Come here, behind the curtain.

I saved you a seat.

When did we last speak? That’s right, I’d just gotten this brand then.
Go ahead. You can touch it if you want.
It’s healing well, don’t you think?

Oh, yes– she’s starting soon.
She’s captivating tonight. Wait until you see the shoes. Custom Louboutin.

Maybe someday she’ll sing jazz and fulfill the prophecy.
I’ll sit backstage and chew on ice, keep the bartender entertained with stories of last Christmas and ghosts of New Years.
Toast to her career and good health. After her set, she’ll toast to mine.

I hear them whisper around their merlot. Vultures, all of them. She always takes it too hard to heart, but I revel in the attention.
It cannot be helped.

We are a lucky sort; we know a user of magic when we see one.
Fame comes easy.

Celebrity is the spoil of the well-placed, the reincarnate, the violently pedigreed.


Is my certainty really so shocking to you?
You forget how reckless I was before.
My prophet’s vision did not come back until I stopped drinking.


Do you remember the summer before you turned fourteen? We spent the last weekend of August at the town fair. The palm reader told me that I would be twenty-three when I met the love of my life.
I did not meet her at twenty-three, but here she is now.

I finally learned
not to trust
any vision
but my own