to Francesca? I don’t see it, really.

RADKA: We’re a little past honeymoon—

HANA: then: conversation over. I would never want to—

RADKA: be shoved from the shore?

HANA: We’re land-locked, Radka. I have no idea what your idiom implies.

RADKA: It means we have to clutch on to what we have.

HANA (gathering the remnant ginger bulbs): You’re bewitching me…

RADKA: Really? Because we shared a joint and some passing contemplation on witches—witches that weren’t, after all? Because we—

HANA: Fuck this ‘we’ (pulling RADKA by her buttoned shirt); you know I’d be outta here in an instant!

RADKA: I don’t know that—I have no idea what brought us here to begin with.

HANA (kissing her, and releasing at ease): That’s what brought us here, no matter what else Ginny has up her sleeve.

RADKA: I have no idea who this Ginny is, after all. I was tugged here, by Franny the Good-intentioned (kissing HANA back, leaning into the half-harvested rhubarb). You—

HANA: You don’t have to do anything more—I know just how such parties go.

RADKA: You do? ’Cause I don’t at all. I’m in the camp that—

HANA (kissing her again): There’s camp enough in this backyard—I won’t think further than that.

RADKA: I have to think, though, that our green man in the back yard has something to do with romance…

HANA: Pfft! You don’t know Ginny, and I don't know this crashing dork who missed his date with his mates…

RADKA: He seems like a nice guy; he’s probably making out with Franny right now.

HANA: You’re saying so to justify yourself.

RADKA: Maybe. A good party wishes everyone a good time.

BREMAN (entering, cocktail in hand): Invariably true. Leaving ample room for backstories and long treks home.

HANA (straightening up): Then it’s not ‘invariably’. What backstory do you have in mind?

BREMAN: Not my own, at least not today. But (quieter) Ginny is calling for you—upstairs, if you will.

HANA: Upstairs? Is she..?

BREMAN: I don’t know—I’m just a messenger.

HANA (looking at RADKA, as if for permission): Okay, save my spot…

RADKA: We’re not going anywhere.

HANA: But (turning to BREMAN), did she sound..?

[exits

BREMAN (to RADKA, looking through her own reflection at the backyard): She sounded, well,.. I have no right to interpret.

RADKA: You’re a doctor, yeah?

BREMAN (looking similarly at a self-reflected backyard): I have taken the Hippocratic Oath, yes; admittedly in a more sober mind… Why?

RADKA: No, nothing. It’s just that we come from all walks of life.

BREMAN: Your own, if I may ask?

RADKA: Of course you can—I asked yours, after all. I’m a page at the UNO, Outer Space Affairs.

BREMAN (turning to her): You’re kidding—

RADKA: I’m not. Why should I be?

BREMAN: Because ‘outer space affairs’ sounds…

RADKA: Star Wars? Douglas Adams?

BREMAN: Forgive my presumption. I’ve lived here my whole life and hardly ever let my imagination land on that island where you work. That said, I’ve witnessed behind those concave buildings some entertaining games of chess, with knee-sized pieces. Whiled away a fair amount of afternoons. (looking back to an opaque backyard) You don’t play chess, do you?

RADKA: In fact, I do. I’ve dueled my share at those knee-sized matches—usually as the token female.

BREMAN: Shame, that. No one should be token.

LUDWIG (entering, with FRANCESCA behind): Somebody here is toking? Shall I call police?

RADKA: ‘Token’, the doctor said, and ‘no one should be’ that.

FRANCESCA: Where went the party?

BREMAN: More or less inside.

RADKA: And how is it outside?

LUDWIG: Well, we’re ready to burn witches, or—what did you say before?—the ‘self’ she shouldn’t have to be.

HANA (entering, softly): Dr Breman, I think you’d better…

BREMAN (handing her his cocktail): Upstairs, still? Okay, I’ll see…

[exits

FRANCESCA (after some moments of non-harvesting): What’s been happening here?...

RADKA (fiddling errantly with a trowel): Why… are you looking at me?

~~~~~

iv. The kitchen, broad and well-lit with a butcher block as a central island. Bottles and bowls populate the counterspace. BREMAN comes in from the winter garden.

JACQUES (mixing something at the stove): Ah, you’re back with more ingredients I hope!

BREMAN: I’m empty-handed, and headed—

JACQUES: You’ll give, then, the spice of your advice. Do you think our garden-variety brew should have a splash of liquor? Or does that betray the organic intentions?

BREMAN: Liquor, as much as I drink, is not in my realm of expertise. My white beard may make me a false resource…

JACQUES: Your beard is becoming.

BREMAN: Becoming what?

JACQUES: Just… that. ‘Becoming’—isn’t that your term for ‘fitting’?—what makes you… you.

BREMAN (tapping his index finger to his cheek, to measure time): Reminds me of something… nostalgic.

JACQUES: Oooh—nostalgia! My favorite diversion. Do speak it out, good doctor—

BREMAN: Specific to the time, I was a doctor on leave…

JACQUES: Nostalgia is always about being removed—and the chance to reconnect.

BREMAN (leaning against the butcher block): When I was with Médicins Sans Frontières in the early 80s—Eritrea, the region would eventually be known as—there was an opportunity for students to apply for nursing schools in Europe. I handled the applicants in English, someone else in French, and so it went: one student came into the tent and announced ‘I am so-and-so, and your tie becomes you!’

JACQUES: Your tie becomes you?

BREMAN: That’s what was said. And the interview went as it did. The next student came in and said, ‘I am so-and-so, and your suit becomes you.’ Well, I wasn’t really wearing a suit—more a hospital smock with a loose-fitting tie—but…

JACQUES: It became you.

BREMAN: Then came another student—this one chomping at the bit—and she says ‘a smile becomes you.’

JACQUES: Were you smiling?

BREMAN: I can’t remember. But she said it twice, maybe in the je ne sais quoi of how to get through interviews.

JACQUES: Ahh—the book I want to write, how to get through… anything, really. And good on you for extending the world our je ne sais quoi.

BREMAN: Well, I was not an ambassador of French letters, let alone English idioms. I barely know the tweaks of German—here in the Eastern Reich, let alone in Tyrolia and further west and north; I don’t know anything about what ‘becomes’ me—tie or smile or otherwise.

JACQUES: What becomes you, Doctor, is your sangfroid, especially in the theatre of African Horn war—

BREMAN: You overstate: I faced no risk in their massacres—

JACQUES: Fair enough. I will still count you among the cool and blooded that aren’t cold-blooded, if you can decipher my, my… je ne sais quoi.

BREMAN: If I can?… To steal the applicants’ way of doing things, the sumo spirit of wrestling ideas becomes me, whether pushed out the ring or pushing, as I’ve experienced in fair measure.

GINNY (entering, on her cell phone): You can’t be serious?... Why, I never… Come to think of it, I might have. Wait, please— (looking with some urgency to BREMAN, and nesting the phone into her clavicle) Doctor Breman, are you…?

BREMAN (lifting his lean from the butcher block): on my way upstairs? Most assuredly. Is there anything from your perspective I should know?

GINNY (eyeing her phone, still pressed against herself): Your perspective is what matters. I don’t know what else I’d want to say… If you can excuse my—

BREMAN: Of course. (touching JACQUES’ elbow) And to our continuation of nostalgia—

JACQUES: A tête-à- tête that will never wear thin. I will be here, Eritrea on my mind—

BREMAN: Oh, at the very least…

[exits

GINNY (back to her phone): No,… thanks for waiting. But—fact of matter—we’re the ones waiting on you… So you agree with that, yes? Good. We’re about to (muffling her phone with both hands, now addressing JACQUES) —have you sensed the whitefish squares and asparagus in the stove?

JACQUES: How could I not have so sensed? I am less a gendarme to their captivity than an advocate for their release!

GINNY (nodding, then back to her phone): So, as long as you know we’re about to eat…

RADKA (entering): Great! I’ve been getting hungry.

HANA (trailing her): ‘Hungary’ is that country to our east—I, for the record, am feeling famished!

FRANCESCA (trailing her): ‘Famished’ is an overstatement—we feast to our own indulgences, after all.

JACQUES: ‘I eat the air, promise-crammed’—so says Hamlet, if I may say so—

FRANCESCA: You may!—seeing as you seem to know the sweet prince—

JACQUES: Hamlet? Yes, I’ve dabbled in his disposition: played his part at uni, that antic stage of life that is—

FRANCESCA: Uni? is more than a stage of life, I think.

RADKA: But, back to the point, this is a ‘feast of our own indulgences’, wouldn’t you say?

JACQUES: Me? or…

HANA: How about completing the iced tea? That would supply everybody’s needs.

GINNY (animated, still on her phone): Well, frankly, that just sucks!.. Yes, I said ‘sucks’—you can’t pose some sort of hauteur about that, now, can you? Especially over the phone…

FRANCESCA: I, for one, don’t ascribe to ‘everybody’s needs’—I’m happy, regardless.

RADKA: But you’re here to feast… regardless.

FRANCESCA: I’m here because Roland invited me—and us—to partake in whatever amenities a party assumes. Snack a bit beforehand, raid the fridge at midnight if need be—but let the evening’s fate nourish the imagination…

JACQUES: Yes! That hits the head of the nail!

HANA: For some coffin you have in mind?

JACQUES: Au contraire—I was rather responding to the feeding of imagination, whether garnished by white fish and asparagus or, if anybody else may suggest, other ways of getting fed.

RADKA: I’ll take that bait. I’m entertaining the notion that maybe Ludwig’s pub down the street is not so bad an option—

FRANCESCA (jamming her, whispering): C’mon—this is not the way to express—

HANA (pretending to be oblivious): Yeah, I too could do for a walk through the neighborhood…

GINNY (still on her phone): If that’s the way you’re going to be about it, well… then just stay tied up…. Yes, we’re going to be here regardless—how could we move away?... The place remains and, sort of, the time does, too…. You know, of course, the front door never locks; the backyard, more to the point, is where our fire and fellowship will be taking place…. Yes… You needn’t call me anymore. Though I appreciate the updates, always…. to a reasonable degree…. Tschüss, I love you… (buttoning her phone, inconspicuously, as a hope)

FRANCESCA: Was that Birgit?

GINNY: That? on the phone? (smiling into a near laugh) That was Roland.

JACQUES: Roland? And what of Anders?

GINNY: They’re still at the clinic—concussion protocols. It hasn’t been so long, anyway, has it? I’m sure it’s all a matter of (looking at her phone, apparently vibrating in her hand)…

FRANCESCA: Listen, we’ll—

GINNY: Sorry… (turning away to answer it, quietly) Yes? You’re sure?... Okay—that’s why we set an empty for Elijah… What?.. You know I can’t do that, love…

[exits to the winter garden, as others go deeper into the house 

~~~~~

v. The dining hall. Marble squares of black and white checker the floor, undermining the warmth of cherry moldings that pillar the bookshelves surrounding the room. Volumes within appear ageless, bound anonymously if conspicuously through hitherto committees of experts and aesthetes. The table itself is long and covered by a cloth the color of the afternoon, which faded hours ago. A dozen leather chairs emboss the same insignia bronzed above the fireplace: upright lions pawing equally a coat of arms. The liquor cart, like most things in the room, carves out its place among the shadows.

HANA: It’s a marvelous room, as few times I’ve been in it—

RADKA: A touch on the stuffy side, if you ask me.

FRANCESCA: Shhh—let’s just let our hostess have some unabated privacy, please.

RADKA: Am I doing anything otherwise? I’d just as likely join Ludwig out at the fire—

HANA: Or take a walk through the neighborhood—that sounded nice.

JACQUES: But whitefish and asparagus are nigh, and we have yet to sample the iced tea…

RADKA: The iced tea. (walking to the liquor cart) As opposed to these spirits here?

JACQUES: Nothing has to oppose. The enduring aim of fashion is to complement—

FRANCESCA: That’s interesting: to merge ‘enduring’ with a definition of ‘fashion’…

JACQUES: But why not? We are not will-o-the-wisps that glow upon a fleeting fantasy—

HANA: Oh, my God—can you resist being boring for a while?

RADKA: Well, give the man his due. You married into his mind, after all.

JACQUES: My body, too; (to HANA) which bores you more than white fish and asparagus, I’m sure.

HANA (turning to RADKA): That’s code for ‘check the oven, wife!’

RADKA: Nourishment will come with imagination, isn’t that right Francesca?

FRANCESCA: I’ve said my piece on that already. But while you’re at that cart, I’d love a…

RADKA: Manhatten? Rob Roy?

JACQUES: Ahh! Vermouth, if I could place that order—

RADKA: Which one?

JACQUES: Surprise me. Surprise us all!      

HANA: You’re drunk already—I can tell.

FRANCESCA: Let’s be easy on each other. Mix me a Rob Roy, por favor.

RADKA: Coming up.

HANA: Make that a double, if you will.

RADKA: Check that. And for Jacques and me, I’ll surprise us both.

JACQUES: You’re too kind, and I’ll be back like a leprechaun to surprise that surprise, as soon as everything is up to snuff in the kitchen.

[exits

FRANCESCA: He’s a sweetheart, if I may presume.

HANA: You may, of course. (looking over the bookshelves) Presumption is what drives us, usually.

FRANCESCA: —to conclusions?

HANA (lingering on one shelf in particular, then answering): I was thinking more on the motivation side. We go to a thing thinking it will more or less be… so and so.

FRANCESCA: Or sometimes just so-so… What drove you here tonight?

HANA: Anders, bless his head, drove us here.

FRANCESCA (accepting a Rob Roy from RADKA): Literally he did.

HANA: He did, (snapping her fingers) literally. And now we don’t have him to drive us home.

RADKA (giving HANA her own Rob Roy): That shouldn’t matter, logistically. Tomorrow’s Easter, after all—the bluest day of blue laws, when nothing’s meant to disturb the sabbath grip on things. Close down the stores to keep you at church, or, barring that, stay put in your tomblike home. Not yours, necessarily—I don’t mean to presume…

HANA: No, you’re right: home isn’t driving us home. (glancing about the room) So perhaps we slumber here tonight…

FRANCESCA: We can add you to our Uber—

HANA: That’s generous. (gulping her drink) But I got Trina upstairs to think about.

RADKA: Who’s Trina?

HANA: Anders’ wife. You weren’t aware?

RADKA: Of what?

HANA: She… well, I better wait on Dr Breman.

FRANCESCA: Wait (pawing her): Anders—at the hospital right now—has a wife upstairs… who’s now with this party guest doctor?

HANA: Yes, by coincidence, I guess. I don’t think hers is a hospital issue, exactly.

RADKA: But a doctor issue…

HANA (taking another swig): I prob’ly said too much.

JACQUES (entering, with iced tea): Said too much on what? That’s usually my specialty!

HANA: Too much on Trina being upstairs, while we remain below.

JACQUES: Trina? Is she… upstairs?

FRANCESCA: Looks like none of us are in the know…

RADKA: Hey (handing JACQUES a Manhattan), how’s the home fire burning?

JACQUES (confused): The hearth? I see nothing in this fireplace—

HANA: She’s talking about the oven. Or?

RADKA: Yes, I suppose that. (clinking his glass) Bottom’s up, meanwhile.

JACQUES: The oven’s turned to almost off and dinner is incubating like spring chickens—

FRANCESCA: I thought we were having fish…

JACQUES: Just a ‘so to speak’. I left the scene for Ginny to commandeer. She’s been on the phone for all this time, but shooed me here to say she’d do the rest.

RADKA: And Ludwig? Is he still outside?

JACQUES: Where else can he be?

LUDWIG (entering from archway to the living room): Is someone speaking of the devil?

FRANCESCA (dropping her drink and gasping): My God!

LUDWIG (casting his arms to warn of the glass shards that, in fact, do not result, as the tumbler hits the marble floor squarely on its thick bottom): Whew—close one, that. And… an instant upgrade from devil to God!

HANA: More likely a thief! How did you get in there?

LUDWIG: Through the front door—I didn’t want to disturb Roland’s wife on the phone.

HANA: Her name is Ginny… And who’s watching the fire?

LUDWIG: The ring of stones around it. There’s no wind tonight—and nothing so dry a floating spark could incinerate.

JACQUES: We can bring that fire inside, oui? The house has a hearth—

LUDWIG: More than one, from my brief tour... Come see for yourself.

[exit LUDWIG and JACQUES, through the archway

RADKA (swabbing the spill on the floor with a towel from the cart, and handing FRANCESCA the tumbler): Looks like a hairline crack, but I’m sure it would gladly hold another drink.

FRANCESCA: If I can hold it—and if (looking around) there aren’t any more spooks in store.

HANA (whispering): He is a spook, the way he noiselessly came in. He must have listened—

RADKA: to what? Banter about drinks and blue laws?

HANA: Maybe about Trina…

RADKA: So far, she’s the spook.

HANA (lightly slapping her): Take that back, even as a joke—

RADKA: Okay, okay—apologies. I’d like to know who she is by now, but… (pouring her more from the shaker) Here’s a little peace offering.

FRANCESCA: What about me?

RADKA: You have to slap me, first—

JACQUES (entering, with a page between his hands): Ladies, ladies—look at this. What Ludwig found on the piano.

LUDWIG (immediately behind): On the music stand, to be precise.

FRANCESCA: What is it?

JACQUES: A poem—I think—or cryptic recipe. (inspecting, inches close) I cannot tell.

HANA: I smell a prank, somehow, or worse.

LUDWIG: Just a poem—

HANA: By you?

LUDWIG: No!—I just… saw it there.

FRANCESCA: Hand it here. I teach this stuff to teenagers.

RADKA: Maybe this is a scavenger hunt.

FRANCESCA: Hmm. (reciting)                           

   we are fractions of our

selves, some twenty-five,

some forty, me a likely

   sixty-six-point six until

infinity, slivering our pies,

no telling what we bake

   inside—cherries, rum, a

hint of cyanide cooling on

a windowsill, straddling

   familiar sides, tempting

cats and luring ants as

fellow fractions of our

   self-inverted universe

That’s all. No period at the end.

GINNY (entering from the kitchen): So you’ve begun the open-mic! I had it planned for after dinner, before desert—

HANA: Is this your poem, Ginny?

GINNY: Roland’s, actually. He’s always nervous about these things; he’ll appreciate that, now it’s read, he’s off the hook!

JACQUES: But what does he mean by ‘cyanide’?

FRANCESCA: ‘a hint of cyanide’—that’s different.

HANA: You didn’t put any cherries in the iced tea, husband, did you?

JACQUES (throwing up his arms): I am naïve to everything this evening.

GINNY (laughing): It’s nothing to be frightened of. We’ll all have our try at reading out something.

HANA: Everyone? We haven’t prepared!

GINNY: Oh, that’s no matter. You can do a charade, or pull something from one of these books, tell an anecdote—

RADKA: Do an interpretive dance…

GINNY: Sure!

FRANCESCA: Don’t you think Roland would have wanted to read his own poem? I feel some breach of trust…

GINNY: No, no. He’d be gratified. With him, it’s all about ‘many hands make easy labor’.

LUDWIG (moving more to center): That’s why he collared me, most likely.

FRANCESCA: So now, (gesturing to the shelves) we all have homework to do…

JACQUES: Umm.., I’m still on KP.

[exits

GINNY: As long as I get a spice in edgewise—

[exits

HANA: And I wanna check on Trina.

[exits

RADKA: And—allowing for a pregnant pause—I’m going to check with her.

[exits

LUDWIG (taking a swig from the shaker): That leaves you and me, babe.

FRANCESCA (taking a volume her eyes had settled on): Ah! Thomas Stearns. He’ll do.

~~~~~

vi. Upstairs. The flames from squat candles sitting up the steps fail to bring light to the corridor, though a night-bulb in a wall socket glows above the carpeted floor. Another hint of light comes from within the bathroom, its open door mostly closed. Other doors are ajar to more darkness, except the one that HANA knocks upon.

HANA: Trina? Are you still in here? (taps this time, with fingertips) Can I come—

BREMAN (opening the door a crack, and shushing): Oh, it’s you. Well, Trina’s almost sleeping; she said it was what she most wanted to do… I can ask her if…

HANA (whispering as well): No. I… wait—are you going to stay there while she sleeps? What’s happening? I mean,… don’t get me wrong—you’re a doctor and all, I know, but—

BREMAN (gesturing an understanding): Indeed, it looks confusing—she’s in no danger, and I’ll be only too inclined to let her be, though she… Well, let me ask again—

HANA: —no, don’t disturb her if she wants to rest. She saw me just a while ago and knows I’m not going anywhere without her. I just want to know if she’s—

BREMAN: Okay, I’ll see what she might want to say, or—give it some minutes—I’m monitoring her blood pressure, periodically. Meanwhile, if you can relay to Ginny, I’ll be down soon enough.

[softly shuts the door

HANA: I’ll… see… (sighing, sliding her back down the wall, then springing up at the sight of RADKA) God!

RADKA (as hushed as BREMAN had been): Just me.

HANA (matching her volume, with added intensity): Just go, why don’t you?

RADKA: I would, but—

HANA: But you won’t.

RADKA: C’mon, we did this already.

HANA (sliding down the wall again, staring intently at TRINA’s door; waiting a measure in silence): You’re standing like a dope.

RADKA (seeking a space at the opposite wall and sliding against it): Now I’m a sitting dope.

HANA (keeping her eyes on the door; mouthing her words with little sound): Do you know what’s going on in there?

RADKA (as silent): I can guess.

HANA: We shouldn’t have kissed, you know.

RADKA: Okay. (scooting over to her side)

HANA (nonplussed, though still whispering): No! I said ‘shouldn’t have’—

RADKA: I gathered that, but can’t really hear. So, I’m… now here.

HANA: Just to hear.

RADKA: Just to listen. (looking at the door) What are you going to say for open-mic?

HANA (grimacing): For fuck’s sake, I don’t know… Maybe how I lived out my life in an hour.

RADKA: Like how?

HANA (itemizing on her fingers): Digging in the sandbox, experimenting with drugs, telescoping puppy love with a mid-life crisis,.. seeing a real one happen with a friend,.. spilling my life story to a total stranger—that sort of thing.

RADKA: Am I the puppy or the stranger?

HANA: You’re a strange puppy. Like what the Commies rocketed into space.

RADKA: Laika? From the frickin 1950s? That’s not a nice thing to say, especially to a Czech.

HANA: I’m not a nice person. (gulping, as her eyes start to water) And… even if I was,... what’s so wrong about being a Laika? I mean, she had no better life being a stray. (sniffling) Heard they scooped her up from some alley and put her through a battery of tests. And, passing them I guess, took on… the job. Had a hero’s send-off, or (sniffling, accepting RADKA’s crumpled kleenex) heroine, I should say. (blowing her nose) Stupid Curious George people made a children’s book on that, so Americans could have their shot at the same shit. Only he had the Hollywood right to survive…

RADKA: Wait—Laika didn’t survive?

HANA (blowing her nose again, and dabbing below her eyes): No. Didn’t anyone clue you into that part? I mean, space diplomat that you are and all, I would have assumed—

RADKA: I didn’t join the UN to relive the Cold War. I’ve grown rather numb to the history of politics.

HANA: The dog’s not political. More like a virgin sacrifice. I thought, with your interest in witches and all, you’d—

RADKA: You thought I’d follow the fate of each bitch. Feminist that I am…

HANA: The Soviets claimed she had died comfortably, from gradual asphyxiation and an odorless poison in her food, to serve as euthanasia. Closer to the truth, she overheated in confines that limited her to standing and lying down, pooping and peeing into a hind muzzle. Icon of the Revolution, she must have suffered unimaginably.

RADKA: I thought the point was to keep her alive, to test how a cosmonaut would return…

HANA: They had no way of getting her back. She was like—Major Tom, floating in his tin can. Here—(handing back the kleenex) I’m done being a crybaby. (reacting to the crack of the door) Poor choice of words…

BREMAN (stepping out, and closing the door): Oh—you startled me. Have you, um, been waiting out here for…?

HANA (still sitting): Is she alright?

BREMAN (unsure whether to kneel down; deciding to bow): She’s sleeping; blood pressure is better. I think that’s…all—

RADKA: Where is the fetus?

HANA (elbowing her and hissing): That’s none of your business!

BREMAN (considering a response): There’s a medical side and something more mystical. I can vouch for the medical to a sufficient degree: the patient is safe.

RADKA: Patient? but there’s two—

HANA (throwing up her hands): Shut the fuck up. I can’t believe! (turning to BREMAN) I’m sorry doctor, for—

BREMAN: The question is given in good faith. And remember (turning toward the stairs), others do need to vouch for that something more mystical…

[exits down the stairs

HANA (after gathering herself, still in the same position): Satisfied, are you?

RADKA (wiping her eye with the kleenex): No. I’m not a mystic. I’m like the death of this party.

HANA: You’re seriously hard to take. Or hard to take seriously… No—just hard to take.

RADKA: Shall I leave?

HANA: No. (curling into the floor, as if to nap) Truth be told, I would have asked the doctor the same. She really wanted it to happen this time…

~~~~~

vii. The dining hall. Twelve plates are stacked at the head of the table, clutches of forks and knives beside them. Two large pitchers of iced tea stand in the middle, like foci of an ellipse. LUDWIG enters with eight wine glasses upside down, their stems through the fingers of both hands, and unopened bottles snugged under each biceps.

LUDWIG (realizing up his problem): Little help here! Ho..

JACQUES (entering, with a covered braiser): Really, now—ask yourself how you got here.

LUDWIG: Through the kitchen, like you.

JACQUES: What I meant is… (searching for a trivet) Oh, curses—same dilemma.

LUDWIG: Yours you could put on the floor; mine I cannot.

JACQUES: On the floor! Like a bowl of dog food, sacré bleu?

LUDWIG: Why not? It’s covered. And God knows our campfire won’t be so clean.

JACQUES: Why should it be? We aren’t going to eat flaming logs. (noticing the tiled top of the cocktail cart, and placing the braiser upon it) There! it takes a moment of patience and then (sliding his fingers clumsily under LUDWIG’s) we can… dis…entangle the rest—

LUDWIG: No, no—take the bottles first! The glasses are too, too this way and that—

JACQUES: But I’m in too far already—it’s like a game of Jenga!

LUDWIG: Just pull out.

JACQUES: My good man, I’m stuck!

LUDWIG (a mock holler toward the kitchen): Little help here!.. again…

GINNY (entering with bowls of cranberry sauce and garlic bread): Oh dear! Where is Francesca?

LUDWIG: She went downstairs.

JACQUES: Make haste, si’l vous plaît, before they break!

GINNY (setting the bowls on the table, then sliding the bottles out from behind JACQUES): To the cellar? Why in the world?

LUDWIG: Inspiration, she said. (loosening his arms to wiggle his fingers free). Open-mic, apparently. I followed, but—

JACQUES: Careful—we’re not out of these woods yet! (gingerly withdrawing the glasses from LUDWIG, who turns them upright one by one) See! How you said before: many hands make—

GINNY (considering): The cellar for inspiration—that’s rather new. To each his own, I always say.

JACQUES: Or ‘her own’, as the case may be. But surely she needs to eat white fish and asparagus, not to mention the iced tea of her own gardening!

LUDWIG: I’ll call her, to make her aware.

[exits

JACQUES (unstacking the plates and setting them around the table): We’ll set for twelve? Are we so many here?

GINNY: Eleven in total, and one for Elijah.

JACQUES: Ah, Elijah. How shouldn’t I have known… —Who’s Elijah?

GINNY: The prospect of an angel, unawares. We always set one for him—or her—and add a crust of bread, at least, to ensure that the unexpected guest—or even the unseen spirit—can eat.

JACQUES: Does the bread disappear?

GINNY: We’ll see, won’t we!

BREMAN (entering) Why, we see what we want to see, generally. I see a beautiful banquet expanding in grace…

JACQUES: You are that grace-giver, Doctor; I’m afraid our banquet is rather disparate at the moment—you’ve seen Hana, I assume, and Trina—

BREMAN: They are well bestowed upstairs, along with Radka.

GINNY: It’s hardly a banquet, really—just an upgrade from finger food. An ad hoc feast. However, (going over to the bookshelf and quickly finding a volume) that reminds me of something—maybe something one of us can use for the open-mic.

JACQUES: Splendid! I am bereft of ideas!

GINNY (paging to the middle) Ah, yes—here it is. Perhaps you can read this passage, starting here… to about… here.

JACQUES: Dubliners, is it? I will attempt a Gaelic brogue. (a-hemming)

“When he gained the crest of the Magazine Hill he halted and looked along the river towards Dublin, the lights of which burned redly and hospitably in the cold night. He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast. One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame. He knew that the prostrate creatures down by the wall were watching him and wished him gone. No one wanted him; he was outcast from life’s feast.”

… Hadn’t I read that phrase before?

BREMAN: You had. It is a motif. Maybe in this case, a double-negative…

JACQUES: But why did you select it… and give it to me?

GINNY: Our paltry banquet; a few outcasts by unforeseen circumstances. And you are our thespian this evening—giving voice to the lonely hearts who would go into paroxysms if they ever knew they were on stage.

JACQUES: I am flattered, if a touch confused. Shall I read this on behalf of… someone?

GINNY: You don’t need to read this or anything at all. That said, you sport a good James Joyce.

BREMAN: I’d be willing to take that passage up if you don’t, Jacques. I remember it from adolescence, and the poison placebo it seemed to offer: “Love between a man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.” (clearing his throat) If you, uh, pardon the profanity.

GINNY: No pardon necessary! I paged to the story, didn’t I? It’s meant to be considered, challenged, embraced for the chance to—

JACQUES: I could not read that. I would blush like a tomato. Can I tell some jokes instead?

GINNY: Of course! Give us a dress rehearsal!

JACQUES: Oh, but that would spoil the fun. Plus, I haven’t thought of them as yet.

BREMAN: Extemporaneous stand-up. That would make me blush…

GINNY: To everyone his own. We are a motley menagerie.

LUDWIG (entering abruptly): Mötley Crüe, don’t you mean?

GINNY: Jesus! you startled me. And where is your muse? —she needs to be fed.

LUDWIG: She said she’s not hungry. Could use some wine, though.

JACQUES: Or a glass of iced tea?

GINNY: Tell you what—bring her a half plate of samples here to stoke her appetite.

BREMAN: And I’ll do the same for Hana and Radka.

GINNY: And Trina?

BREMAN: Perhaps. Can’t hurt, I suppose.

JACQUES: Wait—so we’ll eat not together? Quartering the house?

GINNY: Not so much—I count three peopled areas, not four.

BREMAN: Hmm—triage, perhaps.

JACQUES: I’ll eat outside, friending the fire, to make it a square—

GINNY: Now, now…

JACQUES: —practicing inflections of the outcast man...

BREMAN: It’s too dark to read.

JACQUES: I have it most already in my heart. And the glowing embers will illuminate the rest.

LUDWIG: I’ll join you out there if I’m booted from the basement…

GINNY: Well, we’re all due there eventually—the rooms of the house shan’t contain us.

BREMAN: But they’re cozy enough while we’re here.

They each move with purpose: BREMAN to start with the white fish; LUDWIG to open a bottle with a corkscrew on his pocket knife; JACQUES to dollop cranberry sauce on a plate; GINNY to pour glasses of iced tea. They rotate to grab another thing each—mostly to seem like they’re not abandoning ship. GINNY takes another plate off the stack and places it on the far corner, adding a slice of garlic bread. She wonders if that is enough.

JACQUES: For Elijah?

GINNY: Indeed.

JACQUES: I’d be honored if he could taste the iced tea.

[all exit

~~~~~

viii. The living room. From what archway light the dining hall chandelier casts, as well as the firefly flickers through the other archway from the stairway candles, the room is a quilt of shadows. Two loveseat sofas and four plush chairs ring the massive, coiled rug. BREMAN sits at the piano, perpendicular to its keys, almost finished with his portion of white fish and asparagus.

GINNY (entering, turning on a lamp): Oh, you’re here—I didn’t think anybody would be… eating in the dark, I mean.

BREMAN: One’s vision adjusts to the environment. It’s not so dark when you know how the food gets on the fork, the fork gets to the mouth—as I’ve practiced for twenty-two thousand days.

GINNY: Doctor Breman, you’re not so very old!

BREMAN: I’m actually older than that—by about three thousand more.

GINNY: I would have guessed less. But why tally so minutely?

BREMAN: Just convenient. Allows me to channel a Moody Blues song, from Long Distance Voyager.

GINNY (sinking to a corner of a loveseat): A song! Perhaps you can sing that for our open-mic. And with a little coaching, I can accompany you on the piano—

BREMAN: It’s not that type of song, really. Not anything I’d want to represent for this, uh, open-mic. Which, if I may dredge for your purpose, is a, how would you say? a chance for free expression, um, concerning?...

GINNY (egging him on): Concerning…

BREMAN: Oh, I don’t know—a chance to aerate ideas to semi-strangers and possible friends? to open self to selves? who, one would expect, likewise need to be opened… Is that it, remotely?

GINNY: Not remotely, —precisely! You are a good reader of things, Doctor.

BREMAN: Hmm. You flatter a bit.

GINNY: Why would you assume so? I put you first on the list of this year’s guests after having met you at the Albertina. I was rather lost in the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, and you stepped in to save that autumn afternoon! Remember? and Roland joined us at the Palm House, naïve to all we’d seen, and you had the presence of mind to extend the grandeur of the neighborhood and take in The Third Man at Burg Kino—

BREMAN: Yes, yes—the following week, as I recall. That was fun. All those years walking past that marquee, wondering what such celebrated reels of black-and-white held.

GINNY: That’s why I said you were a good reader of things—you gathered that Roland would be game, and handing that over to him to command, well, it made for a delightful second evening.

BREMAN: Understand—I’ve read countless sonograms and expectant faces, some I had to coach toward a certain short- or long-term plan. The hardest were those that didn’t have respect for plans, that treated fate like something mechanical—me being a sort of grease monkey, if you pardon my profanity—

GINNY: You’ve said that now too often, you Venerable Bede!

BREMAN: I don’t in the faintest know to whom you refer, but (looking across the room)—if I may ask, now that the light brings details to the room—I’d rather gather something else. What is that painting above the mantle?

GINNY: That old thing? Funny you should ask. It’s a generous donation from a friend, brought to us exactly—let me see—five years ago? Maybe six? after sitting in this very room, having more or less the same conversation.

BREMAN: I’m sorry I’m so derivative.

GINNY: No, no, forgive my clumsy way of putting things. We talked deeply, this very time of the evening, having had a similar type of dinner—though, admittedly, everyone ate in the dining hall. Our guests were more centripetal than centrifugal that night; wandering off seems more and more the way of wayward phone calls. Perhaps even then and there the concept of the open-mic sprung forth: we were talking all together at once, it seemed, and this guest—

BREMAN: named, if I may ask?

GINNY: —named, to be sure. And he said this place needed something with a twist, something tempest-tossed, ruffling the feathers, so to speak. He knew just the piece—the painting he took weeks to reproduce, doing such copies for a living. He loved Jackson Pollock—

BREMAN: Oh! I would have guessed it was him.

GINNY: —a protégé. This piece is called “Full Fathom Five”, as approximate as anything like that could be. Well, he didn’t have it on him, of course—he brought a bottle of wine to the party, maybe some chocolates, as most guests do. But the following week he knocked on our door, came in almost wordlessly, held his unsheathed painting in the span of his shoulders, extended, and eye-balled the place where it now resides.

BREMAN (contemplative): It fits.

GINNY: We had nothing on the mantle but photograph portraits of relatives; the space above them was blank, almost like we had no imagination that there’d be anything else to put up there, above the memories of people years ago, framed in contrived poses, as they usually are.

[enter RADKA, empty plate in hand, and HANA, also, from the candle-lit archway

RADKA: “Usually” often means the opposite, if (nudged by HANA)—sorry… We’re barging in on something, aren’t we?

HANA: You are, Radka. I’m just following like a pin-the-tail-upon…

GINNY (rising with affectation): There’s no donkey here, though parties tend to love that game! And no, you’re not barging in—how can you be? Doctor Breman and I were just going down memory lane and thinking of ways to substantiate—

BREMAN (also rising, clearing his throat): —the ‘open-mic’, if I can be so brave to broach.

GINNY: Of course! the evening is everyone’s; mine is not the mind to leave us in obscurity.

RADKA: “mine is not the mind”—you make me laugh, Ginny! And I mean that in, well, a good way, if I can be so—

GINNY: You can be so! That is more than half the point. Jacques was thinking of telling some jokes for the open-mic, stand-up style—

HANA: Oh. My. God. He’ll be a disaster, worse than cringe-worthy.

GINNY: Why would you assume that?

HANA: Why? Does it not count that I married the man and know him bone for bone—and believe me, his funny bone does not stick out! Well, let him spout out his sense of comic relief.

RADKA: That implies a necessary break from tragedy…

BREMAN: I’ve been looking at this painting—replication, I guess, to be precise—the black and silver cuts across the whole composition, splotches of turquoise, white and fuchsia, that nagging tread of orange circled toward the corner…

GINNY: Nagging?

HANA: It does provoke.

BREMAN: That’s the better word.

RADKA: or evoke?

GINNY: I’m kind of drawn to ‘nag’…

BREMAN: No, no, when you say it that way—in such a gracious home? on so sublime an evening? But I’m thinking beyond. The lingering thing that, I don’t know, a painting such as this provokes. It haunts me that, by chance, I’d seen its spirit earlier today.

RADKA: Oooh—another witch to burn!

HANA: Hush, let a story have its space. What was that chance, Dr Breman?

BREMAN: I walked a circuitous route to come here—

GINNY: —‘here’, our house? You’d be not the first to get lost in Hietzing.

BREMAN: I knew my way—more lost in thought, perhaps. I went through Schönbrunn, sat at Gloriette a while. Didn’t have a book, as I usually hold for comfort, but enjoyed the passing of the day. Reading people, weaving in and out of sun and shade, kind of timelessly. But appointments are for keeping, and I was glad to have a reason to rouse and head west, strolling past the emu area, if you know it.

GINNY: The emus? Why, of course—they are wonderful, like sentries guarding the woods around the Gloriette.

HANA: That’s rather sentimental. Aren’t they just billboards for the zoo? Loss leaders, the business world might say.

RADKA: Now you hush and let the emus have their space!

BREMAN: Actually just one emu—at least I’ve never seen its mate. During previous walks along that path, when I was not alone, I suppose the details mattered less. But today they mattered more: the way the emu tenderfoots about, circling a thousand times a year, perhaps, within the chain-link fence, croaking on occasion, gutterally. Wondering, like me, why it’s even here. Like the delivery gods confused Australia with Austria.

RADKA: That little ‘ail’ can make a world of difference. But what’s the part that’s haunting you?

BREMAN (raising his arm to the Pollock print): There’s the rough and tumble of the creature, tattered feathers and mangy neck, garish head with ears like bullet holes, eyes obsidian and orange, begging no apparent understanding—if vague acknowledgement that you exist on your side of the fence, at least as chance would have it.

HANA (looking for another to respond, then): This is not how I’ve seen the emus—you must try to catch the babies as they run like tubby chipmunks, trying to keep up with mum.

RADKA: Maybe they’re chopped up in the painting as well…

GINNY (unsure whether to laugh, looking at BREMAN’s still raised arm, which slowly falls): I cannot say what inspired the painter, or my friend. That it references The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last hurrah, plays something into it.

RADKA (softly lifting her voice): “We are such stuff

                  As dreams are made on, and our little life

                  Is rounded with a sleep.”

HANA: You’re quoting that?

RADKA (sniffing through a smile): I played Miranda in high school. Quit after that—while I was ahead.

BREMAN: And now you study the starscape.

RADKA: Sometimes. I stay pretty grounded with chess—Miranda’s role sort of taught me to.

GINNY: See, this is what the open-mic can do.

HANA: Huh? Has anybody said their piece?

GINNY: Exquisitely! You’ll never forget the emu now.

BREMAN: That was my contribution?

GINNY: You can always try another. And Radka, maybe you and Jacques can improvise that chess match between Miranda and… and.. Caliban?

RADKA: Close enough! With your permission, Haničko?

HANA (peeved, playfully): I don’t know what you’re talking about—but I’ll nag it for you anyway…

[HANA and RADKA exit via the dining hall arch

GINNY (warmly): I can’t tell you, Doctor, how much you’ve ennobled the evening.

BREMAN: That’s hard to fathom, given how ghastly I just was.

GINNY: Hana knows your heart already: you will catch the emu babies soon enough.

BREMAN (musing): Babies captivate, indeed. But tell me, really: what is this evening all about?

~~~~~

ix. The fire ring. JACQUES and LUDWIG sit on oversized logs the length of benches—five in total and an equal open space to make a hexagon. Smaller, split logs are piled behind LUDWIG, at arm’s reach. He picks out two to toss into the fire, and JACQUES uses an empty bratwurst pole to lever them into optimal position. They celebrate their cooperative task with a raise of bottles from between their feet, swigging straight.

JACQUES: Where did I leave off?

LUDWIG: Something about creatures wishing him gone.

JACQUES: I was just about done then! Why’d you stop me?

LUDWIG: The fire was hungry and we were thirsty. Plus, you said you wanted pregnant pauses, something I know nothing about. But, hey (raising his bottle again), credit to my trying.

JACQUES: You do provide a sympathetic ear.

LUDWIG: I provide pot and liquor—the latter poached from Roland’s well-stocked cellar.

JACQUES: It pains me that you bring him up—he is tending to the man I maimed, being the hero I can never be. (standing to address the stars) Anders! Roland! Hasten your return to oust the jackass by the name of Jacques. (reciting from memory) “No one wanted him. He was outcast from life’s feast.”

LUDWIG (considering): He was outcast or ‘an’ outcast?

JACQUES: Doesn’t matter. He feasted nonetheless, shamefully—or is it ‘shamelessly’?

LUDWIG: You’re asking me?

[enter RADKA and HANA

RADKA: Gentlemen! Are you practicing your jokes?

HANA: Shamelessly?

JACQUES: It’s funny you enjoy so much my shame.

HANA: What else can I do? You tend to ask for it.

JACQUES: You’ll see and you’ll be sorry!

HANA: Oh, for—

JACQUES: I shall walk to the nearest bridge and dive into the Danube, find some solace there—

HANA (hissing): Don’t you bring that up! Leave her out of this—

JACQUES: Why should I? More a sister to me than you ever were to her—

HANA (still between her teeth): Goddamn you! Shut it, or—

LUDWIG (standing, offering his bottle): Now, now—seems we’re between having drunk too much and yet too little. Here’s to cooler heads.

RADKA: What about a peace pipe?

LUDWIG: Got that, too.

JACQUES: I will shut it. No jokes from me tonight.

RADKA: C’mon, man, just be yourself. Little I’ve had the chance to witness, humor becomes you.

JACQUES (looking at her as if a ghost): That’s uncanny how you say…

HANA (to RADKA, in gentler voice): Leave him be, his… self or otherwise. (aiming eyes at JACQUES, who reciprocates) Despite my rude cover, he knows that I love him,.. more than I did my sister.

RADKA: Say what?

LUDWIG (offering her): Joint?

RADKA (looking to HANA, who goes over to JACQUES and drinks from his bottle): Um,.. sure.

LUDWIG (lighting them both, then laying back on his own log, staring up to the stars): I wonder if my mates miss me tonight. Ha! Let ’em.

RADKA: If they’re just down the road, you can fetch them here.

LUDWIG: Why? You fancy meeting ’em?

RADKA: I’d want to verify their existence—test the figments of imagination…

LUDWIG: You think I’m making them up?

RADKA: No. I like to play haplo with physiognomies. Just for the sake of science, of course.

LUDWIG: Are you kidding?

RADKA: Kinda. We’ve somewhat lost our newlyweds (pointing over to HANA and JACQUES, mashing on their log), so we’ve got to conjure some new fun.

[enter GINNY and BREMAN

GINNY: A perfect night for fires—landed and aloft!

RADKA (hooking into LUDWIG’s arm): Your neighbor is a bona fide Vulcan. I’d like to rent him, forge some girded bridges and things like that—if you don’t mind.

GINNY (looking uncertainly at LUDWIG): Um, you’d have to ask him what furthering the evening holds, as sometimes is the case—

LUDWIG: Ladies, ladies—there’s much of me and my mates to further any evening. As for the time being, (pointing to a table beset with rice-paper globes) I’d love to set these lanterns free. You had that in mind, Ginny, I think, around about this time of night.

GINNY: It was Roland’s piece to organize, but indeed we’d be honored if you’d put them to the skies.

LUDWIG: I don’t know the skies, as such. Radka, wanna help?

RADKA: ’Cause I know the skies?

LUDWIG: ’Cause I want you to help.

BREMAN: I think I see it now: the burial of preconceptions, the lifting of posthumous things—

GINNY (whispering to him): Sssh, you’re giving away too much the game.

BREMAN (honoring the whisper, in kind): Granted, I don’t view it as a game.

RADKA: We’re not all present, though. Why launch these lanterns half-attended?

HANA (rousing from the log): We’re here enough. Some of us more than others.

[enter FRANCESCA

FRANCESCA: Am I late?

RADKA: Lo and behold: Saint Francis from her cave!

FRANCESCA: I thought we were going to do this in the living room?

LUDWIG: The lantern lighting?

FRANCESCA: The open-mic.

GINNY: It felt too stale there. The evening’s perfectly set here: the center of our lawn, in the center of the neighborhood, the center of the continent—

RADKA: In a galaxy off-center, as should be. Who wants to be so centered, anyway?

FRANCESCA: Ginny has provided us a gracious proximity tonight. Why skewer that?

RADKA (approaching FRANCESCA, offering the joint she knows she wouldn’t take, then kissing her lovingly, if short): There. The proximity that means the most.

FRANCESCA (blushing): Don’t do that to me. I just wrote… something that stings.

RADKA: For the open-mic?

FRANCESCA: You could say the occasion compelled the moment, or vice versa.

GINNY (to LUDWIG): Are the lanterns ready, from the firestarter’s point of view?

LUDWIG: I’d say so. But the spheres need music, I think—

RADKA: Oh, I’m on that— (grabbing GINNY’s phone brazenly, tapping on the screen her intention, with a quick eye of kindness to the acquiescing owner): Give it a sec—Andy Shauf, I think you’ll agree…

FRANCESCA: Oh, I should’ve guessed! You play this constantly…

RADKA: Damn straight! (lyrics unfold from the palm of RADKA, now dancing, enticing others to get up and dance, which HANA and JACQUES do as the song goes on, RADKA singing):

                  “Camera kisser fakes another smile

                  Bends my ear so I stay awhile

                  Oh, I know this town can feel so small”

FRANCESCA: Are you going to sing the whole thing?

RADKA (nodding, pulling her to dance):

                  “I need to stretch my legs

                  Find some big mistakes

                  Find some big mistakes”

JACQUES: Sounds like me. But suddenly I’m happy.

RADKA: And this part’s for Ludwig. Listen:

                  “Dream-maker takes another sip

                  Starts a fire with her fingertips

                  Head to toe I’m falling into light

                  Oh, it seems like truth

                  I could fall for you

FRANCESCA: Figures.

RADKA (pulling FRANCESCA closer):

                  I could fall for you

                  Oh, you’ve got the eyes of them all

                  You’re just dancing on your own

                  Oh, you’ve got the eyes of them all

                  You’re just dancing on your own…

GINNY: It’s lovely—exactly what I’d want to loft with lanterns tonight, if, Ludwig, you’d be so kind…

LUDWIG: To launch each one, or have each of you—

GINNY: It doesn’t matter, as long as they are launched.

JACQUES (jumping over): I’d like to launch one by myself—if at the risk of setting everyone ablaze…

HANA (joining him): Make it for us—more than you and me, that is.

RADKA (watching JACQUES launch a sterno-fueled lantern, and turning to FRANCESCA): Shall we make the same blessing?

FRANCESCA: To launch a ‘more than you and me’? (tossing a lantern up rather roughly) Let it go wherever it will.

RADKA (watching it struggle, then slowly rise): I’m sorry I’ve been such a…

LUDWIG: witch? (smiling coyly) I can’t resist, eavesdropping and all… (lifting another lantern on behalf of nobody in particular)

BREMAN: Is there something left? Not that I need…

GINNY: For God’s sake—and the emu’s—we must have more, (appealing to LUDWIG to ensure that promise) plenty more: there—you see how easy, Dr Breman, lifting a little lantern can be…

BREMAN (fumbling at the feel of the rice paper and wicker rings that shape the lantern, now warped into the crush of his hands): I’m sorry… I’ve smashed this specimen—

LUDWIG: No worries, Doctor, there is another—

GINNY: There’s always another…

BREMAN: I don’t need a go-between; I’ll launch the blame thing myself.

LUDWIG: Fair enough. Seems like there are lanterns left for other strays of the neighborhood.

GINNY: We can open up the gate—why not?—but first we should have last licks at the open-mic, as unplugged as it was always meant to be…

FRANCESCA: What do you mean ‘last licks’? What have I missed? Shouldn’t I, also, hear everybody else’s?

GINNY: Well, (looking around) you’d have to poll the polity, get them to return their eyes to the earth…

LUDWIG: That’ll be easy enough—I wanna hear your cellar-born creation. (raising his voice to everyone at the fire ring) Friends, Romans, countrymen, give it up for Francesca, having done the night’s homework for everybody…

FRANCESCA (blushing again, and with RADKA’s push, centering herself in the glow of the fire): I am hardly representative of ‘everybody’; I chicken out, in fact, when it comes to… almost anything.

GINNY: Nonsense: look at the… everybody—here, eager to listen.

FRANCESCA: Underscores my point. But (taking a swig from LUDWIG’s bottle) I guess a little solitude is what everybody needs, even in the midst of… a good time. (looking at the page she’s unfolded and frowning) I think this doesn’t fit anymore.

RADKA: Come on, it will fit.

FRANCESCA: You think? I said it was something that stings.

RADKA: No one here’s allergic to bees.

JACQUES: Well, possibly I am… but, please, give us your recitation.

FRANCESCA (sighing): I grabbed a volume by T.S. Eliot from the library. There is a “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” you probably had to read in high school. It, among other such poetry, has kept me in high school all my life. I guess the working title is “Prufrocked”, and, again, I was a bit bitter down there…

                  Off I go, aware, if not so

                  wittingly, having once

                  again prepared a face to

                  meet the faces that, well,

                  one of us has got to meet,

                  I try too hard to recreate

                  the waking of a dream:

                  a bridge of sighs between

                  the me that walks with

                  you, and us as incomplete.

                  Tonight, the fishing’s for

                  a token form of pay-off

                  no angler would wait out;

                  I’d say ‘explore’, yet no

                  one’s trawling anywhere.

                  The mood’s long spent,

                  and spirits don a coat and

                  tie like any bloke who

                  needs to die with dignity,

                  staring so as not to stare.

                  It’s just a fucking party,

                  punning all intended;

                  let us go then, you and I,

                  talking of mermaids singing

                  each to each; then return,

                 

                  licking wounds like dogs

                  who’d just as soon greet

                  failures as a reason for

                  more sleep. Nothing more

                  they need, or need to earn.

                                   

                  We crave too much, you

                  and I, discretely, and when

                  we don’t, we seem to

                  anyway; I wake tonight

                  in trembles I could never

                  really shake: you are in

                  them, somewhere, and so

                  from them I will—tonight,

                  and foreseen nights forever

                  ’til I die—tacitly persever.

There. (throwing it into the fire) Let it light some dead memory.

RADKA (diving to retrieve it): C’mon, Fran, you know it’s not dead—

HANA (stretching to spot RADKA): —don’t burn with it! For God’s sake, Radka. The poem is beyond the mere paper!

RADKA (blowing out what little flames had caught the page, then pressing it against her sweater): So you would have remembered the lines? word for word?

HANA: Not word for word, but the spirit of it—

 JACQUES: I’ll remember the bridge of sighs.

BREMAN: And I feel I’m the bloke that needs to die with dignity…

GINNY: Oh, dear Doctor, no one needs to die—

LUDWIG: I heard mermaids in there—proof pudding that—

FRANCESCA: —mermaids don’t exist. But maybe ghosts do. (pointing toward the winter garden) There’s one coming our way.

HANA (going toward her): No, just a belated guest.

RADKA (following): Hello, finally. I’m Radka. Hope you’re feeling, well,...

TRINA (stopping just outside the fire ring): Thank you, it’s… okay. I’m Trina, nice to meet you. Hana’s friend, right?

HANA: We’ve all been making friends—nature of the evening, right?

GINNY: Yes, you’ve figured it out! Some years it’s not so clear.

LUDWIG: Crashers obviously help.

JACQUES: I’m ecstatic, Trina, that you are here, even as I’ll never live it down that Anders is not.

TRINA: Anders will come, in due time. I managed to catch him on the phone.

JACQUES: That is balm to my heart. Phones keep us in touch, no?

TRINA: Well, I’d rather we wouldn’t require them so much. 

FRANCESCA: Speaking of, I thought you might be Birgit. (turning to GINNY) Is she coming, after all?

GINNY: Birgit? Actually?

FRANCESCA: Yeah, I mean… not my business, really, but it seems odd she’d be stuck in traffic all this time.

GINNY (addressing the fire, reflectively): Birgit’s been dead for twenty years. This is her way of showing up.  

  

~~~~~

END

~~~~~

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2018)