It’s all we can do not to drag Mrs. Clark out of her dressing room and force her at knife point to bully and torture us.

 

 Sister Vigilante calls herself the People’s Committee for Finding a Decent Enemy.

 

 Director Denial limps around with both feet wrapped in silk rags. All of her toes hacked off. Her left hand is nothing, just a paddle of skin and bone, just the palm, with all the fingers and thumb hacked off, this paddle wrapped huge with rags. Her right hand is just her thumb and index finger. Between them, she holds a severed finger with her dark-red polish still on the nail.

 

 Holding this finger, the Director walks from room to room, the Arabian Nights gallery to the Italian Renaissance lounge, her saying, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” Saying, “Cora? Come to Mama, Cora, my baby. Dinner’s ready . . .”

 

 Every so often, you hear the voice of Saint Gut-Free shouting soft as a whisper, “Help us . . . Someone, please, help us . . .” Then the soft clap of his hands patting the exit doors.

 

 Extra soft and quiet, just in case someone is right outside.

 

 Director Denial calls herself the People’s Committee for Feeding the Cat.

 

 Miss Sneezy and the Missing Link, they’re the People’s Committee for Flushing the Rest of the Ruined Food. With every bag they flush, they force down a cushion or a shoe, anything that will make sure the toilets stay clogged.

 

 Agent Tattletale knocks at Mrs. Clark’s dressing-room door, saying, “Listen to me.” Saying, “You can’t be the victim, here. We’ve voted you the next villain.”

 

 Agent Tattletale calls himself the People’s Committee for Getting Us a New Devil.

 

 The lightbulb “peaches” the Matchmaker picks, that he lowers to Baroness Frostbite . . . That she packs so careful into boxes padded with old wigs . . . At the end of every day, the Earl of Slander takes them to the subbasement and breaks them on the concrete floor. He throws them the exact same way he’ll tell the world Mrs. Clark broke them.

 

 Already, the rooms seem bigger. Dimmer. The colors and walls disappear into the dark. Agent Tattletale videotapes the broken bulbs and Sister Vigilante’s thrown-away fingernails on the floor. Identical half-moon shards of white.

 

 Despite the ghost, our life is almost bad enough.

 

 To Sister Vigilante, the ghost is a hero. She says we hate heroes.

 

 “Civilization always works best,” Sister Vigilante says, picking the knife under another fingernail, “when we have a bogeyman.”

 

  

 

Voir Dire

 

 A Poem About Sister Vigilante

 

 “Some man sued for a million bucks,” Sister Vigilante says, “because of a dirty look.”

 

 On her first day doing jury duty.

 

 

 Sister Vigilante onstage, she holds a book to shield the front of her blouse.

 

 Her blouse, frilly-yellow and edged with white lace.

 

 The book, black leather with the title stamped in gold leaf across the cover:

 

 Holy Bible

 

 On her face, black-framed eyeglasses.

 

 Her only jewelry, a charm bracelet of jiggling, trembling silver reminders.

 

 Her hairdo dyed the same deep black as her shoe polish. As her Bible.

 

 

 Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

 

 Each lens of her glasses, it glares with the reflected image of electric chairs

 

 and gallows. Grainy newsreel footage of prisoners sentenced to the gas chamber

 

 or the firing squad.

 

 Where her eyes should be,

 

 no eyes.

 

 That first day on jury duty, the next trial, a man tripped over a curb and sued

 

 the luxury car he fell against.

 

 Asking an award of fifty grand for being such a stupid butterfingers.

 

 “All these people with no sense of physical coordination,” Sister Vigilante says.

 

 They all had excellentblaming skills.

 

 

 Another man wanted a hundred grand from a homeowner who left the garden hose

 

 stretched across the backyard that tripped him,

 

 breaking his ankle,

 

 while he fled from the police in an otherwise totally unrelated case

 

 of rape.

 

 This crippled rapist, he wanted a fortune for his pain and suffering.

 

 

 There, up onstage, the silver charms flashing against the lace of her cuff,

 

 her Bible gripped between the fingers of both hands,

 

 her fingernails painted the same yellow as her frills,

 

 Sister Vigilante says she pays her taxes on time.

 

 She never jaywalks. Recycles her plastic. Rides the bus to work.

 

 

 “At that point,” says Sister Vigilante, her first day of jury duty, “I told the judge”

 

 Some charm-bracelet version of:

 

 “Fuck this shit.”

 

 And the judge heldherin contempt . . .

 

  

 

 Civil Twilight

 

 A Story by Sister Vigilante