stain
the barn is silent. All eyes are fixed upon the sleeping girl, She lies there, indifferent to their gaze: inert, dreaming, blank, detached. Innocence, some might take it for, the audience seeing her as if for the first time, as if she has been restored, through sleep, to her proper dimensions; she is only a girl, asleep, her hands folded neady on her chest. She looks small. Her monstrous hands look small as well. The people of her town cannot stop gazing at them, at how quietly they lie. They watch her hands with the absorption I of a poet, who cannot bear to look away from his mark on the page, the word he has left there.
hush
from behind the curtain comes a fluttering, and Mme. Cochon steps out onto the stage. Her hair is dishevelled, her wings are askew, but it is with a beautiful degree of poise that she extracts her diary from deep between her breasts. When she opens the book, its pages fan out like a peacocks tail. The audience sighs at this disturbance, as if she were a noisy member in their midst. But she will not be silenced. She says to them: You know me as a woman of science. For months you have seen me at work on this volume, in which I’ve recorded many small and mysterious signs. Now, at last, I wish to share with you my findings. Holding her book in one hand, gathering up her fat in the other, Mme. Cochon sweeps past the half-wit, and like a dainty lady forced to navigate a puddle, she frowns at the girl lying asleep on the stage, and finally steps over her, as though she were of little matter. From the first page of her book, the woman reads: Hush. And together, the neighbors, the brothers and sisters, together they inhale softly and the barn fills with one endless exhalation of breath: Shhhhhhhhhhhhh. It is all about to begin.