Rehearsal Notes

Category B: Third Place (2023) Monash Short Story Writing Competition
Author: Aditi Acharla

The trunk opened with a click. I shut my eyes and turned away, wanting another moment to savour any remaining breaths of her without the invasion of her privacy. I did not even know where I was to take this to, who to give it away to. I was alone in the entire theatre. Second by second, I looked back again. Above everything was pale pink tissue paper. Sweeping it aside, it revealed a shallow surface filled with polaroids and short, square paper with writing on them. I took the latter first. They were not letters, but notes. Agnes’ notes. They weren’t dated yet even so I could have been able to tell what day she was talking about, who she was playing, where I was. I read another one, similar to the last. A third one that recited one of her lines from The Bride of Messina. I stopped at the fourth one. I was fixated:

I am growing old. I am too old. Ancient to modern-archaic to integration. One: fix creases of skin. It seems the world is changing with my age too, developing with rapidity-crossing off each day as if it is a second. Two: ask Johnson for treatments. Everything is changing. I cannot stop it and myself. Three: change with everything.

I never took into account how old Agnes was. All I only saw was her. She was barely anything from her gleaming personality, the smile that turned my hope into permanence, the laughter pattering down like children’s footsteps in a large, country house where we both weren’t so lonely anymore. But, I too could feel myself shifting with the days of the city. The mementos of Agnes caught me in a whirlwind. I spread them on the carpet of the room, attempting to recapture everything and burn it into recital. A polaroid of her sitting by a table of a cafe with the manager across from her, both engaged in a heated debate. A note lamenting her age, mourning her youth: make me young again, make me young, make them cry again. My forehead beat to my heartbeat swallowing a sob. Outside, cars readily zoomed past as gusts of wind overtook the passengers on the side. Structures erect in stone, brick and the rubble of its past to be swept up soon. Agnes on stage as Desdemona. One: acting is the best thing I can do to myself. Two: I do not know how to be anyone. Evening draped over my shoulders through the window.

Then night. I hadn’t eaten anything but I was pouring through Agnes. There was a photograph of the two of us in the mix. My fingers gripped onto it. She and I were side by side, legs draped over the stage. It was after a performance. Everyone had congratulated her and I was the last. She had beckoned for me to come over, patting my back before sitting us down on the stage; she whispered my name, Eden. Then she started talking about everything she had felt during the night. My eyes-glistening in dim light-were focused entirely on her. Memorial-the photograph imparted-of Agnes smiling down at me and me utterly enraptured in love for the first time. A note separate but next to it read: Garden of Eden. A paradise, one not so consumed by development. It is a persona to live in, like the actor does. One: bring her the photograph and coffee. Two: leave her your phone number for company. Three: do not cry when you realise that there is no Garden where we live. There is no Garden, there are no flowers.

I took the trunk back home. Walking twenty minutes from the theatre to my flat. It was not heavy but bearable with a handle at the top to my convenience. My cheeks were still crystallised with tears. My mouth had run dry with cries. I was smiling softly to the sky that had parted from the hour of rain beforehand. The sun had risen minutes ago. Agnes held my hand. I felt warm, soaking in light. The city buzzed into liveliness; machines overturned now back with functionality, grinding screeches of wheels and the static of wire above my hair. It tolled onwards, it was our music. I thought of how young I was, how it was a mimicry of my lack of senses, overall, my distilled desires dissolving null and void. Agnes smiled. A stream of cabs prevented me from crossing the road. Individual voices drowned by upheaval of traffic from the west to the north. In a few more hours, the theatre would open again. I was not the actress. Agnes and I travelled downtown.

One: I can never stop acting even when I retire. Two: I do not want to, because there is no guarantee as to who I’ll be at the end of this. I heard the creak of a bridge in the distance. I tightened my arm against Agnes’. We sunk into the roaring streets.

One: write down everything I have learnt these two decades. Two: retire silently. Three: Garden of Eden is somewhere away from here. Four: Promise myself this. I looked at her.

Agnes was crying. It spilt down over and over and she was trying to laugh through her cries and I seemed to have been laughing as well. She was crying and I was so happy and we had never been further away from the theatre as then. I remember her. I remember her perfectly now. Her head against mine. A metropolis bound to the stage ropes. Her hair in my neck. The camera flash leaving tinges of black in front of me. My palms against hers. Everything about her afire in spotlight. Me, backstage, waiting for her to come to me again, ask me how I was, tell me her history of everything about us. A dismantled set. Agnes let go of my hand. In the modern world we are alive. But we are someone else.