The Beginning of the End

Miss Honoré started it, when Rachel came in one night, soaked and running late.

It had been a rainy year, as has been mentioned. Rachel had actually purchased an umbrella, after the third storm in a row hit precisely as she parked her car in the last free spot in the Grand Hotel’s employee parking lot, from which one could, on clear days, actually see the employees’ entrance shining mirage-like on the horizon. Her $25, super-compact, guaranteed to survive a hurricane purchase broke the moment she tested it out in her living room. Her roommate, Helgi, a six-foot-two Amazon whom the rain would never, ever dare to dampen, had laughed and suggested she lean it by the front door, where she’d be sure to remember to take it back and exchange it. Three weeks later, the broken umbrella was still leaning there, and aside from tripping over it as she rushed out of the door each night, Rachel had had no more contact with it.

Tonight, as she leaned over Miss Honoré’s desk to sign in, simultaneously tilting her head back so her hair wouldn’t drip onto Miss Honoré ’s papers and also leaning sideways so her bag wouldn’t slip off her left shoulder and thump into the side of the desk, her boss looked up at her with a gleam in her eye.

“Rachel,” she said, stretching out her hand to tap, tap, tap her cigarette against the enormous marble ashtray that weighed down one side of her desk, “I was looking through your file today.”

Rachel had learned long ago not to speak when she came to the office. Miss Honoré usually didn’t. She didn’t, in fact, generally acknowledge her dancers in any way, unless she were handing out critiques.

“You— were?” Rachel stumbled.

“We were cleaning out old files, Gina and I,” Honoré told her with the barest of nods toward her assistant, sitting at her own tiny desk in the office’s darkest corner. Gina stared up like a scared cave creature from the shadows. “Just came across it,” Honoré went on. “I’d forgotten how long you’d been with us.”

Her words rang and echoed. Old files. How long. How loooooooooong. They twisted through the air in the office.

Rachel and Miss Honoré looked at each other. Miss Honoré smiled, slightly, and a tiny wisp of smoke trickled from her lips, the twitching tail-tip of a struggling rat she’d swallowed. Rachel felt definitively turned to stone, caught in Medusa’s gaze on the stained and threadbare carpet.

“It’s been five years,” she mumbled.

“Yes, seems like no time, doesn’t it? Contracts go by like nothing, when you’ve been around awhile. It’s the same old story.” Miss Honoré smirked, or grinned, or anyway stretched her lips at Rachel.

Old. There was that word again. “I guess.”

Miss Honoré nodded, and after waiting for a frozen eternity, Rachel realized the conversation had ended. She fled. Gina’s cave-creature eyes followed her, but Honoré had moved on to other things.

NEXT POST: A HOT QUEEN IN THE DESERT (Monday 9/14)