A Surefire Hit

The program warned a smoke machine and a strobe light would be used during the production. It said nothing about a gun.

The theater was one of those dodgy ones, tucked up four flights of stairs, on an empty street, in an area that bordered Chinatown. Ellen couldn’t imagine it passed fire code. A make-shift box office was set up in a hallway outside the door, where a stoned looking college kid collected money in a shoe box. “Do you have a reservation?” he asked without making eye contact, then checked Ellen’s name off on a crumpled sheet of paper.

The hallway lead directly into the theater. Five rows of mismatched chairs stood on a raked slant. Faded black paint covered crumbling plaster walls. Rusty stage lights hung haphazardly from a makeshift grid. Ellen looked around for Claire. Where is she? It’s opening night. Last time Claire had been hiding in the light booth at the back, but this theater’s “booth” consisted of a table at the rear of the room in full view of the audience. Even Ellen, with her lack of theatrical knowledge, knew the setup wasn’t ideal. Trent, Claire’s husband, a burly, bearded man, sat fiddling with the knobs on a stereo that actually still had a tape deck. Don’t tell me she has him running lights. He probably feels guilty. Ellen tried and failed to catch his eye.

Claire was Ellen’s co-worker at Jarvis, Jarvis & Max, LLC. When she wasn’t being a legal secretary, Claire wrote, directed and produced her own plays. She’s decent enough at preparing subpoenas, but her plays… In truth, Ellen had only seen one. She must be backstage giving her final pep talk to the actors or whatever it is directors do. Or maybe she’s acting in the show. Oh dear. This could be brutal! Ellen stopped trying to catch Trent’s eye and scanned the program.

It wasn’t that Ellen didn’t like Claire. She did. They bonded soon after Ellen had started working at the law firm. It was their mutual hatred for one obnoxious litigation partner that initially brought them together. “I plan new ways to kill him every day,” Claire confided as they munched on salads in Bryant Park one warm afternoon. “My favorite fantasy: hired assassin. Except I’m the assassin.”

Somehow, this conversation lead them to discover their uncanny mutual obsession for Bruce Lee films. “The mirror scene in Enter the Dragon is my all time favorite,” declared Ellen as she chomped on greens and grilled chicken.

“Well, naturally. Plus, Bruce Lee is just so…” Claire licked her lips suggestively. “And it’s funny, because I’m not usually attracted to—” she stopped herself.

Ellen knew how the sentence ended, and she was used to people editing themselves. She was third generation, but people still considered her Chinese.

“Asian guys?” Ellen asked.

“No!” Claire protested. “I meant—I don’t know—the martial arts type. I’m more into big bears. Beards and flannels and…”

Ellen laughed and disclosed that she too had a preference for husky lumberjacks. In a few months it would become pretty obvious that she and Claire really did have the same taste in men.

“Brandon Lee, Bruce Lee’s son wasn’t bad looking either,” Ellen offered during a lull in the conversation. “Messed up how he died though.”

“A bullet shot out by a blank. Talk about a freak accident,” Claire said.

“A freak accident would be a great way to kill someone,” Ellen suggested, bringing their conversation full circle.

Alas, it was one thing to discuss films and plot imaginary murders during lunch. It was quite another to be dragged into one’s subconscious via live theater. And yet here Ellen was, subjecting herself, a second time, to one of Claire’s plays.

Ellen still hadn’t figured out where to sit. A too cozy couple had settled into the fifth row. A woman with big hair and too many shopping bags sprawled herself across the fourth. The front row was empty, but she didn’t want to sit that close. “Always sit on an aisle, so you won’t get trapped in theater jail,” a boyfriend once advised. That had been Michael—poor Michael. She’d dragged him to Claire’s last play. Soon after, he dumped her.

“He had the best flannel shirts,” she cried on Claire’s shoulder at work.

“Don’t worry. You’ll find someone new,” her friend consoled her.

And she had. Rather quickly.

Ellen noticed the shiny metallic reserved seat with her name on it, smack in the middle of the second row. Well, that was nice of Claire. Sit there…or on the aisle? The third row aisle seat was empty. If Claire doesn’t show up, I could escape during intermission. She knew she could trust Trent not to tattle. But she’d only do that if the play was as excruciating as the last one.  Claire insisted her work was “experimental.”  Ellen had discovered that “experimental” apparently meant lots of yelling and nonsensical rhymes. At Claire’s last show, one woman had inexplicably exposed her breasts. There’d been this large box on stage that people kept crawling into.

“I liked it,” Ellen lied when she and Michael joined Claire and Trent for post-show drinks at McHarley’s. “It was really…interesting.” She took a quick sip of beer. Michael shifted uncomfortably. Trent smiled knowingly. “Yes, my wife’s plays are always very interesting,” he said as he winked.

“No, really. It was.” Ellen felt like Trent might be the only person who knew exactly what was going on inside her mind. “I just…I didn’t get the box.”

“Ah yes. The box.” Trent’s voice made her thighs twinge. She looked at Michael to check if he noticed her blush, but he’d been too busy with his beer.

Claire sighed and donned a sympathetic smirk. “It’s a womb. They were crawling back into the womb.”

“Oh,” Ellen said like it all made sense.

This new play, Claire had informed Ellen, was an existential mystery. One woman’s quest to find herself in a fog of modernity. “Sort of like our lives here at the law firm,” she said.  “We’re always trying to find our true purpose, and we certainly aren’t going to find it here.”

Ellen, unlike Claire, was not searching for anything more than a steady paycheck in a job she didn’t loathe, and a little fun on the weekends. Or a lot of fun on the weekends as the case might be.

“Sounds great!” Ellen wondered how someone who liked Bruce Lee films and had a husband who was so… adventurous… could write plays with so little action.

“So, you’ll come?” Claire asked.

“Of course.”

“You should bring a date.”

“Oh…” Ellen paused. “I’m not seeing anyone right now.”

The theater smelled like burnt toast. Ellen scanned the program again. A note read: This play will be performed without an intermission. Ugh!  At least the seat was comfortable enough. It had a bit of give. The music and lights began to fade. Ellen glanced back one last time at Trent, but that too-cozy couple was in the way. A blue glow oozed through a door that lead backstage. Moments later the playing area began to fill with smoke.

Chanting actors made their way through a constant fog. Ellen caught herself enjoying the experience. Oh, most of it didn’t make a bit of sense, but some of the poetry was rather catchy this time. And…is that Claire? It is, and she’s not half bad. Ellen was pleasantly surprised that she was actually enjoying this glimpse into the recesses of her co-workers brain—the self-deprecation, the angst. There was a painfully long stretch with a strobe light and some bizarre writhing, but when that was over, the show picked up again. Was there something about betrayal Ellen caught in the chanted rhymes? Claire couldn’t possibly know. Ironically, Ellen thought Michael might have actually enjoyed this performance.

More chanting. More angst. More smoke.

And then Claire pulled the gun.

***

Trent made a point of not looking at Ellen when she walked into the theater. Of course he saw her. She was impossible not to notice. Her pointy heels clicked on the creaky floorboards. Her red blouse clung to her small breasts. Her black hair flowed to her waist like a forbidden river.

Instead, he focused on the light board and checked the script one more time. He hadn’t seen two plays in his life before meeting his wife, and he’d certainly never been a board op. Marriage to Claire often felt like Theater 101.

Earlier that week, Claire explained to him how to raise and lower the light dimmers. “If this piece of crap were computerized, you could simply press a button. But this is old school,” she said.

“Um, how do I know when to do what?” Trent nervously asked his wife. Rather than providing clear instructions, Claire tossed him a prompt book. She often made him feel like the scrawny little boy he used to be before puberty hit. His look—the beard, the bulk—all a mask to disguise how he often felt inside: six years old; knock kneed; the boy who, until high school, had been remembered for wetting his pants on a field trip to the zoo in first grade.

Once he figured out the light board—and it really wasn’t that hard—Trent’s teeth unclenched. By the second night of tech rehearsal, he began to enjoy making light shine on the stage. The previous stage manager/board op—the one he’d replaced—had marked the script precisely. Even the cues Trent was not responsible for were indicated: the entrances and exits of every actor; the moments when the smoke machine and strobe light needed to start and stop; and the gunshot noise at the end.

“Um, do you have the sound cue for that?” he asked Claire before the final dress rehearsal.

“I’m using my handgun.”

“Is that legal?”

“Blanks.”

There was something about the way Claire had said the word “blanks,” that made Trent’s chest tighten ever so slightly. He once watched his wife demolish a target dummy at a firing range. “I just imagined someone I wanted to kill,” she’d said.

A second conversation, later that night, made Trent make a mental note to inspect the gun.

“Ellen’s coming to the show tomorrow.” Claire had been checking reservations on her laptop during a dinner break.

Trent tried not to have a reaction, and shoveled a forkful of Lo Mein into his mouth. He could feel Claire watching him chew.

“You remember Ellen don’t you?” she asked.

He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Your work friend. She had that boyfriend—what was his name?”

“Oh, that ended months ago. I thought you knew,” Claire said. It was at that moment that Trent knew that Claire knew. He paid close attention to the rest of the rehearsal. That night he studied the prompt book.

The gun was used once, at the very end of the show. Prior to that, it would be set on the stage left prop table. That would give Claire an alibi, should she need one. In theory, anyone could tamper with it. The trouble was, there would be no time for him to deal with the gun beforehand. There was just too much to do before the performance began.

The stoned college kid snuck into the theater. “The actors are all in place. Claire is ready to begin,” the kid told Trent, and found himself a seat in the middle of the front row. Where is Ellen sitting? Trent thought. A couple who simply could not keep their hands off each other blocked Trent’s view.

Trent dimmed the lights and faded the music. He pushed up a dimmer, and a blue glow filled the stage. He knew his only chance to take care of the gun—make sure it really was loaded with just blanks—would be during the strobe light scene. It was about two and a half minutes long—a strange dream ballet of sorts—and Claire was on stage the entire time. It was really a shame. The strobe light scene was his favorite.

The smoke machine filled the theater with a smoggy haze. More chanting. More blue glow. As soon as the strobe light started to flicker, Trent left his post.

He tried to exit as quietly as possible. But it didn’t matter. The theater door was locked.

***

The smoke never filtered onto the stage quite the way it was supposed to.  Claire wanted puffy clouds to flood the playing area. Instead, the machine coughed out drabs of grayness that crept along the stage floor and eventually floated upwards. She was even more disappointed with the blue glow. There was a certain shade of blue, more cerulean than sky, she wanted emanating from the doorway. But with a limited budget, she had to make do.

A powerlessness overwhelmed her whenever she watched one of her plays from the audience. How often had she wanted to clap her hands and scream “pick up the pace people” or “that’s not what I wrote”? But she always refrained from anything of the sort. Once she’d ripped apart some anorexic actress, who simply could not make a timely entrance during an intermission. The girl, shocked, muttered some obscenities, and promptly left the theater right before the second act. Luckily, with just a few adjustments, the other actors could make do. That was one of the benefits of writing nonlinear, sensory based theater. Individual actors added symmetry and texture, but weren’t essential for any formal narrative. Still, these days, Claire always waited until after the curtain call to give notes.

She decided it was time for her to return to the stage one night when Trent claimed to be working late. She’d been flipping channels mindlessly, waiting for her husband to return home when she stumbled upon The Crow, starring Brandon Lee. The film shook loose the memory of some half-remembered conversation. Something about freak accidents. Oh sure, they happened. Bullets sometimes did strange things. There were a host of weird ricochet stories out there and such. But her freak accident would need to be planned.

As much as Claire was excited about her return to the boards, she felt the tiniest bit of apprehension. After all, she hadn’t performed since college. It was then she’d realized good actors surrendered themselves fully to the moment, and she hated that. She hated surrendering. She knew how to say the words, how to move her body, how to change her voice to fit a character. But losing control was not something that interested her. She preferred to be in complete control. That way, she could be sure she wouldn’t butcher her own blocking, or lose a line, or miss an entrance. She would pick up all of her cues. Even with the stage lights in her eyes, she would never miss.

Opening night, Claire made sure to arrive extra early to the theater. The space was rented by others during the day, and the stage needed to be swept, the props set, and the lights triple checked. Several months ago, a crucial moment in one play had been ruined because a gobo had been shifted ever so slightly. After the performance, Claire had pounced on the idiot she’d hired to run the lights.

“Didn’t you check them?” she demanded.

He cowered in a corner and mumbled something indiscernible. Claire realized she would need to do the checking. Tonight, props were on her mind.

During her lunch break earlier that day, Claire took her gun to the Westside Fire & Pistol range. It wasn’t an unusual thing for her to do. Shooting relaxed her. It was opening night, and she needed all the relaxation she could get.

If she accidentally left a live round in the gun, so be it.

It was live theater. And accidents did happen.

“You know, I can help set props,” Trent offered when he met her at the theater.

“No!” She snapped too quickly.

Trent was only running her lights because no one else would. She’d gone through three stage managers for this production alone, until she finally broke down and asked him to help.

“Of course honey,” he said, and kissed her. He rarely kissed her anymore. “Whatever you need.”

Claire had met Trent six years ago. A friend of a friend introduced them at one of those too cramped Christmas parties in the East Village. Well past midnight, Claire had been on the verge of throwing up from too much cheap wine. But then the hostess made tater tots and suddenly she was talking to this guy.

“So…you like Bruce Lee films?” he asked.

The next morning they would linger in bed and watch Enter the Dragon. Two years later, they were married.

Trent wasn’t intimidated by a woman who owned a gun and he understood her art. He knew her thoughts before they fully formed in her mind. He sensed her emotions before they became apparent. Claire didn’t really believe in soul mates and she never could define love, but Trent was a part of the universe she had crafted for herself, and she wasn’t going to let Ellen ruin that.

Claire told that college kid—she never could remember his name—that the actors were all in their places. He gave her a sleepy, stoned smile. “You are going to kill it tonight. I can tell.” He brushed the hair out of his eyes, and slipped into the theater. Out of habit, Claire locked the door behind him. She entered the backstage area through another door down the hall.

When she stepped onto the stage, she no longer felt like herself. She delighted in the fact that she was almost unrecognizable in costume. Not that it mattered. Her crime would be committed in full view of the audience. And like the death of Bruce Lee’s son, on that film set years ago, it would look like a tragic, tragic accident.

The show was going better than expected. Claire felt the audience’s energy. They understood her words. They understood her angst. As her body moved through the flickering strobe lights, she let go, the way an actor should. But she stopped herself. No, she needed to stay in control. Just one more entrance, one more speech.

It was dark, but she knew where to aim. She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger.

***

“You didn’t sit in your reserved seat,” Claire said to Ellen. They sat with Trent having post-show drinks again at McHarley’s. It was just the three of them. All the other cast and crew members had declined Claire’s invitation. That college kid who ran the box office said he might join them, but then muttered something about a headache. Ellen thought he looked even more stoned than before. “I felt fine during the show, but then…” He never finished his sentence, and left the theater rubbing the back of his head. Is that blood in his hair? Ellen thought for a moment, and then decided she was imaging things.

Trent was downing beers at an alarming pace. Ellen figured it was the awkwardness of the situation. Did Claire know? But how could she?

“I like to sit on the aisle,” Ellen said, looking down at her beer.

“Why is that?” Claire asked.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Ellen struggled to fill an endless silence. “I know I already said this, but the show was really great tonight. Really powerful message. That gun at the end. I swear I saw a spark fly off that seat in the second row. Is that why you wanted me to sit there? So I could experience a little bit of theater magic? If I didn’t know it was a play, I would think you had actually fired a gun with like real bullets in it or something. I mean, that totally freaked me out. I seriously almost wet myself.”

Trent glanced down at his crotch and hoped no one noticed the dark splotch on his jeans.  “Yeah Claire? How did you do that?” he asked.

“Oh that wasn’t what I’d planned,” Claire answered.

Ellen waited for some elucidation. When it didn’t come, she continued. “Anyway you were fantastic, and the play was a real heart stopper. I think you’ve got a hit.”

Claire smiled, but it was like she was thinking about something else. “A hit? I wish. But I’m sure the next one will be.”

Trent ordered another beer.

 

BIO: Nina Mansfield is a CT based fiction writer and playwright. Her YA mystery novel Swimming Alone was published by Fire & Ice YA in 2015. Nina’s short stories have appeared in various publications including Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mysterical-E, Crime Syndicate Magazine and various anthologies. Her plays have been produced around the world. A member of MWA, ITW, SCBWI and the Dramatists Guild, Nina is also a co-vice president of the NY/Tri-State Chapter of Sisters in Crime.