The Weight of Standing Still
Diva Actions stood in the dark wing with her eyes closed, counting her breath the way she had been taught decades ago by a voice coach who no longer remembered her name. In for four. Hold for four. Out for six. The rhythm had outlived the teacher, outlived the studio where she'd first learned it, outlived every version of herself that had needed it less than she needed it now.
Somewhere beyond the curtain, three hundred of the industry's most powerful people were finishing their second round of champagne, and a string quartet was sawing gently through something by Elgar, and a woman in a headset was murmuring numbers into a walkie-talkie that translated, roughly, to *she goes on in ninety seconds.*
Diva smoothed the front of her gown, a column of ink-blue silk that had taken four fittings to hang the way it hung now — as though gravity itself had been consulted and agreed to cooperate. She touched two fingers to her collarbone, checked the clasp of the necklace, checked it again. Her assistant, a nervous, capable young woman named Priya, hovered at her elbow with a compact mirror angled just so.
"You look perfect," Priya whispered, which was, Diva thought, the least useful…