The First Show Act I Scene I

1908, Spokane, Washington

Edmund Varrick

It was never a theater. Not really. Just a rented attic space above a café, where raindrops bled through the cracked plaster, and light came fractured, like memory through fog. But it was enough. Twenty chairs, two lamps, one curtain stitched from bedsheets, and enough determination to keep the roof from collapsing.

The addition of the second lamp was a necessity. I’d paid for it using the last of my working wages, and still it faltered as if the light itself hesitated to begin. I remember standing in the wings of that attic stage, pretending the uneven glow was deliberate—half shadow, half stage—like the world itself couldn't decide whether to reveal me or swallow me whole.

Then she stepped into it.

Clara Rittenhouse. I’d found her by accident, or maybe she had found me. She was supposed to be passing through—an actress between trains and troupes—but she stayed long enough to give my words a pulse. To give my words meaning—life. And tonight, in the stammering lamplight, she was the only thing that refused to falter.

Her voice carried low and steady, the kind that didn’t need to raise itself to be heard. The audience fell into silence. The lamp dimmed to a faint, trembling amber glow. For a moment, I forgot the walls, the noise, and the ache of the living world. She was the only thing that felt real enough to worship.

She reached the monologue-the one I’d written in the sleepless hours of the night, when doubt was all I had left—and when she spoke it, the air itself seemed to bend toward her.

“If memory is a stage,” She whispered, “then let me die under its lights. Let me burn bright enough that no one can look away. Let me blind them with memory.”

A line meant just for fiction, and yet—hearing her utter it—I believed her.

Every word. Every breath between them.

When she finished, I realized I’d forgotten how to breathe. Then the applause came—thin, trembling, like the first breath you’d take after drowning. And for the first time, I wondered if art could endure longer than the sound of hands fading into silence.

When the audience had dissipated, I stayed behind to gather the ticket stubs scattered across the chairs and floor. The air still held their warmth, as if the room itself hadn’t realized it was empty yet. I gathered the stubs until my hands smelled of ink and dust. I told myself I was just cleaning up, but I kept counting them-each stub, each crease. Some part of me needed to know it had all been real.

The habit began that night—saving proof. Proof it had happened. Proof I wasn’t dreaming. Not anymore.

“You’re serious,” she said, amusement softening the words as she caught me gathering the stubs. Her laughter was as soft as candlelight—brief, golden, gone too soon.

“I am.” I murmured, afraid the moment might break if I spoke too loud.

“Saving souvenirs, are you?” she said, tone light but her eyes searching.

“Evidence.” I said.

Her eyes found me in the lamplight-curious, bright, alive. “Of what exactly?” she asked.

“This. The proof that it wasn’t a dream. That we were real, if only for a moment.”

Her laughter rose again—warm, unguarded, and far too alive for walls built to hold silence. “You’re a strange one, Edmund.”

“I prefer peculiar.”

We left together, down the narrow wooden stairs that smelled faintly of damp wood and the scent of coffee gone cold. Outside, Spokane was wrapped in fog. Streetlights hummed softly. Far off, the streetcars sang to the river.

Clara drew her coat tight, a wisp of fog curling between us. “Next time, you’ll need a bigger hall,” she said, the words soft as laughter.

“Next time,” I told her. “I’ll build one worthy of you.”

She smiled then—softly, easily—unaware that I’d already started building a world around her.

The fog pressed close, turning the lamplight thin and pale. The city hung between waking and dream, as if waiting for revelation.

And in that suspended hush, beneath the streetlamp’s amber glow, I remember thinking some souls were born to be remembered. The rest of us spend our lives building monuments—trying either to live up to them, or not to live in their shadow.