Zelda and the Death of All the World
Clark Picone purposely parked on Franklin Street so he and Alice would have to pass the theatre to get to the visitation. Someone had put up a sort of homemade tribute to Benjamin Walker in the box office window: a big piece of posterboard had been decorated with pictures from roles he had appeared in over the years and was temporarily covering over the poster announcing auditions for the next show.
By: Wade Newhouse
The Mott-Wilson Funeral Home was on the block behind the Sheltonville Little Theatre—to get from one to the other you just had to go around the corner, and on busy days they both used the empty lot across from the railroad tracks for overflow parking. Clark Picone purposely parked on Franklin Street so he and Alice would have to pass the theatre to get to the visitation. Someone had put up a sort of homemade tribute to Benjamin Walker in the box office window: a big piece of posterboard had been decorated with pictures from roles he had appeared in over the years and was temporarily covering over the poster announcing auditions for the next show.
It was a small affair. Benjamin Walker had outlived his relatives, so most of the people moving through the funeral home were faces from the theatre community. Too many of them were getting on in years as well; Clark supposed that younger people didn’t take funerals as seriously or maybe just didn’t know how many decades’ worth of performances Benjamin Walker had under his belt. Clark nodded respectfully at a few actors he had worked with in the past year or so, but he wasn’t sure how much his own aging face would have registered as one of a handful of backstage volunteers. Certainly some of the actors recognized him, but many probably wouldn’t have been able to place which show he had last been involved with or what he had done on it. Actors could be so . . . possessive of the little groups they formed in a show. They were talking about other things: You should definitely try out for that. Auditions are next week!
The casket was closed, thankfully, and to avoid thinking about that Clark marveled that they came in standard sizes for all different types of people. “He was a big man,” he murmured to Alice when their turn came to file past. “But everyone gets the same sized coffin.”
“Ssshh. Someone might hear you.”
It was chilly walking back to the car. There were crows in the thin leafless trees and instinctively Clark looked up at them, not knowing how far they roamed in any given day.
“Do you remember a bunch of years back where I helped with the costumes for a musical? Was it Pippin or Anything Goes? I know we did both.”
“Good lord, Clark. How would I know that? I don’t know anything about musicals. Less than you know about costumes!”
Clark shrugged. “I remember Walker standing there—like he was taking up the whole stage. And the light glinting off the buttons, and I was watching from the wings thinking I sewed on those buttons. I wonder if I went through the costume shop if I could recognize that jacket after all this time.”
“I’m sure you have better things to do with your time. Most people start their retirement with big plans. Think fancy!” Alice took his arm the way she always did and as they walked away from the funeral home another small group of actors was going into the front foyer.
They did not attend the burial service. The little cemetery stood by itself on the edge of town, right where the weathered subdivisions petered out and became brittle yellowed farmland, and their house was close enough that Clark was sure they would practically be able to hear the voices carried on the winter air through the trees in their back yard, recited like the script of a play.
In the kitchen, Clark was gathering up old foods from the fridge that it was time to throw away. He pulled some chicken from a leftover cutlet that had gone stale and took half of the last tortilla in the plastic package.
“What are you doing with that stuff?” Alice asked from the kitchen table.
“I’m taking it to Zelda.”
“You and that bird. It doesn’t matter how much food you put out there: he’s not going to be your friend. It doesn’t work like that. You’re just going to attract bugs.”
“It’s the yard. There’s already bugs. And what’s the harm? Maybe she’s out there and maybe she’s hungry and maybe she’ll appreciate it.”
“Do you really hope that bird will bring you something shiny to thank you for giving it a tortilla?”
He had read about stranger things. He had read stories of crows that recognized people for being nice to them—some people who left food for them in parks would find crows waiting at the exact parking space that they frequented. And one family kept finding bits of foil and bottle caps on their back deck after they scared away a cat that was stalking the yard. Of course, Clark had no way of knowing whether Zelda was even a single bird or just whichever crow happened to be in the maple tree from day to day. But he felt like she was looking at him, and he felt like he was building a rapport. He had first seen her, watching him, in one of the big trees in front of the theatre a few years ago. He had waved at her every day during his work on the Glass Menagerie set. Then she started appearing in his yard, holding her head at that strange angle she had that set her apart from the other crows that cawed and fluttered in the autumn.
She was there today, her feathers puffed up against the stiff breeze that had come up. She watched him as if she knew he would show up.
“Hello Zelda! I brought you some things. Where should I put them?”
She turned her head, fixing him with that beady black eye. Staying a respectful distance away, Clark gently positioned the chunks of chicken on the half-tortilla on the ground beneath a different tree some ten yards from the one Zelda was in.
“I’ll leave you to it. And don’t worry—I won’t stare at you while you eat. But hey: what do you know about these auditions coming up? Are they looking for some new blood? Keep your eyes peeled and let me know if you think I should do it. It looks like a pretty serious show—maybe they need someone old to give it some gravitas. Brush up my Shakespeare. And I definitely want you there to see it!” He offered her a cheerful wave, and she considered him. Without looking back, Clark ambled back to the little ranch house where he had lived for thirty-four years. Zelda’s tree had been barely a sapling when he and Alice first bought the house, back when the idea of sticking around for a thirty-year mortgage seemed like a bureaucratic eternity. But trees get stronger as they get older, and little men who work their whole lives as insurance adjustors just get weaker.
Most people start their retirement with big plans. Think fancy!
Zelda waited until Clark was inside before she fluttered down to the food he had left.
The next day they were at the kitchen table again. Clark had pulled out a scrapbook of clippings and programs from shows he had worked on at the Little Theatre, barely covering up the copy of Richard III he had bought, while Alice browsed through some brochures she had picked up from the travel agent’s office.
“Do you remember McAlister Temple? She died in a car wreck, but backstage everyone whispered that she was drunk. People said she was always drunk—even when she was performing.”
He flipped through another stack of programs.
“Oh my god Andrew Kelly. So blasé and handsome. I think I wanted to be him back when I was younger. That’s what I considered star power back then. Everyone said he didn’t even really like acting—just did it to get women.”
“And these are the people you choose to spend your time with.”
“Well not anymore. All the great ones are dead now. None of these kids coming up are anywhere near as good as they were.”
Clark remembered how, while arranging pens and letters and daggers on props tables, he had heard directors making suggestions, laying out blocking, offering line readings. As he scanned the clippings cut from the newspaper he remembered seeing them for the first time and realized how many times he must have read them, because the words unspooled before him now half-memorized. Maybe—but of course he wouldn’t know—this was what it was like for an actor to see their lines weeks, months after the show had closed: not quite remembered anymore but familiar, each word just out of sight until you saw it again and then of course that’s the line. I should have known.
Benjamin walker had been dominating and strong and powerful.
Andrew Kelly had been witty and charming and delightful.
McAlister Temple: winsome and fetching.
Alice was looking for places they could go together with the money she had been saving up. Clark went to the sliding glass door to see whether Zelda might have eaten the food he had put out after the funeral.
“Oh no . . .”
He heaved the door open and stepped gently out on the grass, Alice hanging back in alarm.
A dead crow was lying on its back beneath a tree, pieces of chicken and tortilla scattered around it. The cold January breeze ruffled its black feathers, and its shiny eyes were open to the sky.
“Clark Picone. You poisoned a bird.”
“I did NOT. Oh my god. Poor Zelda. I wonder if she was old too.”
“Well don’t just stand there. Get a shovel and do something with it.”
But Clark was not moving. He brought his hands to his dry lips and blew into them.
“They say that sometimes crows have funerals for one another. Not really funerals. But the rest of the flock will gather around the body—so it looks like they’re having a funeral—to try to sense whether they can learn something from it. Like disease or danger or something.”
“So you’re going to leave it there. In case some other birds want to have a funeral in our yard. You are beyond belief.” And she went back into the kitchen, where there was soon the rattling of dishes and coffee mugs.
Clark felt that he should do something. He wanted to pet Zelda: stroke her black feathers to see whether they were soft or brittle, tell her that she had been a good bird and that it was okay to go now to wherever birds might go. He wanted to see her up close the way he never could before, to see the shape of her beak and the crook of her talons. But he didn’t know if the others would mind and not give her the funeral she deserved if he somehow contaminated her. It occurred to him then that if Zelda had flown the other direction for a hundred yards or so—through the trees away from his house rather than toward it—she might have reached the cemetery where Benjamin Walker had just been buried.
“Wouldn’t that be a thing,” Clark said to himself out loud. “Benjamin Walker and Zelda the crow spending eternity together. And me here just waiting out the clock.”
“Oh!” Alice’s voice came from the kitchen table. “We could go to Las Vegas! That would be something!”
It had been years since Clark had gone to bed at a reasonable hour. He sat on the couch until 2am, 3am—and now that he was retired what was there to get up early for? There was always news to read on his little computer, and the bookshelves were filled with books he had intended to read “someday.” And now, in the days since Benjamin Walker’s death, he had found the old books of monologues that he had collected back when he thought he too might try out for something.
Scenes for Young Actors
Two-Person Audition Scenes
100 Great Monologues for Men
But he could not remember being young, and he did not know anyone with whom he could work on a two-person scene, and he did not deserve a great monologue. Apparently they did not put together collections of Mediocre Monologues for Scared Old Men With No Experience.
It felt to him that people were set into permanent tracks. Some people would always be cast as serious leads, others as supporting best friends. Some would always be part of a romantic pair. Some would be clowns. McAlister Temple was still playing flirty ingenues in her 40s when she had died alone on the side of the road, and the sight of Benjamin Walker’s dark casket had seemed as perfectly Shakespearean as anything he had done in his thirty-plus years at the theatre.
Clark Picone was a backstage volunteer who helped build sets and organize props and sew on buttons and ruffles.
Hey Clark! Good to see you again! What are you doing here?
I’m trying out for the show.
OH. You mean like—trying out for a role? You want to try to act?
And of course they would never say out loud what they were thinking next:
But you’re not an ACTOR.
He remembered being awake at night as a child, thinking over what his parents had told him: you can be anything you want. But that had been at age ten, twelve, thirteen—at some point surely “anything you want” became “what you are” and then “what you will always be.” A typical rehearsal period for a show at the Little Theatre was about four weeks; how long were retirees expected to stay in a visit to Las Vegas?
It was colder and darker—just later—than Clark had realized. The space around him had shrunk, and the light of the television seemed further from him than before. Nothing in his small living room had actually changed, but he realized that he could no longer see the print in the monologues and scenes had had been flipping through only a minute before. Had it been only a minute? The shadows seemed deeper, although there was no new light to cast them. Clark’s teeth chattered suddenly twice, three times. On the coffee table before him the brochure for Vegas that Alice had left was sitting beside the monologue book he had been holding. They sat together like two tough kids going head to head.
It’s only five weeks. Plus three weeks of shows. We could go to Vegas later.
Alice has been waiting for time with you for years. Maybe her whole life. You could do the show later.
A shadow fluttered over the Vegas brochure. It shifted, twisted, and settled into the shape of a bird’s head. Clark turned back to the sliding glass door and saw something pass between the moon and the glass.
“Zelda?” he said aloud. Don’t be ridiculous—he heard Alice’s voice in his head. Zelda’s dead.
But there are other birds. Maybe she—
Ssshh. Someone might hear you.
Let me know if you think I should do it.
He woke up suddenly and found himself on the couch with the Vegas brochure clutched in his hand.
There was some deception in his plan to be sure, but it had escape clauses. If he got a good part, surely she would be proud of him enough to postpone their trip. If he didn’t get a part, then she would never even need to know that he had tried out. There were two nights of auditions, and he chose Tuesday because that was the day she visited her mostly-bedridden aunt on the other side of town.
His audition piece was clumsy: a monologue from Richard III in which Richard masterfully seduces the wife of the king he has just murdered in cold blood. Your beauty was the cause of that effect.
The crow had been watching him from the tree in the front yard when he pulled the car out of the garage, and Clark imagined that he saw it at various places along the way: sitting on a STOP sign, stretching its wings on top of a red light, brushing past a speed limit sign (thanks, bird—I didn’t realize I was going so fast). He parked in the same lot as he had for Benjamin Walker’s funeral, and the bird (a bird) was watching him from the street sign.
He walked across the street under the yellow halo of street lights, and he recognized plenty of faces in the group that was milling around on the sidewalk. He nodded to a few as one of them held the lobby door open for him, and he was startled to see the black bird slip between them and fly into the lobby.
“Whoa,” he said to a petite blonde woman (he remembered her playing a brothel madame in Measure for Measure two years ago). “That was weird.”
“What was weird?”
“That crow that just flew in here. It—” But the woman was just smiling at him, with her head cocked to the side a bit like Zelda used to do.
“Crow?”
“Nothing. Never mind. Old joke that I forgot how to tell.”
“Okay. It’s good to see you, Clark. I always knew one day we’d get you to an audition!”
“Well, this is the day I guess. Thanks.”
Zelda was now making herself comfortable in the lobby, unnoticed by the twenty or thirty people who were milling around. She circled overhead once, as if she might be surveying the posters laying out the history of Little Theatre productions on the walls, then landed on one of the empty chairs that had been set up around the perimeter.
Clark took one of the audition packs attached to clipboards at the front table and then sat in the chair beside the black bird to fill it out. Personal information form (Please list previous acting experience), rehearsal schedule, acknowledgement that participation was voluntary and not paid. The bird watched him, its head tilted, and then pecked violently at the hand that was writing in his name and address.
“Ow!”
A few other people in the room glanced at him then, but most were chattering away with their friends or, in the best tradition of small-town community theatre, people they had just met who were already sharing expectations for the experience to come.
Omigod she was fabulous in that role. I mean, it was just breathtaking.
Who do I have to sleep with in here to get a role in this show?
I bet it’s actually precast. You know how it is.
The woman running the audition process took a break from her endless waving and chatting with people to make the obligatory announcement:
“Hey everyone. Just letting you know: give us your forms when you’re done with them and then we’ll be sending people into the house five at a time. After that you’re done for tonight! Hopefully the callback list will be on the website by tomorrow morning.” This was followed by a rush of random questions from random people, sometimes in little clumps.
“Ugh. I hate reading in front of people.”
“Really? Oh I love it. I don’t like that whole one-on-one staring thing.”
Clark looked at Zelda, glad that she had nothing to say. He went over his monologue and tried to ignore her.
Eventually his name was called with four other people, only one of whom he vaguely knew. They filed into the house, and again, as it always was for him, the dark room full of empty seats was like the end of secrecy: in the very back it was dark, but it grew lighter as the rows unspooled one after the other toward the small black stage, and there the lights flooded down and created a hot white space where nothing could ever be hidden. And then beyond that circle of light the shadows crowded in again and the back upstage wall was black with nothingness.
The audition announcement had said Actors of all races and gender identities are encouraged to audition. But it had said nothing about age. The script had roles for people in their 20s, 40s, and plenty where no age was specified.
Clark had not even noticed that Zelda had come in with him. The actors spread out in the house, giving one another some space while the director, a short extremely cheerful woman with thick glasses and frizzy hair, gave some basic advice about relaxing and having fun. (Think fancy!)
“YOU are supposed to be dead,” he muttered under his breath. Zelda hopped onto the armrest beside him and then turned her head toward the stage.
The director was still talking, excitedly explaining her vision of the show. But behind her, in the dark corners where the stage faded into obscurity out of the range of the lights, something was happening. Dark forms gathered in the haze of the wings, spindly limbs and grasping fingers trembling, touching the black walls and then the velvet edges of the open curtain. With them came the smell of the grave: a faint breeze of cold moisture, the salt of the sea, the brown edges of burnt paper crisping among the fallen leaves.
Clark felt the vague swell of recognition he often encountered when the ensemble of a musical first came out for the big opening number. I’ve seen that person in something or other; that guy looks familiar; oh I loved her in that comedy last season; he’s been in literally everything. But these weren’t quite people: they were bleak, incompletely abstract versions of people who had once been actors, twitchy and unfinished like watercolors.
No one else in the theatre saw them.
The director took her place back in the front row, and the first person to audition went up on stage now: a thin middle-aged man with dark skin and charm and self-confidence to spare. The other people in the house gave him that solemn attention reserved for auditions, but Clark saw only the others, impossibly onstage again after years, in some cases decades, gone in death. They thinned out around the sides of the stage, avoiding the glare of the light, and when the living actor began to speak they echoed him, each shade offering a lifeless reading of some other random line that they must have spoken in some play now long forgotten.
“I’ll get the door!” hissed a bony woman hoarsely.
A plump red-headed woman who had been buried in something far too tight and spangled with sequins looked out toward the house and said, woodenly, “I can’t believe you live seven flights up! Was that really only seven flights? It felt more like ten.”
A little girl, her hair still yellow but the red bow untied and hanging listlessly over her right ear, turned to watch the others, pointlessly, waiting for an adult to give her a direction.
Someone clapped, a starchy rustling sound, and the actor took his seat again.
Three more times a living actor took the stage to recite their monologue, and each time the blurred and restless dead shifted, pushed together and away, reached out with brittle death-rattled arms toward the unseeing remembered audience. And always they talked.
A gust of cool nighttime air swept in from stage right, and with it came Andrew Kelly, five times voted “Most Favorite Male Performer” in the seventies and eighties, almost dapper with white hair and funereally perfect false white teeth, wearing the cut of handsome tuxedo he had worn to premieres, cocktail parties, charity dinners, Southern Heritage Days cotillions on the river. Then, inevitably, his own funeral in a drought-stricken September. The others parted for him, one or two reaching out to touch him and missing.
“That son of mine is going to drive us both to drink, my dear,” he intoned. “Now let’s have none of that; you know you should be dancing with someone of much higher caliber.”
When McAlister Temple appeared from stage left he took an obligatory step back and yielded the stage. Miss Temple walked slowly, her weakened right foot, crushed in the car crash, still holding her back, both her porcelain arms held out before her, beseeching. Her eyes were wide, unseeing but then again not so different from the haze they had been during her heady days of bourbon and champagne.
“I heard some kind of bird singing last night,” she said in an almost-whisper. “I think he loves me, but as long as he doesn’t say anything about it I don’t know what . . .” She ran a hand down one side of her cold breast, still impeccably housed in tasteful dark blue. “I loved you once.”
Andrew Kelly turned to her, adjusting the space between them. “We can find our escape in yonder forest,” he said. McAlister Temple scanned the footlights, her eyes empty.
“And finally…Clark Picone!”
With a start, Clark realized that he had heard nothing of the other monologues. He was last, and the other four respectfully waited for him to take his turn. As he shakily stood up he felt himself growing pale, and as if they could see him the crowd of the once-acting dead on the stage grew agitated, began to murmur and seethe among themselves.
Clark had forgotten about Zelda, who now pecked frantically at his hand. He waved her away, saw her take flight and wheel up in awkward circles toward the lighted area of the stage. The dead sensed her, and some of them lifted up their open but unseeing eyes, pale with the long cataracts of the grave, as she flitted around their heads.
The director, unburdened by such sights, remained cheerful. “You ready to go, Clark?”
As he came slowly down the aisle Clark imagined himself standing among them, feeling their musty embalmed chill surrounding him, breathing air rendered foul with the absence of living time. Hearing their cold emotionless words.
As he took the first step of three up to the stage, Clark looked up and saw the watery crowd shifting again, parting for someone new.
He came among them, named in life Benjamin Walker: heavy, rough, his face half-collapsed upon itself from the suicidal bullet that had ended his life barely a week ago.
The casket had been closed, thankfully.
He was a big man. But everyone gets the same sized coffin.
The dark suit in which he had been buried hung on him crookedly, and he walked with deliberate slow precision. Andrew Kelly felt him approaching and stepped further to the side. McAlister Temple, sensing something new in her personal space, held a pointing finger up to test the air, turned her dusty head slightly to the left like a cat.
“I still turn to Mama when I need advice,” she said.
Benjamin Walker slowed his steps, lifted his eyes toward a memory of his own spotlight. “So shaken as we are, so wan with care, find we a time for frighted peace to pant. . .” His voice was slow, rounded. He could not complete the sentence as Shakespeare had written it. He held his hands out before him, staring at the joining of fingers and palm, reading the lines of the grave that were newly etched there. “I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world,” he said in a black whisper.
“Let’s hear what you got, Clark!”
Ssshh. Someone might hear you.
Clark now stood in his own circle of light, with eyes in the theater house watching him and only him. They waited to hear his words, but he felt the presence of Benjamin Walker behind him, and as he felt Zelda’s wings brush past his forehead, he understood at last that she was warning him. The shadow of a bird’s head on a cheap tourist brochure for Las Vegas.
“My name is Clark Picone,” he announced. “And I will be performing a scene from Richard III by William Shakespeare.”
In that moment of quiet Clark heard his own heart beating but he felt the cold emotions that leaked out, still palpable, from the ghost over his shoulder. So many auditions, so many rehearsals, so many lonely walks back to the car at midnight when people called out Great show! but there was no one to go home to. No laughs like Andrew Kelley, and no flirty women; none of the undressing eyes that roamed over McAlister Temple’s nubile shape. Just the study and the repetition and the willing of the poetry into being. Like a funeral.
Clark opened his mouth to speak but Benjamin Walker’s voice was there, in his ear, before his own could be heard.
Your beauty was the cause of that effect;
Your beauty, which did haunt me in my sleep
To undertake the death of all the world.
For the first time unafraid of how he looked to the others, Clark slowly turned to see if Benjamin Walker even knew he was there. The large man saw through him instead with his one intact eye, his shattered half-gaze searching for something further away and more permanent. Actors could be so . . . possessive. But he shuffled uncomfortably in his burial suit, which even here pulled too tightly across his dead shoulders.
Who sewed on those buttons? Clark asked himself. And did they have recognize them in the coffin?
“Clark?” asked the director. “Are you ready?”
Damp breath, still tinted with the magic-marker smell of embalming fluid, was at his ear.
Entertain some score or two of tailors
To study fashion to adorn my body.
“Clark?”
He cleared his throat. “You know what? I don’t think I’m ready after all. I think maybe I’ll sit this one out.”
“Take all the time you need, Clark.”
“No, no—” and now he was pushing past the dead who took up no space and fighting his way back down to the house, “I think I’ll skip it this time. Really.”
Old enough to have been a parent to half of people in the audience and perhaps a grandparent to the other half, Clark felt a new kind of warm shame as he hurried up the aisle and back out into the lobby: the certainty of being watched from behind, the knowledge that he had broken a protocol and been weaker than the rest. Back in the theater they would be talking now, pretending that it hadn’t happened or perhaps that he had never even been there.
Most of the people in the lobby had left now, gone home with their private feelings of pride or dread or bewilderment at having flubbed that one line that they always got right before. The woman at the table was pulling paperwork into stacks and paperclipping them.
“How’d it go?”
Zelda was there too, standing on the corner of the table and regarding Clark with her beady eye. He started to say something and then stopped, the smell of the embalming fluid still in the back of his throat.
“I think I’m going to volunteer to help out with costumes this time.”
“Oh! Well do we have your information? I’ll put you on the list.”
“Oh yes. I’m always on the list.”
By the front door, back out onto Franklin Street, someone had taken down the memorial poster that had adorned the box office on the day of the funeral. Clark hoisted it up and looked at the pictures, trying to match up the intensity of Benjamin Walker’s face in these photographs with the sad fragments of a life that had shared the stage with him a moment ago.
Iago in 1990. Richard in 1992. Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The Crucible. The blinded Gloucester.
Once outside, Clark breathed in the cold winter air and Zelda alighted on a bony tree branch. “Maybe next time, right, girl?” Zelda cocked her head at him.
“Well,” he said, starting off toward the parking lot by the funeral home, “maybe when we get back from Vegas I’ll see you around. Maybe I’ll bring you something shiny from the casino.”
She flitted around his head, but her wings didn’t move the air.
“What do you think makes a man do that, Zelda? To undertake the death of all the world. It’s probably precast.”
Even as he spoke the words, Clark was not sure if he meant the man’s life, his death, or his afterlife. And Zelda was gone.
Wade Newhouse is a Professor of English at William Peace University in Raleigh, NC. He has published scholarly articles and book chapters on such diverse authors and topics as William Faulkner, Neil Gaiman, Civil War fiction, and the history of Dracula movies. His short fiction has been published in HelloHorror, Lyonesse, Love Letters to Poe, and the Notch Publishing volume Sick Cruising. He is a contributing writer at HorrorObsessive.com and will soon have some flash fiction appearing at SciFiShorts.co
This is a work of fiction. All the names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
