The Curator's Game

Derrick is fighting with the canopy again. He always fights with the canopy. I lean against the van and drink my coffee and let him, because honestly it's my favorite part of any festival morning, watching him get slowly out-argued by aluminum poles.

"Sakura. A little help?"

"I'm supervising," I say. "It's a different job. Equally important."

"You're the worst," he says, but he's grinning, and the corner of the canopy finally clicks into the joint he's been hunting for ten minutes. He's thirty-nine this year and he still sets up a booth like it's his first time, all elbows and muttering. Three years together and I still get a little flutter watching him work. The entire problem with my plan, really. I love showing off for him so much I keep raising the stakes. Tonight I'm going to raise them higher than I ever have.

Because tonight is the game. The one I've been building for two months.

He doesn't know the details. He knows there's a game. He agreed to that much back in August, when I told him I wanted to run something at Thornwood this year, something immersive, something where he wouldn't know where the performance ended. He said, and I quote, "If you're going to scare me, do it properly." That's one of about four hundred reasons I'm keeping him.

"Canopy's up, oh wise supervisor," he says. "What do you want where?"

"Book table on the left. Cash box under it. And hang the black cloth on the back wall, not the green."

"The green's better."

"The black is what the game needs." I hop off the van and start unpacking the crates. "Trust me tonight. Can you do that? Trust me and don't break character, even when it gets weird?"

He stops folding the table and looks at me. "How weird are we talking?"

"Weird enough that you signed a waiver."

"I did not sign a waiver."

"You signed the booth paperwork. Close enough." I hand him the crate of catalog books and kiss his jaw on my way past, because I'm allowed, because in about four hours I won't be, not until the game lets me. "It'll be fine. It'll be better than fine. I've been rehearsing."

"Rehearsing," he repeats. "You rehearsed."

"Christa helped me block the whole thing. I have cue cards."

"You have cue cards," he says, and he laughs, and he goes to hang the black cloth without another argument, which is how I know he's curious. Derrick's curiosity is a big dumb friendly dog. You just have to point it in the right direction and hold on.

---

Christa finds us at the coven entrance gate at noon, which is when I knew she would, because Christa is nothing if not punctual about her own festivals. She's forty-seven and she runs Thornwood the way a ship's captain runs a ship, minus the shouting, plus the lanyards.

"There's my favorite curator," she says, and kisses my cheek. "Derrick, love, your canopy is crooked."

"My canopy is fine."

"It's fine the way your girlfriend's footnotes are fine, technically, and everyone notices." She turns to me and her voice drops into the register she uses when she's handing over something real. "It's in my left pocket. Sealed. Don't open it until the booth's done and he's out of earshot."

"You're the best," I tell her.

"I know. Also Darius wants a word about the bonfire circle later, he's worried the second ring is drawing all the energy off the stage. Tell him he's right and we're leaving it." She pushes the envelope into my hand. It's heavy paper, wax-sealed, and Christa does not do wax seals for jokes. "Script's in there. Moves, lines, timings. I typed it clean and I burned my notes."

"Burned your notes?"

"Sakura. Sweetheart. I read your scenario. Some of it I did not want in my handwriting existing in the world." She pats my arm. "It's very good. It's going to land. I'm slightly concerned for your man's cardiovascular system, but it's going to land."

"That's the goal," I say. "Land on him."

She snorts and waves us through the gate, hollering at a vendor about open flames before she's even turned around.

---

I read the envelope at the picnic table behind our booth while Derrick does the lanterns. Christa's script is tighter than mine was, honestly. She's cut two of my scenes and added a cue I didn't think of, a moment where I'm supposed to let him almost catch me, almost see the seams, and then pull away. She's written in the margin, *this one will hurt him in the good way. Do not skip it.* I fold it back up with my hands not entirely steady. Forty-four years old and my hands shake over a game. Well. Over what the game is hiding.

Because here's the part Christa knows and Derrick doesn't, the part the script circles around without ever saying straight out. The character I'm playing tonight, the cold one, the one called Silence. She's not a mask I made up. She's the oldest thing in me, the thing I keep in the locked case in the back of my skull like an artifact with a do-not-touch label. Tonight I'm going to take her out and put her on the table in front of the man I love and let him decide what he's looking at.

Derrick comes around the booth and stops. I've changed while he was on the lanterns, and Christa's cue card sits in my sleeve like a knife.

"Hi," he says, and then he catches the tone of the room, or the black cloth, or my face, and he straightens up. "Sorry. Let me try again."

He clears his throat, lifts his phone like it's a press badge.

"Excuse me. Derrick Marsh, freelance. I was told there'd be someone here who could authorize footage of a private ritual. Nine o'clock, main ring, no press?" He's good. He's actually good, a little nervous at the edges, and I let the silence stretch one beat past comfortable before I answer.

Silence speaks, and it isn't my voice. It's flatter. Colder. It comes out of my chest like smoke.

"You were told wrong," I say. "There is no authorization. There is only permission, and permission is not given in daylight."

His eyebrows jump. He recovers. "Daylight's when I work."

"Then you'll work tonight," I say, "or not at all. The ritual at nine does not tolerate witnesses who flinch. Sit. We will find out if you flinch."

He sits, across the booth table, in the chair I put there an hour ago facing the black cloth. His knee is bouncing under the table. He's still playing it as a job, I can see that, a fun weird gig his girlfriend set up. He doesn't know yet that the woman across from him has stopped being Sakura somewhere between the lanterns and now.

"Terms," Silence says, and lays one card on the table, face down, Christa's first cue. "You film what I allow. You ask nothing before midnight. You do not say my name."

"Do I get the name at midnight?"

"You get what midnight gives you."

He swallows. I watch his throat move, and under the table my own hands are colder than they should be, and the festival noise carries on outside our little black-walled room like a tide that has agreed to ignore us.

"Deal," he says. "Who are you?"

I slide the second card across, and on it, in Christa's neat handwriting, are the two words I have been practicing not saying in the mirror for a week.

"You may call me Silence," I say.

He repeats it back, quiet, like he's testing the weight of it. "Silence. Okay. And you're... what, exactly? The priestess? The host?"

"I am what the ritual is for," I say. "The ritual does not serve me. I serve as its door." Christa's script says I should let that hang, so I let it hang. Outside, somebody drops a case of bottled water and a man swears about it, and then even that fades.

"And if the footage is good?" he asks. "There's a longer arrangement? My contact mentioned."

"There is no contact. There is me." I stand and blow out the lantern on the table, and the booth goes down to the one flame and the black cloth and his face. "Bring your camera. Walk behind me. Do not pass me."

He does as he's told, which surprises me more than it should. Three years and he still finds new ways to surprise me. He grabs the camera off the charger, checks the battery with his thumb, and follows me out into the festival noise. I walk the long way, past the food tents, past the drum circle, out along the fence line to where Christa told me the second bonfire ring sits empty on festival nights. Darius has been grumbling about this ring all week, saying it pulls energy off the stage, saying nobody uses it, which is exactly why I want it. Empty circle, one fire, no witnesses.

"You're quiet," Derrick says behind me.

"I said walk behind me."

"Yeah, you did. Sorry." A pause, gravel under his boots. "It's just weird, you knowing this ground better than me. You've been here one more day than I have."

I don't answer that. The grass goes wet with dew and the main ring's noise drops behind us until it's just our footsteps and the crackle of the second fire, already lit the way Darius promised it would be. Orange light on bare dirt. Five canvas chairs set in a half circle, one facing the rest. I spent an hour on this before lunch and my knees still remember it.

"Sit there," I say, pointing at the lone chair. "Not in the circle. At its edge."

He sits. He lifts the camera and I put my hand flat on the lens and push it down, slow.

"No film yet. First you learn the words. If you say them wrong, the ritual doesn't open. If you say them wrong twice, you leave."

"Harsh gig," he says, and grins, and the grin dies when I don't grin back. I let my voice drop, down into the register I've been practicing in the shower, in the van, into Christa's horrified face at the picnic table. An octave down and flat, no music in it at all.

"Say: I am here as flesh and witness. I ask only to carry what is given."

He clears his throat. "I am here as flesh and witness. I ask only to carry what is given." Fine. Clean. Annoyingly good, actually.

"Again."

"Why?"

"Because the fire has not heard you. The fire is the second witness. You speak for the fire, not for the camera." He says it again and the words come out rounder this time, and I walk the half circle behind the chairs, dragging my fingertips along the canvas backs, and I feel him tracking me without turning his head. Good. Let him track me.

"Now the answer line. When I ask what you carry, you say: whatever the door gives me."

"Whatever the door gives me."

"Again."

"Whatever the door gives... me?" He stumbles on it, splits the line in the wrong place, and I stop behind his chair and lean down close to his ear.

"Wrong," I say, and it comes out as a growl, low and rough, nothing I have ever made with my throat in front of another person. His shoulders lock. "Again. Whatever the door gives me. The door is not kind. Do not pause inside it."

"Whatever the door gives me," he says, steady, and he doesn't flinch, and something in my chest turns over. I come around the chair to face him and the firelight hits my eyes and he goes still in a different way. I