Terri Lewis: LEAVING THE STAGE • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Terri Lewis
LEAVING THE STAGE

When night fell and lights dimmed, the dream of watching my last play gathered in the shadows and I’d begin to moan. My anguish wasn’t stage fright—that was for the actors—but for the ruination of my words, my scenes, my feelings. During rehearsals, I sat alone in the back of the auditorium because I tended to clutch an arm or pinch a knee when a line was abysmally read. Or worse, changed. The further you go into production, the more control you lose. I cursed to myself in the dark—that awful inflection, those god-forsaken pauses, the vulgar mumbling—as my play came to life, but not the life I envisioned. As if I’d nurtured a beloved child who now loved soccer, hated opera, or would rather eat at McDonald’s. Wayward and willful, no longer mine.

I long for auditoriums, but can only drift in my room, windows closed against any movement of air which is not conducive to my health right now. I am pillowed, surrounded by heat and quiet; I could be sliced by a slight breeze, shattered in a wind. Yes, this is the image: a dried Victorian rose in a bell jar that exists only because nothing touches it. When my friends come to visit, I smell the weather on their clothes and it worries me. Weather doesn’t belong in this act of the play. If I’m tired, I turn away their gossip and talk of Dürrenmatt or schicksaal. Then I nap.

When I’m alone in the feverish stillness, small events flood my mind. Last week, Wagner’s Liebestod leaked through my apartment walls. As the music rose, I floated on sound like a boat on a river with rose petals in the water and diaphanous light like cellophane. A hard effect to achieve onstage. Of course it was the potpourri by the bed and the Wagner. The climax approached, my chest opened, and a moment of life stirred sharply in the room before dying away.

When I am helped to the bathroom, I inspect my body in the mirror, my shriveled sex, the harp of ribs. Desiccation is not elegant. I fixate on my spine, which runs down my back like a thick whip under skin. It could snap my head off. Shivering, I mask myself under a quilted jacket, Mao-blue, soft like a bird’s nest lined with feathers. Very different from a nest for dinosaurs, their scales rattling among the shells, born to run and eat. My body takes on the shape of a velociraptor, starved and fierce. Beaten into bone and running like hell.

A wave of stage fright rises from the unknown.

My actor friends speak of peripheral light and the frightening black before them, a huge mouth to be fed. They feed it. I sit in the back as my words unspool from the stage and can do nothing but suffer hidden in the last row, nonexistent. The actors don’t think of me, nor does the audience. Filled with fright, I’m moaning again. Let it be all right. Help me write the final scene.

Whenever my plays opened, I imagined audience members as characters in my next play. Stories rose off them like ghosts. In an aisle seat, a man fingered the blouse of his companion: he works at a cleaners and loves the dresses, their limp fabric permeated with perfume, powder, the faint smell of a woman’s body. He keeps an orange blouse with a strange fragrance for several days, meditating on its scent, rich and alluring. I give him understanding: a woman planned a murder while wearing that blouse.

At intermission, a lanky brunette walks up the aisle and stretches her arms. She will howl at the moon after an evening of Mozart, then crawl into bed with her sleeping husband. Her toes are cold and ugly with a bruised nail. Black. Streaked with blue. Out of the blue, a touch of cold on my spine. A little brittle shattering. Frozen slices of skin peel away.

Nurse says Sir, it is too hot in this room and I jolt awake. My friends flank the bed, waiting with the shadow people, a crowd of great beauty. Beautiful crowds appeared in all of my plays. Others wait in the wings; the character from the cleaners has not yet appeared on stage. Nor the truck driver who blasts Bach as he wrestles his semi across Colorado mountains. Unfinished lives. Unstarted lives, mine to create. Graciela has lived with me for eight months. I know the run in her stocking under her dress and how she aches to wail. I want them to live. They deserve a chance. I could give them life; oh yes I could. If I had time, I could create a whole world of husbands and murderers and parties and goddamn fucking truckers with destiny. Son-of-a-bitch, just give me time!

My anger feeds the heat. Friends push their chairs away from my great dragon mouth and talk about my work. Puny little plays. I should have written about this roaring, my words like flames singeing the eyebrows of people in the first row. Had I roared, my work would have played New York—the Schubert, Winter Garden—theatres where lobbies have carpets and tables with flowers, where five hundred, no fifteen hundred, come every night. Prizes and adulation.

Nurse is here with her needle.

Graciela’s toes are perfect. A pale frosty color, she pushes them against her husband’s hairy ass. The crisp bedclothes rustle. Did you know she irons the sheets? They flow over the board and tangle her feet, wrapping her in morning glories and shafts of color and simple blue and when she makes the bed, she lays her face down and the flowers engulf her. She has entranced me. At sunset, she stops at the windows to celebrate the sky. She folds towels and plants basil. No, not basil. Everyone plants basil and politely thanks the waiter. Graciela is daring; she invites me bungee jumping.

With hope, I step out to the edge of fright, then sail off into a sparkle of wind. A confusion of heavens. Then down, down fast. The dark earth waits. Suddenly boing. Retrieval. It could happen. Boing and I’m back! God, I love her.

Nurse sends my friends home. They are confused because they haven’t met Graciela. Far away my toes are cold, already freeze-dried. I will be completely freeze-dried like hiker food in a Ziploc baggie. I crackle as I turn in the bed. Inside the nest of my padded jacket, my ribs are breaking into tiny dinosaur bones.

Across the room a man’s face hangs in a mirror on the wall, contorted with pain and stage fright. I’d forgotten him. He accepts a green pill from Nurse, hoping the fever—with its grief of dissolution—will evanesce. Far away lights disconnect. Ribs, knees, spine disappear and shadows crowd in, but he remains. His shattered face, his blue jacket, the pain far away, but not far enough.

He is in my play. I created his whole life: his pain, his shadows, this hot dry room. The rose potpourri by the bed and the antique chain marking his book, the monologue and the fear of the cold dark—mine. I have created everything he has and says and does. Everything, even the stage fright which announces the curtain call, that inevitable end. A finality which I cannot imagine or create. The last, the wordless, the unfathomable end.

Terri Lewis has been accepted to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and into juried workshops with Rebecca Makkai, Laura van den Berg, and Jill McCorkle. She published in the Denver Quarterly and the Chicago Quarterly Review, among others, and reviews for The Washington Independent Review of Books. Her debut novel, Behold the Bird in Flight, A Novel of an Abducted Queen, tells the story of Isabelle d’Angoulême, King John’s second wife, a woman mainly erased by history. In 2025, she won the Miami University Press 2025 Novella Prize. Learn more at terrilewis1.com.