INT. CARD TABLE — UNKNOWN.

MUSIC CUE:
“NOCTURNE IN B FLAT MINOR, OP. 9 NO. 1” by FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN

You look down from above at a green baize table and a neatly stacked deck of playing cards. The back of the top card is adorned with a gilded fleur-de-lis on red stock. Two pale hands reach over the table from above frame, sleeveless and dirty, and begin to riffle the deck like a professional.

GORGO (O.S.)

When is a game not a game? Some will say it is measured in the enjoyment gleaned from a poker night between friends. Others will wax philosophically about the thrill of taking down a dealer at high stakes casino blackjack. Neither is correct.

The OFF SCREEN voice is a mixture of high and low tones, alternating in chaotic harmony. Bitter and worn and sounding as if it had been sliced up, beaten with a hammer, and then dragged through gravel before escaping into your ears. But there’s a culture to it and a cold, calculating intelligence in its metallic rasp. It’s a song which vibrates the air molecules to a melody of pure agony and harmonized by endless, manic laughter.

GORGO (O.S.)

Some suggest that any game must offer all participants a chance at winning. Otherwise it’s not fun and ergo, not a game.

Also incorrect.

A game is simply a set of circumstances where multiple variables compete, independent of emotion and outcome, and while some games are built to encourage parity and fairness between the players, others have fates that are predetermined before a single card is dealt.

SLOW MOTION: CARDS
flick and stack and shuffle like an accordion between the two hands.

Your eyes focus on the dirt caked under their fingernails and crusted in the wrinkles of their knuckles. But the more you look, the more it becomes obvious the grime isn’t clustered soil or smeared mud. It’s red and gritty, like scabs that form over flayed skin, and you can almost taste the iron in the air.

GORGO (O.S.)

Ten soldiers carrying clubs.
Ten gardeners with spades.
Ten courtiers ornamented with diamonds.
Ten hearts carry the royal name.
Four Knaves hold the crowns
for four Kings who lead.
But none hold more power
than the four ruling Queens.

CUT TO the table, now level with the frame. The cards are placed face down on the felt and spread smoothly across in an arc. Behind the table, just out of focus, is a woman’s body from navel to neck. Bare breasts are hidden behind a frayed curtain of stringy, greasy hair which is stuck to her skin in clumps of dried blood. Rigid abdominal muscles are decorated with a grotesque pattern of coagulated drips and splatters.

Her right hand passes over the cards to the opposite side, where it selects a single unknown card and separates it with a lone, broken-nailed finger pushing it gently forward from the pack.

GORGO (O.S.)

The Queen of Clubs.

SLOW MOTION: THE CARD
is turned over to reveal a French-suited Queen in lavish clothes and waving a fan.

CLOSE UP ON THE CARD FACE.
Her features bear a striking resemblance to Jessa Wells.

GORGO (O.S.)

My girl Jessa. So desperate to make your mark and rise to the top of Black Dahlia Legacy and Miracle Galaxy Pro. Do you think you’ll ever surpass Constanza or Jack? Tut-tut. I know what you see when you look in the mirror. A scared little girl who has spent her entire life fighting someone or something and what do you have to show for it, huh? Huh?

A cackle rattles out of her like a broken tambourine.

GORGO (O.S.)

You will spend your career trying to climb a hill you can never conquer. After you took out Tatum, did Jack have one eye open when she gave you that big girl hug? Or did she blindly pull you into her arms knowing you don’t have it in you to slip a knife between her ribs?

The house money is on the latter.

SLOW MOTION: A SECOND CARD
is selected, seemingly at random, and flipped over.

GORGO (O.S.)

The Queen of Spades.

CLOSE UP ON THE CARD FACE.
A dead ringer for Kimberly Stark, she is holding a technicolor tulip.

GORGO (O.S.)

Aren’t you just a live wire, Kimmy. What was it you said before Pillars of Creation?

“It’s the dream that I’ve always wanted, without limits, to be one of the top women in this country and to have a legion of fans that I inspire to chase their own dreams.”

And people call me narcissistic! I wonder what was going through your mind when you went tumbling over the top rope at Intrepid Odyssey. Hey, babe, I get it. Battle Royale’s are for the birds. I prefer the simpler things in life. Like blunt force trauma and hypoxic brain damage.

With her face out of frame, her words are accentuated by quick, jerking movements of her hands, like a politician behind a podium, with knotty, gnarled fingers that frequently lock and pop at the joints.

A single finger points into the air.

GORGO (O.S.)

One thing I like about you is you didn’t take any guff from Tasman but truth is, you should have let her beat CHIGUSA senseless. I mean, I get it. Colors of Victory is supposed to be about learning, growing, and just plain having fun! ‘Cause that’s what being privileged is all about!

(clears throat)

Sorry, I had a flashback to Camp Chippewa. ANYWAY… It’s a shame you joined Colors of Victory, darling. I think we could have fun together. You’re like this bright star that I want to reduce to a singularity. Alas, you’d rather be the great white hope of Japan BUT don’t fret, precious. Corrupting your spirit through physical violence can be just as enjoyable—for me, at least. Not so much for you.

SLOW MOTION: A THIRD CARD
is picked from the deck and revealed.

GORGO (O.S.)

The Queen of Diamonds.

CLOSE UP ON THE CARD FACE.
Shino Suzuhana, cloaked in diamonds and holding a red cherry marigold.

GORGO (O.S.)

The Galaxy Defense Force considers themselves the defenders of the balance between good and evil. Well, you’re in luck, Shino-san. Here’s the opportunity you’ve been waiting for. In one match you may propel yourself toward the championship glory which has evaded you while also stopping me from beating you to it.

But there are much bigger stakes at play than your little fairy tale story coming true. Let’s be honest. If you three could co-exist for ten minutes without tearing at one another, you could all snuff out my hideous laughter before I can even get started. This is your moment to slay me, drive me to the sea and end this whole thing on a high note. If you don’t, you won’t have anyone to blame but yourselves. A year from now you’ll look back at our match and know that this is where it all began—the death spiral of Miracle Galaxy Pro into beautiful chaos.

SLOW MOTION: THE FINAL CARD
is taken from the ribbon of cards and placed down on the felt next to the other three.

GORGO (O.S.)

And finally…

CLOSE UP ON THE CARD FACE.
A portrait of a sovereign, showered in rose petals. Yelena Gorgo.

GORGO (O.S.)

The Queen of Hearts. Traditionally portrayed by the French as Judith, a Jewish woman who used her beauty and charm to save her besieged city from an Assyrian army. She fucked her way up the ranks, from privateer to the general’s tent. There she seduced the enemy leader, plied him with food and wine, and then while he slept she cut off his head.

Her hand slices her lower neck across the top of the frame.

GORGO (O.S.)

Judith was willing to do what was necessary to save her village and she used the only weapon in her disposal to great effect—the one between her legs. I share this little parable with you so when I tell you I am the most dangerous woman in Miracle Galaxy Pro, I want the gravity of that statement to grip your heart. Like Judith, there is nothing I will not do to get what I want. What I need. But unlike the Queen of Hearts, my armory is stocked with a more diverse arsenal.

You MOVE FORWARD over the table, over the playing cards, and then PAN UP. Slow and deliberate. Rising past her sternum and twisted, grungy hair, and the jugular notch…

GORGO (O.S.)

So what do I want? What will complete me? I’m supposed to mention the Gaijin Assault Army and how gung-ho I am to help my new lady comrades in destroying the other factions to gain control over the Interstellar Dream Championship from the Black Dahlia Legacy.

You see the and the beginnings of her lower neck, and the veins running down each side…

GORGO (O.S.)

All that will come in due time, as a consequence for my more selfish goal. I want to remake Galaxy Pro in my own terrifying image, where miracles become terrors and sanity spirals into a beautiful horror. “Why,” you may ask without understanding it’s the least interesting question. How is so much tantalizing.

Old, red crust of flaking blood turns wet and fresh as you rise past the underside of her jaw and over the point of her chin. Her mouth is hideous in sight, covered in gore as if it had recently ravaged a victim like a wild animal. You never see beyond her nose, but somehow you can feel her eyes on you, watching you watch her.

GORGO (O.S.)

To start, I simply have to win at Rainbow Roadkill and from there this entire Mickey Mouse operation will unravel like a cheap sweater. The devil is in the details, of course, and while I could tell you more, that would spoil the surprise.

Her lips are cracked and unnaturally spread, like a snake unhinging its maw to devour large prey. Teeth, sharp and gleaming, slice the ends from each syllable that escapes.

GORGO

The important part is I already have everything I need to succeed so allow me to be the first to welcome the status quo—

to the new Nightmare Galaxy Pro.

CUT TO BLACK.

A long beat. And then—

LAUGHTER.

The sound of a woman totally CRACKING UP.

X

THE WHITE RABBIT

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
— Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit.

HALLOWEEN

SAN FRANCISCO. THE CAR TURNS left at the dead end sign onto a narrow access road. Gates crawl past the windows, and above them million dollar mansions loom like towers reaching up into the star dotted sky. For a brief moment jealousy creeps into my heart. I need to escape New Orleans.

Ignore the driver. He’s a nobody. A name and picture on the screen when I ordered the Uber with a burner. He offered me a Desani. Yuck. He also asked me what music to play. That’s why Nancy Sinatra is belting out These Boots Were Made For Walkin’.

I’m trying to not think about how uncomfortable this chest binder is when I catch myself faintly reflected in the back window. The red shag wig, the blue eye shadow, perfectly sculpted cheekbones. What, did you expect me to go to a Halloween party not in costume?

The reflection is smiling back at me, with a strained, hee-haw kind of madness, with little strands of saliva between the teeth until the tongue runs over the incisors. The curious thing about this is that I’m not actually smiling. That’s not me. That’s the Other Me.

“I wondered if you might show up,” I say to her and her alone. We have our own little way of communicating. She’s staring at me with unblinking eyes that begin to leak thin tears down her cheeks. It’s like a dog begging to go outside after being stuck indoors all day.

My hand raises to the glass and presses against hers. “It’s Halloween, after all. What kind of Me would I be if I didn’t let my better half out to share in the celebration?”

My eyes close. Our eyes open.

Our tongue runs over our upper lip while our hands grind down the tops of my thighs. Oh, how we missed this. We’re lost in the euphoria, in the feeling of a million synapses firing to a thick beat.

The driver says something but we almost don’t notice.

“Excuse us.” AHEM. “Me, I mean.”

Our lovely voice, all knife edges and gravel, with a melodic quality, like an out of tune harp.

The driver looks back over his shoulder and says, “Are you okay?”

“Oh, yeah,” we say with an exaggerated wink of our eye as we climb back up into the seat. “Just so you know, you might need a towel back here… How much further?”

“What? Oh ,It’s right here,” he says, with a nod toward the gate on the right.

“Excellent, my good man. Say, a heads up. I need you to walk around the car and open the door for me. I’m going to do this whole movie star entrance. So you’ll need to take care of that and then after, close the door, if that part wasn’t obvious.”

Oh! We wave our hand. “But not too soon! They need to hear the music!”

The car slows to a stop. The driver turns back. “Music?”

Behold, the burner phone, and our finger pressing down on the volume. The car audio gets louder. I bet he’s happy he gave me bluetooth access. While he gets out of the car and walks around, a quick swipe calls Spotify back onto the phone’s screen.

A beat, then:

Suffragette City by David Bowie blasts away.

Dracula and Barbie are at the gate having their invitations verified by the security guard. All three immediately look at the car when one black high heel boot kicks out of the door and steps onto the sidewalk, followed by the second. Our hand shoots out into the night air and the driver wisely takes our hand and helps a lady out of the car. The blue tuxedo suit. The dotted white tie over a striped shirt. What, did you think we were going to a Halloween party without a costume? Psh.

“You may go now,” we say to the driver and then walk toward the gate. The door shuts, muting the music, and seconds later the car drives off. Now, there’s a slight hiccup that we haven’t told you about. We didn’t want you to worry, but we don’t actually have an invitation. We are, however, rich.

We cut in front of Dracula and Barbie. The security guard is a middle-aged man with gray, sporadic hair on his balding head. He looks like an ex football player who’s at least tried to stay in shape.

“Invitation?”

We shake our head. “I don’t have one.”

“Then why are you bothering me?”

We hold up one finger then reach inside our jacket. After a little bit of fishing, out comes an inch and a half stack of Benjie’s in a $10,000 wrapper.

“Like what you see?”

He clicks his teeth and says, “Man, that shit is fake as hell. Fuck off.”

Dracula jumps into the scene like we’re an improv group and reaches for the money. “May I,” he asks with his nubby little hands trembling to touch the cash. We toss it to him. He shrieks in panic until his hands manage to snag it before it could fall into the sewer drain.

As he stands, he starts riffling through the bills like a meth head smelling the pipe the next morning. He takes a deep breath.

“I’m a banker,” he says in a pinched voice. “Or at least, I was. Now I’m the CEO of—”

We cut him off. “I don’t require your backstory, Dracula.”

He apologizes and says with the money raised, “This is real. I’ll tell you what. You can have both our invitations for all of this.”

Barbie starts to argue. Dracula shushes her. “I didn’t even want to come to this party. Our neighbor is an asshole. There, I said it. She only invited us to shove our noses in all her famous friends and weird decorations.”

“Dracula,” we yell, snapping his attention back to us. “I just told you. No backstory! All you had to say was invites for cash, for fucks sake.”

“Come on, Natalie,” Dracula says and tugs on Barbie’s arm. She hesitates. Ohh, a power play.

“But I wanted to go,” Barbie whines like a disappointed child. She may be middle aged but she’s in California shape. There’s not a drop of pandy weight on this little doll.

“Hey, Barbie,” we say with our most normal voice we can muster.

“Um, yes?”

“It’s a shame to let one of these invitations go to waste. You could come with me. I’ll be your Ken tonight.”

Her cheeks blush and her teeth ever so slightly bite down on her lip. It’s a fleeting moment that passes too soon for both of us because Dracula had to cock block me. “No,” he says firmly before taking his wife’s arm and dragging her down the block.

A long, silky sigh slips past our lips and we say, “That’s a shame,” then turn to look down at the security guard. We’re a giant in these heels. “So, we good?”

He grunts and mutters fuck it under his breath before grabbing the iron handle of the large, wooden gate. It takes some effort for him to pull it from the stone frame. He dips his head and says, “Don’t get into any shit.”

We show him three fingers. “Scouts honor, sir. I’ll be a good boy.”

We’re walking through an arched tunnel when something causes our legs to go weak. Our weight shifts to the left and the only thing that stops us from going down hard is our left hand pressing into the wall.

Perhaps…heeee…perhaps we shouldn’t have… …come out so early. We could have waited till we had Vanessa alone.

NO! By George, we shall not be deterred! Ask not what your country can do for you, and the only thing we have to fear is fear itself! There we are. The feeling is coming back. But can we maintain, we wonder. How long until we lose control and cut someone’s face off in a fit? No, we will be careful. And quiet.

“HA HA HAAAA HAA HAAA!”

We stumble out of the tunnel and into the backyard clutching our chest. Two dozen party-goers, most of them in Party City’s finest, turn as one to gawk as we slap our knee and try to get ahold of ourself.

“Oh, boy,” we say with a wave of our hand then point our thumb over our shoulder. “That security guard is a regular Sinbad. He’s killing it out there. How’s the pâté? Oh, champagne!” We snag a flute off a wandering waitress’s tray and take a healthy swig. After a few awkward seconds, everyone goes back to their droll conversations.

As we walk toward the house, we’d love to point out all the famous wrestlers that are in attendance but we’re contractually not allowed to. There’s that guy who you know from…somewhere. The Face of Wrestling. Ha. As if. Oh, and here’s a Japanese tag team you know from some crazy match.

Focus. We’re not here for them.

We didn’t tell you that this bitch lives in a castle. A literally a castle. Exposed masonry. Stained glass windows. Wrought iron all over the place. In the first room we enter there’s a massive hearth. We hear you. This must be some historical landmark, right? Who historically built it then? Some Normans must have gotten blown off course, ended up in the Bay Area and erected this lone castle.

No. The truth is sad and predictable. A rich white person in the thirties decided he wanted a castle, so now there’s a castle. Let’s move on.

The rooms are strangely large and every connection is so narrow it’s amazing they fit any furniture inside. After searching for the better part of half an hour and not finding Vanessa, we find the nearest waiter and corner him.

“Can I help you?”

We say entirely too loud, “WHERE IS VANESSA BYRNE?”

He gives us a total non reaction. In fact, was that an eye roll?

“She’s in the cuddle room, dude.”

Oh, la la!

Our voice restrains itself. “How would one locate such a room?”

“Follow the hall and up the spiral staircase. Then it’s on the left.”

He ducks under our arm and hurries off. Down the hall and up the stairs we go, with our boots clanging on the metal stairs. It’s darker up here. Moodier. Ahead on the left, a block of purple light is cast from the doorway to the floor. There’s a low, thumping beat but it’s quiet enough that the chaotic noise of countless conversations happening at once can be heard.

Through the arched door frame is a dark, wide room glowing in UV light. The deejay is spinning the music to the left and to the right is a long bar with a handful of costumed guests gathered with their drinks. In the middle, sprawled on bean bag chairs in various designs, are ten or twelve more people whose faces are hidden under a haze of smoke. Tobacco. Weed. Maybe something harder. This may have an effect on our composure.

It feels like we’re walking in slow motion on the way to the bar as our mind recoils in beautiful horror. Forget about the poison, let’s set the building on fire! YEAH! Lock the doors and kick back outside in a chaise longue with a glass of champagne! Oh, the screams tragically don’t last long but ah, smell that the barbeque. 

No. Stick to the plan. Find Vanessa. Get her alone. Deliver the palytoxin. Let’s not mess with a good thing. We mosey up to the bar between Taylor Swift and Deadpool. The bartender is juggling liquor bottles like it’s risky business. He’s even dressed like Tom Cruise, except as Maverick from Top Gun. Metaverse. He tosses a bottle of mescal over his shoulder, catches it behind him, whips it around and then pours five shots for the Scooby Doo gang at the end of the bar.

Taylor Swift takes a last sip of her cocktail and walks away. The bartender spots our new face and immediately comes down to take our order.

“What can I get you,” he asks loud enough to be heard over the music. The strangest thing begins to happen. His aviator sunglasses warp and swell until the lenses are bigger than his slowly shrinking head.

We repress a cackling laugh and say with a deliberate accent on every syllable, “Gin mar-teen-ee, dry with-a-twisssst.”

We must not be the strangest thing he’s dealt with all night, as he immediately scoops a shaker in the ice chest and then grabs a bottle of Hendrick’s gin. While he does his little shake-shake routine, we suddenly realize Deadpool is staring straight at us.

“Hi,” he says, slightly muffled by the mask, then points at himself. “Deadpool. So, how big is your dick?”

That’s…not…fair.

“BAHA-HAHA-HAA!”

Our fist pounds on the bar, drawing too much attention but it can’t be helped. With every guffaw, Deadpool shrinks a little bit, until his shame is too much to bear and he leaves. The bartender places our martini in front of us on a little napkin. As our laughter tails off, we take a drink. Fuck, that’s actually really good. 

We must have missed the start of the next song, because all of a sudden Grace Slick is singing the first line of White Rabbit and that funky bass groove is pounding in our chest. You know what? This is our kind of party. It’s a shame we’re here on business.

A soft voice says, “I think you hurt his feelings.”

Our eyes move right to see a woman with her back to the bar and a long, silver cigarette holder between her fingers like she’s Marlene Dietrich. A rabbit half-mask disguises her face, with two long ears reaching another foot above her head. Her dilated eyes are black saucers staring at us while she takes a puff off the cigarette.

“He’s probably used to it,” we counter.

A laugh comes out of her. She places a silver cigarette case on the bar. The bartender scurries back but not to me. He asks if the bunny needs anything. Her neck stretches backward, causing the corset’s bust to pull away from her cleavage, and for a moment the dark pink of two nipples slip free from the material.

“What’s he drinking,” she says, nodding her head toward our glass.

“Gin martini,” the bartender shouts over the music. “Dry with a twist.”

“I’ll have one of those.”

He starts working and her focus returns to me. A thought must be kicking around in her head, because she’s staring at us silently for a long moment, until she points at us with her cigarette and says, “You aren’t a He. At least not like Maverick here.”

We say, “Deadpool would have been very disappointed with what’s in my pants.”

Another laugh. Her martini slides forward. She thanks the bartender before taking a drink. Her face scrunches a little, but in a good way. “Mmm, that’s lovely. I’m usually more of a vodka girl but this is very good.” Another sip, and then: “So, who are you?”

“Ziggy Stardust,” we say playfully. “Can’t you tell?”

She leans on us with one hand on our shoulder and says, “I know every name on the guest list and you aren’t anyone that I recognize. Are you someone’s plus one?”

“You’re Vanessa Byrne,” we say with a hungry breath.

“Bingo,” she says after another drink. “And now you have me at a disadvantage.”

“My plan all along,” we say coyly. “We do have a mutual acquaintance.”

She puts her glass down and looks up at me. “By all means, don’t keep me in suspense.”

We lean down to her ear and whisper, “Spiral.”

She chokes on saliva and cigarette smoke. Sharp, staccato coughs escape her chest as covers her mouth and bends forward. Her eyes roll and her head tilts so she can look at me.

“I thought he was dead…” After catching her breath, she stands straight and begins looking around the room. “I hope he’s not here. Yeesh. Talk about a buzzkill.”

“He’s quite dead,” we say as our back straightens. “All skeleton and goo at this point, I imagine.”

“Well, thank god for small favors,” she snipes. “I’m going to take a wild guess and say you’re his daughter I’ve heard so much about. Imagine my surprise when I found out that monster had not one but two children. I feel bad for the women he slept with.”

This bitch.

You’re wondering what egregious transgression she must have committed against dad to earn her way on his (s)hit list. He said she was rude and lied about title opportunities in order to get him to sign with Valor. These may not sound like crimes worthy of the death penalty, but what you don’t understand about our father is he had a very black and white view on the world. There was nothing he hated more than a hypocrite and a liar, and Vanessa is a prime example of both.

She also sued him for calling her a soul-sucking cunt on twitter after he quit. They settled out of court.

“So,” she says after blowing a stream of smoke through the side of her mouth. “Why did you go through the trouble of sneaking into my private party?”

“Well,” we say, moving a little closer to her so our arm touches hers on the bar. “I was going to kill you with a candlestick in the conservatory, but then I saw you in this little bunny outfit and I can’t bring myself to do it.”

She giggles like a schoolgirl as White Rabbit peaks. Her hand falls on mine and she goes onto her tippy toes to make sure we hear over the music. “Come with me. Let’s chat.”

Vanessa leads us through the drunks and fields who are whistling and cheering at the deejay as if he himself performed the song. Out of the cuddle room she turns right and walks down the dark hallway. It ends at an arched door with six square panes of glass. It creaks when she opens it.

“It’s quieter out here,” she says, then steps out into the cool night air while removing her mask. She leaves it on the round patio table on the way to the rail. The balcony overlooks the backyard where guests continue to mingle, drink and celebrate. Our hands ache at the thought of shoving her over, sending her flopping down on the party goers.

“Remind me, what’s your name?”

We come forward to stand next to her. Her cigarette case is sitting on the railing. We say, “Yelena,” trying our best to contain our murderous desires, but the curious way the words flutter out of our mouth still draws from her a curious, but cautious interest.

“Yelena,” she says, imitating our sing-songy voice with a perked brow. Without the mask, and in the warm glow of the strings of Edison bulbs, we see the wrinkles under her makeup but they are few and far between. Nothing about her betrays her nearly sixty years of life.

“So why are you here? No bullshit.”

“I have a letter for you.” Our hand slips inside our jacket, this time to fetch an envelope with MS. BYRNE written on the front. We hand it over and say, “My father wrote this for you, shortly before his death.”

“You’re kidding,” she says.

He didn’t write it. We wrote it.

“Didn’t he die, like, three years ago?”

“Not long before his death, he grew a little sentimental. I know, it doesn’t sound like the Spiral you knew, but the tumor in his brain had an effect on him. He wrote a number of letters but I only discovered them recently when clearing out his house before it goes on the market.”

She trades us her cigarette for the envelope, then takes the letter out and unfolds it. She begins reading—stern at first, and suspicious, but then her features soften and her other hand touches her face. Is that genuine emotion? It’s hard to tell with shallow people like her. They’re like psychopaths without the fun.

The letter is one big long apology for all the hell he put her through and for the mean things he said about her over the years. It was hard for us to write without dying from the hilarity.

We place the black pipe between our lips and take a long drag of the cigarette as her eyes lift from the scrawled writing. “This is…unexpected,” she says and slips the letter back into the envelope. “Do you know what it says?”

“No,” we lie. “I didn’t think it was my business.”

“It’s not like the man I knew. Being so close to the end, it must have put a lot of things into perspective.”

We won’t bother you with the details. Basically an entire page of it wasn’t you, it was me. We hand the cigarette back to her. It’s little more than a stub with ash clinging to the end.

“Thank you for this,” she says. “I never expected him to accept responsibility for all he put me through.”

“He was a proud man,” we say while looking out into the night sky. Is that a tear? Awh. “Even as his daughter, it was hard to get through that shell. No one knew him, deep down, the way I did, and it’s a shame. He was a good man underneath it all.”

We wipe our cheek before looking back down at her. Her arms snake under our arms and around our back. She embraces us. Our arms slip over her and for nearly a minute there are no words.

With a deep breath she pulls away and then smiles at us warmly. “I’m glad you came. We can talk some more but first I need to visit the ladies room. Care to join? I need a little bump after that.”

Cocaine? Yes please—

NO. Don’t get distracted.

“I’m good. I’ll wait out here for you.”

“Okay,” she says and reaches for her cigarette case.

“Do you mind,” we ask as our hand moves to her hand. “I quit a few years ago but a cigarette really sounds good right now.”

Her white teeth beam between her smiling lips. “Of course. Help yourself. Have one ready for me when I get back, okay?” The holder and the case are left on the rail, but the letter she leaves on the table with her mask. We wait until her figure is no longer visible through the glass before turning our back to the door. The case unclasps and opens. Inside is a row of six hand-rolled cigarettes and a slender lighter.

And now for our last trick…

We kick our right boot up on the rail. Bending forward, we reach down to tug up the pant leg to reveal a small, leather pouch taped to our ankle. Sticking out of the top is a long, narrow plastic container. We pry it open after our boot steps down.

Inside is a syringe filled with 0.5 milliliters of glycerol solution mixed with palytoxin we extracted from the coral at the office. We’re not going to tell you how we did it—curiosity killed the cat—but it was surprisingly simple.

One cigarette is selected and inserted into her holder. We remove the cap off the needle, careful not to come anywhere close to touching it, and then push it down into the cigarette about halfway. Our thumb then presses on the plunger until every last drop has been soaked into the tobacco. The glycerol will quickly evaporate, leaving only the toxin.

The cap is replaced on the syringe, the barrel goes back into the case and then returns to the ankle sheath. We leave the prepared cigarette and the etched case on the table and take the letter since it’s there. We make our way back through the house, never crossing her path again, and retrace our steps to the back gate. After a knock, the heavy door whines on its hinges.

The security guard says as I step outside, “Done already?”

“Yup. I’m partied out. Time to get home.” We take our burner phone out and order another Uber. The pickup marker is moved down the street, but not too far, because our feet are not happy in these heels.

Before we start walking, he stops me. “Hey, that’s a great costume, by the way. Who are you supposed to be?”

We turn but continue walking backward. “You don’t recognize me?”

“Nah. I don’t really know freaky white people shit.”

We crack up. Hard. Turning forward, we walk away, but not before yelling back at him.

“We’re the Woman Who Laughs!”