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Four Nails for Pietro
The girl’s hands wrestle nervously in her lap like blind, albino spiders as she watches us from the rear of a crowded audience. Her eyes follow us hungrily.
She’s going to join us after the show. I know it. I’ve learned to spot girls like her almost immediately. It’s not difficult to do, really. I just look for the ones that remind me of myself when I was her age.
She looks sad and afraid, like most kids in dreamless coal towns. She sees a troupe of vibrant young women dancing in a world more beautiful than anything she’s ever imagined, and she sees a potential escape from her bleak destiny.
There’s no way for her to know that it’s all a lie. Every last thread of it.
Pietro’s Shimmering Veil hangs before us like a wispy curtain as we dance. Colors ebb and flow in the deviled material as it visually transforms everything happening upon the stage. To the audience, it makes us dancers look like glowing, angelic ballerinas pirouetting through a world of soft fire and blossoming stars.
The illusion is perfect. The truth it conceals is undetectable.
The audience doesn’t know the reality of our exhausted eyes or emaciated faces, nor the rags that ornament our bones. They can’t see the rats scuttling through the dank darkness around us. And, of course, they cannot see Pietro standing…
