Flash Fiction. Before The Show, by Marcelo Medone. Image: a woman lies on a theatre stage beneath the cosmos.

Before the show

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You will walk slowly into the rehearsal room of the theatre, you will turn on the lights hanging from the ceiling, you will contemplate yourself full-length in the large wall mirror, you will see a beautiful woman in her thirties, with features as firm as her character, luminous eyes, with her hair in a ponytail, you will turn and contemplate your body that still keeps in shape sheathed in a Lycra leotard, you will take off your slippers and stay barefoot, you will lie on your back on the polished wooden floor, you will watch the slow turning of the fan that barely gives a little air, you will relax each one of your muscles, starting with those of your back, continuing with those of your legs and arms and ending with those of your neck and face, you will feel that your shoulders are released from all the tensions that you have been carrying in the day to day, you will breathe in slowly and exhale even more slowly, feeling how your lungs inflate and deflate, you will vocalize an ancestral mantra once, twice, fifty times until you lose track of yourself, your fingers and toes will loosen and become free for the first time in a long time, your thoughts will bounce smoothly from one area of your brain to another, purifying and freeing themselves from harmful judgments, prejudices, adjectives and adverbs, you will feel your human uniqueness expand until it occupies the whole universe so that there will be no distinction between inside and outside, yesterday and tomorrow, there will be no before and after, cause and effect, beginning and end for you, you will be suspended in the limbo of eternity, in a weightless and timeless place, where you will contemplate the nooks and crannies of infinity and you will be wise, as wise as you can be after thirty minutes of being face up on the polished wooden floor of a lonely theatre where you are the star of a play that will begin in a few hours, when you will no longer be alone and you will be surrounded by the entire cast with whom you have been rehearsing for months and who trust you and will support you and help you to bring to a successful conclusion the first performance that will be the beginning of a rewarding career that will fill your life as an actress with emotion and joy until the day comes when you can no longer continue acting your life and the applause will die away and you will be reunited with the universe in an inevitable ending written in advance.

Marcelo Medone

Marcelo Medone is a Pushcart Prize nominee fiction writer, poet, essayist, playwright and screenwriter. He has received numerous awards and has been published in multiple languages in more than 50 countries around the world, including the UK.

 

He currently lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.

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