Night of Cake & Puppets Read Online Free Page B

listen for the violin.
    There it is, this sound that rises out of the music like a beam of light cutting through darkness. It’s as sweet as love, so goddamn beautiful I could cry, and it’s like my whole being forms the word please .
    I don’t believe in prayer, but I do believe in magic, and I want to believe in miracles.
    Please come , I think through the wall, sending the words toward the sweet, pure sound, and the sweet, pure boy who’s making it.
    And then I leave.
    It’s snowing. I wrap my scarf around my face and feel a kind of peace. I’ve played my gambit.
    It’s up to him now.

5
    Voodoo Eyes
    The curtain drops. The music dies away and applause overcomes it, and when I lower my violin, another Saturday night sits like a cat on a fence.
    I’m not a fan of cats. With one shining exception. Wolfgang established an impossible standard, then died when I was ten, and every cat since has been a source of disappointment. You hold out your hand to them, and they just look at it, and since they’re not stupid, this act can only be interpreted as mockery.
    Yeah, buddy, that’s a hand. You’ve got two of those bad boys. Good for you.
    Not: Oh, you’d like to pet me? Let me come closer, because I like you, too .
    That’s me and Saturday night lately. It just looks at my hand until, ashamed, I lower it and try to pretend I didn’t really want to pet it anyway. The thing that I want to happen consistently does not happen. Mocked by fate? Maybe.
    Maybe tonight will be different. It didn’t begin well, but there’s always hope.
    ‘Party at Stooge’s,’ says Radan as we file out of the orchestra pit, and that’s the opposite of hope. It’s the cat glaring at me, because it’s where I’ll probably end up tonight, and if I do, it will mean that for yet another Saturday, she will have slipped through my fingers. She will not be at Stooge’s, would never be at Stooge’s. I don’t know where she goes after work, but I imagine stars and mist and halls of mirrors, and I want to be there, too.
    I want to do mysterious and improbable things alongside a fierce and beautiful girl who looks like a doll brought to life by a sorcerer.
    Is that really so much to ask?
    I look for her in the hallway, but don’t see her. And the door to the puppeteers’ lounge is open, so I see as I pass that she’s not in there, either. Did I already miss her? Probably.
    Can’t blame fate, I know that. It’s my own suffocating idiocy. Why can’t I just speak to her? I was going to earlier, when we were walking into the theater. It’s embarrassing, but I’d waited under the awning across the street until I saw her coming. Only for a couple of minutes. Nothing weird. I don’t know what I would have said, anyway. Probably something inane, like, ‘Looks like snow.’ Or possibly ‘I like cake.’ (She likes cake. This is one of four things I know about her. The others are: 2. Her name is Zuzana, 3. she’s in her last year at the Lyceum, so is probably eighteen, which is young but not heinously young, and 4. she can freeze a person’s blood with a look. I’ve seen it happen, though I have not been on the receiving end. She has voodoo eyes, and is more than slightly terrifying. Hence the not-yet-talking-to-her.) But I said nothing, inane or otherwise, because she halted abruptly to consider a flyer on the wall, and I didn’t know what to do but keep walking.
    Damn it.
    I wonder what the flyer was. I’ll have to check on my way out. Not sure I want to, though. I’m afraid it will confirm my suspicion that she was just trying to avoid me.
    The moment I walk into the musicians’ lounge, a voice cries my name, and I cringe. ‘Mik!’
    Cinzia. ‘ Meeek ,’ she pronounces it, and it sounds like a condemnation: meek! And then she’s right in front of me and I shrink a little. I can’t help it. Being looked at by Cinzia is what I imagine having a red dot painted on your forehead by a sniper rifle feels like. Tuck, duck, and