Verses and Velvet

The backstage hallway of The Velvet Lounge. Ellis walked it on Thursdays the way some people walk into church — not with reverence exactly, but with the muscle memory of someone who'd stopped questioning why they kept showing up.

A folding chair sat outside dressing room B. Metal legs, rust-colored tape wrapped around one armrest where the padding had split. It appeared every Thursday in the same spot, angled slightly toward the door, and no one on staff had ever admitted to putting it there. Ellis sat down and opened the notebook — soft-covered, blue ink throughout, the spine cracked in three places. Whole stanzas crossed out and rewritten in the margins, with arrows pointing to where they should go, and at least two places where Ellis had argued with a previous draft in handwriting so small it looked like conspiracy.

The dressing room door was open about a foot. Inside, five mirrors lit with bare bulbs. Krystal was doing her eyeliner. Jade had her feet up on the counter, scrolling her phone. Bex was stretching her calves against the wall in clear platform heels.

"Oh shit, it's Thursday already?"

Bex didn't look up from her stretch.

She waved her phone toward the hallway.

"Poetry Thursday."

Ellis lifted a hand through the gap in the door. Half a wave. The kind you give neighbors you're not sure you're on waving terms with.

She appeared from somewhere deeper in the room, retying the sash on a black silk robe. Her stage makeup was half-finished — one eye done, one eye bare — and she looked at Ellis through the door gap with her chin slightly raised, the way someone checks a parking meter they suspect has already expired.

"I'm exactly on time. You're all late."

"We're at work. You're the one sitting in a hallway with a notebook."

Ellis turned to a page near the middle. Dog-eared, ink smudged where a thumb had pressed the same line over and over. The poem was fourteen lines — not a sonnet, just fourteen lines that happened to be the right number. It was about a gas station at 2 AM, and the woman behind the counter who called everyone 'baby,' and how sometimes the most generous thing a stranger could do was pretend you looked fine.

Ellis read it. Not performing, not mumbling. Just the voice of someone who'd written the thing and knew where the weight was.

When it was done, Krystal's eyeliner pencil was still hovering a half-inch from her lid. Bex had stopped stretching. Jade's phone screen had gone dark in her hand.

"The part about the fluorescent lights. 'Buzzing like they're trying to say something but forgot the language.'"

"Yeah. That one took me a while."

Savannah had settled onto the arm of the dressing room couch during the reading, one bare foot tucked under her. She didn't say anything. She retied her robe again — it didn't need retying — and stood up to finish her other eye.

Ellis closed the notebook. Pressed both palms flat against the cover and stared at the hallway wall, where someone had taped a health department notice next to a photo booth strip of Jade and Bex making faces.

She said it to her own reflection, adjusting a false lash.

"What do you mean?"

"The poem. All the details — the gas station, the Slurpee machine, the woman's acrylic nails. None of that's the poem. The poem's the last two lines. Everything else is just making sure you're in the room when they hit."

Ellis opened the notebook again. Read the last two lines silently. Closed it.

"Yeah. That's exactly right."

From the main floor, the DJ's voice bled through the walls — muffled, all bass and vowels. Savannah stood, shook out her hair, and something in her posture reorganized. Shoulders back. Chin different. She became the version of herself that made money, and the transition was so seamless it was like watching someone step behind a scrim.

Ellis's thumb found the corner of the notebook page and bent it back and forth, back and forth, until the crease went white.

She said it over her shoulder, already halfway through the door to the main floor. Bex and Jade followed, Jade still looking at her phone, Bex mouthing something to herself that might have been the line about fluorescent lights.

Ellis sat in the folding chair in the empty hallway. The dressing room lights were still on. A curling iron was still plugged in. From beyond the door, the first bass drop of someone's set rattled the wall. Ellis opened the notebook to a fresh page, uncapped a pen, and wrote nothing. Just sat there with the pen hovering, like the right word was a bird that might land if everything stayed still enough.

The pen still hovered. The page was still blank. From beyond the wall, the bass thumped through someone's first song, and Ellis capped the pen and sat back in the folding chair, listening to the building work around the silence.

Inside the dressing room, Krystal had finished one eye. The other remained bare, giving her face an asymmetry that made her look like two different people having a disagreement. She was staring at her reflection without seeing it. Bex had slipped out during Savannah's set introduction — Ellis had heard the click of platforms heading toward the floor — and Jade's counter space sat empty, phone charger coiled like a shed skin.

Ellis leaned forward in the folding chair, elbows on knees, notebook dangling from one hand.

"Hmm."

"The fluorescent lights line — you mentioned that. But what about the rest of it? The whole thing."

Krystal set the eyeliner down on the counter. Carefully, like it might roll. She turned on her stool to face the door — face the gap where Ellis sat — and her fingers laced together in her lap.

"You really asking?"

"I'm really asking."

She looked at the ceiling for a moment. Not performing thought — actually thinking.

"Okay. The woman behind the counter. You wrote her like she's doing you a favor by not seeing you. Like the kindness is in the looking away."

"That's — yeah. That's the idea."

She unlaced her fingers and pressed her palms flat against her thighs, steadying something.

Ellis sat back. The folding chair creaked, and the sound was very loud in the hallway.

"We do that here, you know. Every night. Somebody sits down and you figure out in about four seconds what they need you to be. Happy, bored, impressed, whatever. And you give them that. And they think it's just — natural. They think you're just like that."

Ellis's hand had gone still on the notebook cover. Not gripping it. Just resting there, like the weight of the hand was enough.

"I didn't think of it that way."

She said it without edge. A correction, not an accusation.

From the main floor, the song changed — something slower, with a piano loop that leaked through the walls like water through plaster. Bex's platforms clicked back down the hallway. She edged past Ellis's chair with a murmured "scuse me" and dropped into the dressing room, pulling bobby pins from her hair one at a time and lining them up on the counter like evidence.

"What'd I miss."

"Literary criticism."

She stretched her neck to one side, then the other, and started re-pinning.

"Krystal. Can I ask you something else?"

"You're going to anyway."

"Is there something you want me to read? Something specific. Longer, shorter, different — I don't know. I just bring whatever I've been working on, but I never actually asked what you all want to hear."

Krystal looked at Bex in the mirror. Bex looked back. Something passed between them that Ellis couldn't read — the shorthand of people who shared a dressing room five nights a week.

She said it to her own reflection, fingers working a pin into place.

"Long."

"Yeah. Something that takes a minute. Everyone always reads the short stuff — the punchy little mic-drop ones. Read something that trusts us to stay."

Ellis opened the notebook. Flipped past the dog-eared page, past crossed-out stanzas and margin arguments, to somewhere near the back. Wrote something small — just a few words in blue ink — and closed it.

"Same time next week?"

Ellis stood, tucked the notebook under one arm, and pushed the folding chair flush against the wall. It would be gone by morning. It would be back by next Thursday. The hallway smelled like hairspray and industrial cleaner, and from somewhere past the door, Savannah's music was ending.

Ellis didn't leave. The hallway emptied out around the folding chair — Bex back to the floor, Krystal finishing her other eye, the dressing room settling into the between-sets quiet that smelled like hairspray and warm bulbs. Ellis uncapped the pen and set it against the blank page, and this time the ink moved.

It came in pieces. A woman behind a counter. A fluorescent hum. But the gas station was gone — Ellis was writing something else now, something that started where Krystal's words had landed and kept going. The pen moved fast, then slow, then fast again. Lines got crossed out before they were finished. New ones started in the margins. Ellis wrote the word 'invisible' and scratched through it so hard the paper tore, then wrote 'chosen' above it in letters barely legible.

The poem was about hands. Hands that read a stranger's need before the stranger knew it themselves. Hands that built a person out of nothing — out of posture and eye contact and the tilt of a laugh — and then dismantled her at the end of a shift and drove home in sweatpants. It didn't mention the club. It didn't mention grace. It used the word 'architect' three times, and each time it meant something different.

Krystal appeared in the doorframe, both eyes done now, a silk kimono over her next outfit. She leaned one shoulder against the jamb.

"I'm still here. Can I — will you listen to something?"

Krystal glanced back into the dressing room. Jade had returned at some point, plugging her phone in without a word, and was now peeling the case off and snapping it back on with metronomic regularity. Bex sat on the counter itself, legs dangling, tapping her heel against the cabinet below — a restless percussion that filled the gaps between bass drops from the floor.

"Go ahead."

Ellis read it. The poem was rough — first-draft rough, with places where the rhythm stumbled and one stanza that was really two stanzas pretending to be married. But the center held. The hands in the poem built faces for strangers who'd never know the construction was happening. The hands were skilled and tired and precise. The last line called them 'the most fluent liars, telling only the truth.'

Silence. The cabinet under Bex went still. Jade's phone case stayed on.

Krystal's jaw had tightened — not anger, something closer to the expression of someone hearing their own voice played back on a recording.

"It's not done. The middle section doesn't—"

"I know what it's not. I'm telling you what it is."

Savannah came down the hallway from the floor, heels in one hand, barefoot on the concrete. She'd shed the stage version of herself somewhere between here and the curtain — her shoulders had dropped, her walk had changed. She stopped when she saw Ellis still in the chair, notebook open, pen uncapped.

She didn't frame it as a question. She straightened the health department notice on the wall — it was already straight — and leaned against the opposite side of the doorframe from Krystal.

"Krystal said something last week that I couldn't stop thinking about. About labor. About what it costs to see someone that clearly and make it look like nothing."

"Read it."

"I just read it to—"

"Read it again."

Ellis read it again. The same stumbles, the same rough seams. But the room was different now — Savannah standing barefoot in the hallway, Krystal still against the jamb, Bex and Jade inside the bright mirror-lit room, all of them listening to a poem about the work they did that nobody called work.

When Ellis finished, Savannah was quiet for a long time. She turned one of her heels over in her hand, examining the sole like she'd stepped on something.

"The ending's missing."

"I know."

"You don't, though. You ended it on the liar line because it sounds good. But the poem isn't about lying. You just haven't figured out what it's about yet."

Ellis looked down at the page. The ink was still wet in places, smudged where a palm had rested too soon. Savannah was right. The liar line was a door Ellis had closed because the room behind it was dark and unfurnished.

Bex had pulled her knees up on the counter, arms wrapped around her shins.

"If I can finish it."

She pushed off the doorframe and walked into the dressing room, dropping her heels by her station. She sat down at the mirror and began removing pins from her hair, lining them up along the counter's edge with a precision that belonged to a different task entirely. She didn't look back.

Savannah didn't answer right away. She set her heels down on the concrete, side by side, toes pointed toward the dressing room like they might walk there without her. Then she pulled the elastic from her hair, wound it around her fingers, released it, wound it again.

"I'm serious. You said the poem isn't about lying. So what is it about?"

"Why do you think I know?"

"Because you read it better than I wrote it. Twice now."

Savannah leaned against the hallway wall, arms crossed, stage makeup still sharp under the fluorescent strips. She looked past Ellis at the dressing room door, where Krystal had gone quiet against the frame and Bex had drawn her knees up on the counter, chin resting on them.

"It's about need."

"Need."

"You used 'architect' three times. First time it's skill — she builds something. Second time it's sacrifice — she builds it out of herself. Third time it's — what. What's the third one, Ellis?"

Ellis looked down at the page. The third 'architect' sat in the final stanza, circled once in blue ink with no annotation.

"I don't know. I thought it was irony."

"It's need. She builds because someone needs her to. And the poem won't say whether that's beautiful or fucked up, so it hides behind a clever last line about liars."

The dressing room went still in a way Ellis didn't check. Eyes on the page, on the word 'architect' with its single blue circle, on the wet ink that had smudged into something that looked like a bruise.

"Not everything has to be about the poet, though. Right? Maybe the hands are just hands. Maybe she likes being good at it."

Jade said it from inside the dressing room without looking up, her phone dark in her lap, and the sentence landed in the hallway like a rock thrown into a pond nobody realized they were standing in.

"It can be about both."

"Then the poem should say that instead of making it tragic."

Ellis uncapped the pen. Wrote the word 'need' in the margin next to the third architect, then a question mark, then crossed out the question mark. From somewhere beyond the wall, a muffled cheer rose and fell — someone's set was going well.

"She's not wrong."

"Which one?"

"Either. Both. The woman in your poem — the one building faces for strangers — you wrote her like she's losing something every time she does it. But what if she's not? What if she's just at work?"

"Then the whole poem collapses."

"Or it gets honest."

Ellis set the pen down on the chair's armrest, in the groove where the rust-colored tape had split. Four women, two of them in stage clothes and two of them between versions of themselves, all telling a poet that the poem was flinching from its own subject. And the poet sitting in a hallway on a chair that shouldn't exist, knowing they were right.

"So the ending needs to hold both. The skill and the cost. Without deciding which one wins."

"Now you're getting somewhere."

She picked up her heels and walked barefoot into the dressing room. Straightened Krystal's eyeliner pencil on the counter as she passed — it hadn't been crooked — and sat down at her mirror without looking back.

Ellis stared at the page. 'Need' sat in the margin, naked without its question mark. The third architect waited in its blue circle. Somewhere in the gap between Jade's correction and Savannah's diagnosis, the poem had cracked open, and the thing inside it was not what Ellis had put there.

Bex unfolded from the counter and stretched her arms overhead, rolling her neck, already shifting back toward the floor. She paused in the doorway, one hand on the frame.

"That's the long one. Finish it."

Ellis picked up the pen and wrote the word 'both' underneath 'need,' and sat with it.

The notebook was open to the architect poem. Ellis had been staring at the word 'both' for long enough that the blue ink had stopped looking like letters and started looking like a stain. The hallway had emptied in stages — Bex back to the floor, Jade following a few minutes later with her phone plugged into a portable charger like an IV drip — until it was just Ellis on the folding chair and the sounds of Krystal and Savannah inside dressing room B.

Krystal came out first, finished and stage-ready, both eyes symmetrical now. She touched Ellis's shoulder as she passed — brief, the way you'd touch a coworker's desk on your way out — and her heels clicked toward the curtain until the hallway swallowed the sound.

Ellis stood. The folding chair stayed where it was, angled toward the door, rust-colored tape catching the light. Through the gap, Savannah sat at her mirror in a silk robe, removing bobby pins one at a time and dropping them into a small ceramic dish. She'd taken off her stage heels. Without them she was a different shape — closer to the ground, shoulders less architectural.

"Can I ask you something that might change this?"

Savannah's hand paused over the dish. Then she pulled another pin, dropped it, pulled the next.

"You can ask."

Ellis stepped into the doorframe. Not through it. One shoulder against the jamb, notebook held against one hip, standing in the threshold the way they'd stood in it for weeks — half in, half out, belonging to neither room.

"Do you write?"

The pins kept coming. Savannah didn't speed up, didn't slow down. She met Ellis's eyes in the mirror, and her face did something complicated — not a flinch, not a smile. A reorganization. The stage makeup was still on, contour and highlight creating a face slightly to the left of her actual one, and in the mirror the two versions overlapped without quite resolving.

"I work here, Ellis."

"That's not what I asked."

Savannah pulled the last pin. The dish was full. She set it at the back of the counter and turned on the stool to face Ellis directly — not through the mirror, not at an angle. Her hands settled in her lap, then one of them reached over and straightened the mascara wand on Krystal's side of the counter. It had been perfectly aligned.

"Why are you asking me that?"

"Because nobody reads a poem the way you do without having tried to write one. The thing you said about the third architect — about need — that's not a reader's observation. That's a writer who knows what it feels like to hide behind a good line because the honest one is harder."

Savannah's jaw tightened. She smoothed the front of her robe across her thighs — a long, deliberate pass, pressing out wrinkles that weren't there.

"And if I said yes. What happens to this?"

"I don't know."

"That's the first honest thing you've said tonight."

She turned back to the mirror. Started removing her stage makeup with a wipe, dragging it down one cheek in a single stroke. The contour came away and her face simplified — became younger, less certain, closer to something Ellis hadn't seen before.

"I write. Sometimes. It's not — it's not like yours. It's not finished things in notebooks. It's notes on my phone at four in the morning. Stuff I delete half the time."

Ellis didn't move.

"You can't ask to see it."

"I know."

The makeup wipe paused against her other cheek. She was watching Ellis in the mirror again, and the asymmetry — one side bare, one side still painted — made her look like someone caught between shifts.

"This thing we do. These Thursdays. It works because you're the poet and I'm the audience. You know that, right? The second I'm also a poet, it's — it becomes something else. Something with stakes."

"It already has stakes."

"Not the same kind."

She finished the other cheek. Her whole face was bare now — no contour, no highlight, no constructed version. Just skin and the faint indentations where the pins had pressed. She dropped the wipe on the counter and sat very still.

"I wrote something about the folding chair."

Ellis's thumb pressed into the cracked spine of the notebook.

"About how it shows up every Thursday and nobody claims it. About how that's — how that's a kind of permission that doesn't ask for anything back. I wrote it on a receipt in my car and then I put it in my glove compartment and I haven't looked at it since."

The hallway was quiet. No bass from the floor — between songs, or between sets, or between something. Four empty mirrors reflected the dressing room back at itself. Savannah's hands were in her lap, fingers interlaced, completely still. Not adjusting anything. Not fixing anything. Just holding herself.

"That sounds like it might be a poem."

"It sounds like a receipt in a glove compartment."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive."

Savannah stood. She was shorter than Ellis without the heels, and the difference was a specific, physical thing — she had to angle her chin up slightly to hold eye contact, and she did, and neither of them treated it as a metaphor.

"If I ever show you something I wrote. It's not because I want notes. You understand? It's not a workshop. It's not you helping me. It would just be — showing you."

"Okay."

She walked past Ellis, close enough that her shoulder brushed the notebook, and out into the hallway. She stopped at the folding chair. Looked at it for a moment — the rust-colored tape, the angle, the way it faced the door like it was waiting for a conversation. Then she folded it. Picked it up. Carried it three steps down the hallway and set it back down, still folded, leaning against the wall.

"What are you doing?"

"It goes in the supply closet. I bring it out on Thursdays."

She said it without turning around. Then she picked up the folded chair and walked it down the hallway toward the closet at the far end, bare feet on concrete, and Ellis stood in the empty doorframe of dressing room B holding a notebook full of poems that someone had been building a chair for, week after week, without ever saying so.

Ellis walked the backstage hallway toward the exit. Past the supply closet — door ajar, the folding chair's leg visible inside like a bookmark holding a page no one was reading.

The back door opened onto the parking lot. Thursday night, almost one in the morning, the air carrying that specific late-hours cold that felt cleaner than it was. The Velvet Lounge's neon bled pink across the asphalt in long smears, and the lot was half-empty — dancers' cars clustered near the back door, customers' trucks and sedans scattered closer to the road. A security light near the dumpster had been out for weeks. Nobody had fixed it.

Ellis sat down on the curb. The concrete was cold through denim. The notebook went on one knee, pen clipped to the cover, and for a while that was the whole scene — a person on a curb outside a strip club at one in the morning, holding a notebook.

Headlights swept across the asphalt and found Ellis for a moment — a passing car on the access road, gone before its driver could register what they'd seen or make it into a story. The neon buzzed back into place.

Ellis opened the notebook to the architect poem. The word 'need' in the margin. The word 'both' underneath it. The third architect in its blue circle. The ending that wasn't an ending yet. Ellis uncapped the pen and drew a single line through 'the most fluent liars, telling only the truth.' Capped the pen.

The back door opened. Savannah came out carrying her heels in one hand and a gym bag over the opposite shoulder, face scrubbed clean, hair down. She saw Ellis on the curb and stopped. Her keys were already in her other hand.

She stood there with keys in one hand and heels in the other.

"You're writing out here now?"

"I crossed out the ending."

"Good."

She didn't sit down. Ellis didn't ask her to. The neon hummed its one pink note and the parking lot held them both at a distance that was closer than the hallway but farther than the dressing room mirror.

"The receipt's still in the glove compartment. In case you were wondering."

"I wasn't going to ask."

"I know. That's why I'm telling you."

She shifted the gym bag on her shoulder. Looked out at the access road, then back at Ellis on the curb with the notebook open to a poem with its ending crossed out. Her car was three spaces away. She didn't move toward it.

"Next Thursday."

"Bring the ending. And Ellis —"

She paused. Adjusted the strap of her gym bag where it cut across her collarbone.

"The chair'll be out."

She walked to her car. The engine turned over, the taillights flared red against the pink neon, and she pulled out of the lot without rushing. Ellis watched the car turn onto the access road and disappear behind the tree line that separated the club from the Wendy's next door.

The parking lot settled. Ellis looked down at the notebook. The crossed-out ending was still visible under the line — blue ink doesn't hide easily under blue ink. Above it, the third architect waited in its circle. Below it, 'need' and 'both' sat in the margin like two people sharing a curb.

Ellis uncapped the pen. Wrote, in the space where the old ending had been, two lines. Then stopped. Read them. Didn't cross them out.

The neon buzzed. The pen was capped. The notebook closed on a poem that held both rooms.

A week passed. Thursday came the way Thursdays had been coming — with the notebook in Ellis's jacket pocket and the drive across town and the particular feeling of pulling into the lot at The Velvet Lounge that was not quite anticipation and not quite dread but occupied the same organ.

The folding chair was out. Ellis didn't touch it. Walked past it, into dressing room B, and stood inside the room for the first time — not in the doorframe, not in the hallway. Inside. Back against the wall between Krystal's mirror and Jade's, the notebook open to the architect poem with its new ending.

They came in between sets the way they always did. Bex first, pulling off her wig cap and dropping it on the counter. Krystal next, already mid-sentence about a customer who'd tried to pay for a dance with a Chick-fil-A gift card. Jade last, silent, earbuds out for once.

"You're inside."

"I'm inside."

Bex didn't comment further. She sat on the counter — her spot, claimed through repetition — and pulled one knee up, waiting.

Savannah didn't come from the floor. She was already there, at her mirror, in street clothes — jeans, a flannel shirt with the sleeves pushed past her elbows. Not working tonight. She'd come in on her night off, and nobody mentioned it, and the not-mentioning filled the room like weather.

"I finished it."

"Then read it."

Ellis read the architect poem from the beginning. The whole thing — the hands behind the counter, the fluorescent hum, the woman who built strangers into the versions of themselves they needed to see. The first architect, skill. The second, cost. The third, need. The poem moved through all of it without flinching this time, without hiding behind cleverness, and when it reached the place where the old ending had been crossed out, Ellis's voice found the new lines without hesitation.

The new ending didn't choose. The architect builds because she's good at it and because it costs her and because someone needs her to, and the poem held all three in the same breath the way a hand holds a match — knowing it will go out, knowing it gives light, not confusing one fact for the other. The final word was 'morning.' Not 'truth.' Not 'liar.' Just the ordinary thing that comes after a long night of work.

Ellis closed the notebook.

The room was quiet, but Ellis didn't catalog it. Kept looking at the closed cover, at the cracked spine, at the blue ink stain on the heel of one hand.

"Yeah."

That was all she said. She slid off the counter and touched Ellis's arm on her way out — two fingers, brief — and was gone. Jade followed without a word, though she paused long enough to unplug her phone from the wall charger, and the pause said what it needed to say. Krystal lingered at her mirror, recapping a lipstick she hadn't used.

"The ending's right."

She left. The hallway swallowed her footsteps, and then it was Ellis and Savannah in a dressing room that smelled like setting spray and the particular warmth of lights left on too long.

Savannah was holding a receipt. She'd taken it from the front pocket of her jeans at some point during the reading — Ellis hadn't seen when — and she was holding it with both hands the way someone holds a photograph they're deciding whether to turn around.

She set it on the counter between them. Face up. Blue ballpoint on thermal paper, the ink already fading at the edges the way receipts do. Eight lines. No title.

"I'm not asking for notes."

"I know."

Ellis read it standing up, leaning over the counter, close enough to see where the pen had pressed hard and where it had barely touched. The poem was about a chair that appeared without explanation. It was about the act of placing something for someone who hadn't asked and might not come. It was eight lines long and the fourth line broke Ellis open because it described the weight of an empty chair as heavier than a full one, and it was right, and Ellis had never thought to write that.

Ellis straightened up. Savannah was watching — not in the mirror this time. Directly. Her hands were flat on her thighs, pressing nothing smooth.

"The fourth line."

"I know which one."

Neither of them said anything else about it. There was nothing to workshop, nothing to fix, nothing to reframe. The poem was on the counter and they'd both read it and that was the whole transaction.

"I should go. I'm not even supposed to be here tonight."

"Savannah."

She stopped in the doorway. Not the hallway side — the room side. She was leaving from inside the room, which meant she had to pass Ellis, which meant for a moment they were standing closer than the arrangement had ever required.

"Thank you for the chair."

Her mouth did something that wasn't a smile. She reached out and took the receipt off the counter, folded it once along a crease that already existed, and put it back in her pocket.

"See you Thursday, Ellis."

She walked out through the hallway. Ellis heard her stop — a pause in the footsteps, the particular sound of metal and hinges — and understood she was folding the chair, carrying it back to the supply closet. Putting the room away until next week.

Ellis stood alone in dressing room B. Four mirrors, four stations, four versions of the room reflected back with no one in them. The notebook was closed. The poem was finished. Somewhere in Savannah's pocket, a receipt carried eight lines that Ellis would think about for a long time.

Ellis capped the pen, pocketed the notebook, and walked out through the back door. The parking lot was cold and mostly empty. The dead security light by the dumpster still hadn't been fixed. Across the tree line, the Wendy's drive-through was closed, its menu board dark for the first time Ellis could remember.

Ellis got in the car, set the notebook on the passenger seat, and sat with the key in the ignition for a moment. Then turned it. The engine caught. The headlights swept across the asphalt and found nothing but parking lines and the back door of a strip club where a poet had just read a poem about architects to the architects themselves, and one of them had answered with a poem of her own, and it was Thursday, and it would be Thursday again.

Ellis pulled out of the lot.