Preface
It is a little-known but deeply irksome fact of human biology that inside each of us, there resides a clown. The white face paint is simply there as a polite visual warning to everyone else.
The wind in the Ozarks on this particular winter day was behaving with the kind of aggressive, uninvited enthusiasm usually reserved for door-to-door salesmen. It whipped past the brick-and-mortar sign of Little Neck Falls Cemetery, violently harassed an American flag, and rushed up the hill specifically to bother a gathering of mourners.
The lamenters encircled the grave. A bafflingly dressed subset of them were entirely swathed in black suits, umbrellas, and bowler hats—an ensemble wholly unsuited for the aerodynamics of the current weather. Gina Cheltham anchored the group, wearing a black dress and a veil thick enough to ensure she couldn’t see the hole in the ground anyway.
As the service concluded, the crowd broke apart, murmuring the sorts of inaudible things people murmur when they are cold and would very much like to be somewhere with a working thermostat. They lumbered downhill.
Terina Vinogradov, a tall Ukrainian immigrant currently losing a battle against the local meteorology, watched her derby hat suddenly achieve liftoff. She sprinted back up the hill after it, leaving Cairn Albert and Jimmy Aaron standing in its wake.
Cairn paused before a stone monument that looked as though it had been chewed on by time and spat back out. She squinted at the weathered epitaph.
“Here lies Jack. Dressed in black,” she read aloud, letting the words fight the gale. “His fatal fact, Jack had no tact. 1883.”
Jimmy chuckled, a soft sound that was immediately swallowed by the wind. Cairn turned to him with a mild smile.
“Quit laughing,” she said. “We are at a funeral, after all.”
Before Jimmy could defend his mirth, Zoe Samsara arrived, moving with the frantic, highly caffeinated energy of someone who had just remembered where she parked.
“Race you to the car,” Zoe announced.
“Well, no,” Cairn replied, exuding the patience of someone entirely used to managing the impulses of others. “Respect for Gina, please.”
“Kidding,” Zoe deflected cheerfully.
“Look, guys, I’m riding back with Mom and Dad,” Cairn said, gathering herself against the chill. “I may not see them again until after the arraignment. I’ll see you at the car. Y’all take care. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Chapter 1
An Abrupt Real Estate Realignment, and the Arrival of a Softail
It is a widely held belief among felines that any human standing on a ladder is engaged in an activity that is fundamentally foolish and highly likely to result in an amusing accident. Consequently, a small, judgmental syndicate of cats had assembled at the tree line to observe Cairn.
Cairn was descending from the theater marquee, clad in cuffed jeans, a blue tank top, and sunglasses. She was insulated from the world by a pair of earphones and was softly singing to herself.
“Good night, baby, good night. The milkman’s on his way…”
Her private concert was interrupted by the arrival of Mike Cheltham. Mike was seventy-three, possessed a solid shock of white hair, and wore a suit that was staggeringly expensive without managing to actually be in style. He moved with the blustery, aggressive confusion of a large, wealthy rooster and had just emerged from his Cadillac.
“Sleep tight, baby,” Cairn sang, turning to see Mike shouting something entirely unintelligible from the ground.
“Where the hell did all the cats come from?” Mike bellowed.
He shoved a clipboard under his arm with both hands and performed an elaborate, pantomimed gesture of removing headphones. Cairn stopped singing and pulled the devices from her ears, letting them rest around her neck.
“These are my hearing aids,” she pointed out mildly.
Mike ignored this medical clarification entirely. “Hear this. ‘G’ as in Singing.”
“What?”
“Singin’? You misspelled Singing. You left out the ‘G’.”
Cairn looked at him with the profound patience required to explain gravity to a rock. “That’s the title, Mister Cheltham. Singin’ in the Rain.“
“Well, hell, that can’t be right.”
“Yes, sir. It’s on the script in your office.”
Mike bristled. “Goddammit, just put the ‘G’ on the end. Don’t want anybody to think we’re a bunch of hillbillies.” He glared at the tree line. “And I got a pellet gun in the office that’ll take care of these stray pussies.”
“Mister Cheltham, don’t you dare,” Cairn said, her tone instantly dropping its mildness. “I’ll handle it.”
She continued her descent, walked right past him, and headed up the steps to the veranda.
“Where are you going?” Mike demanded.
“Going to get a ‘G’. I think there’s one in the garden shed.”
Cairn strolled toward the front doors of the lobby, effortlessly picking up the hum of “The Lullaby of Broadway” right where she left off. She unhooked her shades, hung them from her breast pocket, and unclipped a sprawling constellation of keys from a carabiner on her belt loop.
“Cairn!” Mike yelled at her back.
She turned the key halfway to the lock.
“Did a truck come by?” Mike asked, consulting his clipboard. “Blue with the words ‘Cannon’s Signs’ on the door?”
“Yes, sir.”
Mike waited. A beat of silence stretched out, stubbornly refusing to fill itself.
“Well, did he ask where I was?” Mike finally prompted.
“No, sir.”
“Did he ask anything?”
“Yes, sir.”
Mike stared at her, the gears of his interrogation grinding to a halt against her literalism. “Well? What did you tell him?”
“I told him that I didn’t have an older sister,” Cairn said.
She pushed the key into the lock and replaced her hearing aids, effectively ending her subscription to the conversation.
Mike looked down at his clipboard, raised a pen to make a note, and then froze as his brain finally processed a piece of financial data from five sentences ago.
“What?” he muttered to himself. “Dammit. When did we get a garden shed? Well, how much did that cost me?”
Down at ankle level, a single gray cat had detached itself from the syndicate and was now enthusiastically rubbing against Mike’s very expensive, terribly outdated trousers.
“No, you don’t. Shoo!”
The cat simply sat down on his shoe and meowed up at him with aggressive affection.
“Goddammit,” Mike sighed, conceding defeat, and began the trudge back to his Cadillac.
CHAPTER TWO
A Digital Archive is Contemplated, and a Script Takes
Cairn opened the door into the void. She replaced her earphones, inviting the jaunty, artificial cheer of “The Lullaby of Broadway” back into her skull to combat the silence. She closed the door, and the world vanished.
“Flashlight on,” she commanded the air.
A beam of digital light cut through the gloom, a tiny electronic sun held in her hand. It bobbed along the dark lobby as she whistled, eventually illuminating a doorknob with the dramatic flair of a police procedural. Cairn reached out, turned the knob, and was immediately confronted by a heart-stopping manifestation of 2023 fitness.
Meghan Morris, early thirties and offensively blonde, was standing perfectly still in the darkness on the other side.
“Fuck!!” Cairn’s management skills were momentarily replaced by a primitive reflex to flee.
“Cairn, could you turn on the house lights?” Meghan asked, as if standing in pitch-black doorways was a standard hobby.
“Jeez Louise, Meghan,” Cairn exhaled, her heart attempting to vibrate its way out of her ribcage. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry, but—”
“Rehearsal isn’t for almost an hour,” Cairn interrupted, her internal manager rebooting. “What are you doing here? You come through the back? Did you wake up the ogres? ‘Cause I don’t need that. An angry ogre is a logistical nightmare.”
“Sorry,” Meghan apologized, looking slightly less like a ghost now that the light had stopped shaking. “Had to drop the kid off at daycare and didn’t have anywhere else to go. They were all awake in the green room watching TV when I came through.”
Cairn sighed. If the ogres were already watching TV, the damage was done. “Well, okay. Since you’re here so early, you win the chance to help me set up for vocal rehearsal. Just let me calm my heart down a little. It’s currently doing a solo.”
They moved into the dining room. Cairn followed her flashlight to the back wall, where she swung open a door to reveal a large electrical breaker box. It had no cover, exposing its inner workings like a robot undergoing open-heart surgery. Cairn began flipping breakers.
Above them, the dining room groaned into light, revealing a three-tiered horseshoe of tables and banquettes—the sort of furniture that looked like it was waiting for a very long, very complicated wedding to begin. She slid a few faders on a switch panel, and theatrical lights bloomed over the three-quarter thrust stage, which sat two feet off the ground, looking somewhat hopeful.
“There’s twenty-two members in the cast,” Cairn noted as they crossed toward the stage, “so I guess four rows of five chairs ought to do it. Seth likes them in rows. He has a strange, geometric relationship with authority.”
Ray Sorenson, a man in his mid-forties who possessed the easy-going musculature of someone who had long ago made peace with the chaos of theater, emerged from backstage.
“Mornin’, ladies. You need my help?”
“That would be nice,” Cairn said, her pace never slackening. “I need to stick my head backstage for half a mo. Four rows of five, please.”
“You got it,” Ray replied.
Cairn bounced up the steps to the stage, moving with the kind of momentum that suggested gravity was merely a suggestion. She turned and continued walking backward, a feat of spatial awareness that few mortals could achieve without tripping over their own aspirations.
“Did the new lobby light fixture get here?”
“Should be here sometime today,” Ray called out.
“Thank you, Ray,” Cairn said, turning back around to face her next task. “You’re my hero. Heroes are very hard to find on short notice.”
Behind her, Ray and Meghan began the rhythmic, scraping dance of moving tables to clear a space around the piano, preparing the corner for the inevitable arrival of twenty-two people with loud voices and varying degrees of punctuality.
CHAPTER THREE
The Lucky Charm Lobbyists
Cairn navigated the back hallway, the damp, rhythmic sloshing of the dishwasher providing a percussion track to her morning. Essie Gomez, carrying a stack of dirty pans with the weary grace of a combat veteran, emerged from the kitchen.
“Buenos dias, Senorita! ¿Como estas?” Cairn asked.
“Bien. ¿Y Tu?” Essie replied, her voice cutting through the steam.
“Oh, no me puedo quejar,” Cairn shrugged. I can’t complain.
Essie gave her a look that suggested complaining was a fundamental human right, even if it was currently being ignored. “No es esa la verdad?”
“Que tenga un buena dia,” Cairn called out as they passed.
“Y tu.”
Cairn reached the door to the Green Room. Before the handle even turned, the muffled sound of male voices drifted through the wood.
“…My god,” a voice—definitely Jimmy—bellowed. “That redhead got enough meat and potatoes, ain’t nobody going hungry!”
Cairn swung the door open
The Green Room was currently occupied by Jimmy Aarons and Matt Greeley. They were slumped on the couches in bathrobes and novelty slippers, looking like two kings of a very small, very damp empire. Both were clutching large bowls of Lucky Charms. On the television, an exercise show featured women in unitards performing maneuvers that seemed designed less for fitness and more for a physics experiment in tension.
“Man,” Matt muttered, his eyes glued to the screen. “I am just exhausted watching this.”
“What’re you guys doing?” Cairn asked, standing in the doorway like a parent who had just walked into a crime scene involving glitter and glue.
“What does it look like?” Jimmy asked without looking up.
“Well, it looks like you’re eating Lucky Charms and watching nearly naked women bend over a bunch,” Cairn observed flatly.
“Bullseye,” Matt said. He nudged Jimmy. “Ooh, did you see that?”
“All the way to China, bro,” Jimmy confirmed.
“Jeez,” Cairn sighed.
The room’s atmospheric pressure suddenly shifted as Seth Sassoon swept in. Seth was a human exclamation point. He wore an extravagantly loud jacket draped over his shoulders like a cape and possessed a wall-eye that ensured he was always looking at a very interesting corner of the ceiling while addressing you. He looked like Ichabod Crane if Ichabod had been reinvented by a Broadway costume designer on a caffeine bender.
“Cairn,” Seth hissed, his pronounced lateral lisp making the name sound like a gentle steam leak. “Were you able to get a tuner in for the piano?”
“Um… sure?” Cairn said. She turned her head slightly to look at an invisible camera, giving it a slow, deliberate shake of the head.
“Great,” Seth said, oblivious. “That thing sounds like it hasn’t been tuned in…”
“…Four months,” Cairn finished for him. “Seth, the old man isn’t going to spend money on a tuning unless the audience is gonna hear it. And this show has prerecorded orchestration. So. Sorry.”
Seth bristled, his cape-jacket fluttering. “Well, thanks for nothing.”
“You are very welcome,” Cairn replied cheerfully.
Seth exited with all the dignity a man in a loud jacket can muster. Cairn stepped back into the hallway, pausing at the threshold to look back at the bathrobe brigade.
“Front of house in ten, please,” she commanded. “Will one of you guys close the door behind me? And lock it if you intend to masturbate.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, turning to start her walk down the hall.
“Jury is still out on that!” Jimmy yelled after her.
“Nice,” Cairn muttered to herself, her keys jingling against her hip as she walked away.
Chapter Four
The Unholy Union of Olivier
It is an established mathematical curiosity that if you rearrange the furniture in a room to face an upright piano, the room instantly ceases to be a room and becomes an Auditorium. It matters very little if the chairs are mismatched vinyl and still smell faintly of yesterday’s garlic shrimp.
The universe treats the new orientation with deep, theatrical gravity. On the top tier of the Front of House, a cluster of restaurant chairs had been ruthlessly contorted into a choir configuration, staring expectantly at the black-and-white teeth of the instrument.
Behind those teeth sat Seth Sassoon. He was currently dragging his fingers across the keys, coaxing out a rendition of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” with the sort of aggressive irony only found in people who have spent their lives doing exactly that. Resting on the polished mahogany lid of the piano was his thermal mug—a stark white cylinder loudly embellished with neon pink flamingos intertwining with musical notes. It stood there like a tiny, plastic monument to tropical optimism in the middle of a room full of people waiting to find out if they were still employed.
cattered across the lower tables, the cast members sat suspended in that agonizing purgatory between casual Tuesday attire and tight-fitting dance clothing. Some chewed rhythmically on cold chicken wraps; others talked in the hushed, hurried whispers of people who suspected the director might hear them through the vents.
Cairn Albert drifted into this ecosystem from behind the heavy velvet drapes. Her eyes were locked to the blue glow of her mobile device, guided entirely by that sixth sense unique to stage managers, which allows them to navigate physical reality without ever looking at it. She narrowly missed colliding with Geoffrey Greene. Geoffrey—a man carrying forty-odd years of New Jersey traditionalism, a mustache that could only be described as aggressively cinematic, and the same pair of grey New Balance sneakers he had worn since 1994—stood with his arms locked tightly across his chest. A solitary sheet of white paper dangled from his fingers like a flag of truce.
Cairn glanced up just in time to clear his shoulder, throwing him a quick, practiced smile before sliding into center stage. Geoffrey returned the nod with the stiff precision of a clockwork sentinel and retreated into the shadows.
Suddenly, the music died. Seth Sassoon hit a final, unresolved chord, reached out a hand, and hoisted his flamingo mug to his lips. He tilted his head back, waited for the comforting touch rush of caffeine, and received only the hollow, insulting click of an ice cube hitting dry plastic. The mug was empty. Without a word, his face masking a cosmic betrayal, Seth rose from the bench and evaporated toward the safety of the kitchen.
The cast waited. Some fidgeted with their rings; others stared down at their wrists, watching the seconds on their watches ticking away with aggressive indifference. The universe, as it so often does when people are waiting for a rehearsal to begin, slowed down just enough to be annoying.
Cairn looked up from her screen. “Huh. Did you know that Harry Houdini started with card tricks?”
No one answered, largely because no one was entirely sure whether a stage manager asking a question about Houdini was a trap. Cairn shimmied her headphones down until they cradled her shoulders, shoved the phone into her back pocket, and eyed the room.
“Has everyone signed their contracts and given me updated bios and headshots? If you have, you should have received a script.”
Her gaze drifted toward a remarkably unstable stack of manila folders resting precariously on the lip of the stage. “Is this everyone?”
Two rows back, sharing a table that wobbled every time someone breathed too heavily, sat Jimmy and Matt.
“Oh, oh—one more,” Jimmy piped up, waving a thick folder. Matt looked sideways at him, his tongue tucked firmly into his cheek, tracking the sheer theatricality with which Jimmy straightened the edges of his papers before passing them forward like a high-stakes gambler handing over a winning hand.
Cairn caught the folder, holding it between two fingers. “You must be new here.”
A collective ripple of laughter broke through the rows. It was the specific kind of laughter shared by survivors of an elite club when someone new walks through the door wearing the wrong shoes. Cairn deftly slid Jimmy’s file into the middle of the pile.
“You didn’t think that was gon’na go on the bottom, did you? I’ve watched you deal cards.”
With the practiced efficiency of a dealer herself, Cairn began tearing through the folders. She pulled out bios, snapped headshots up to her face, examined them for hidden flaws, stuffed them back, and dropped the completed files into a plastic box. As she worked, her expression underwent a rapid, silent tour of human emotion: a small smile, a sharp chuckle, a deep, terrifying frown.
The room filled with the low hum of cast gossip, a sound completely disrupted by the sudden arrival of Terina Vinogradov. She marched in from the wings, looking intensely European and carrying an enormous, tweed-covered portfolio that looked heavy enough to contain the lost secrets of the Renaissance.
“Apologies. I am looking for Cairn.”
“That’s me,” Cairn said, her hands pausing over a folder. “This is rehearsal, though. Can we help you?”
“I am new painter.”
Before Cairn could process the structural implications of an unannounced painter, the lobby doors swung open and Mike Cheltham materialized at the back of the house.
“Sorry, Geoffrey. Forgot to tell you. I hired a new painter. We got her from Russia.”
“I am Ukraini,” Terina corrected, her voice carrying the cool, unyielding weight of geopolitical accuracy.
“That’s nice. Well, here she is,” Mike said, entirely unburdened by the distinction. He immediately spun on his heel and vanished back through the lobby door, having fulfilled his cosmic duty of delivering a human being to a room.
Terina stood stranded under the lights. “I can wait here?”
“You can,” Cairn replied.
A thirty-headed dragon of human eyes followed Terina as she navigated the maze of tables, finally choosing the empty seat right next to Jimmy and Matt. The moment she sat, every pair of eyes snapped back to Cairn like a synchronized swimming team—except for Matt’s and Jimmy’s, which remained locked onto their new tablemate with intense curiosity.
Cairn flipped open the next file in her hands. “Okay. Good. Good. Go…od.”
She pulled out a set of stapled sheets, reading the text to herself with narrowing eyes. “Nice bio. The Netherlands? How the hell did you wind up here? Never mind, tell me later. You can stay. Eka…te…or…term…”
“Ekaterina Vinogradov or Terina,” the new painter offered from the back. “You call me Terina.”
“I will do that. Yes, I will.” Cairn paused, looking at the arrangement of the room. “Terina, you don’t know those two you are sitting with, do you? Obviously not.”
She slid that file away and hoisted the next one, reading the name aloud with theatrical gravity. “Mr. James Oliver A. Aron, Esquire.”
“You pronounced my name wrong,” Jimmy barked back.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Mr. Aarons.”
“No. It’s Olivier.”
Cairn didn’t argue. She simply pinched the corner of the top page in Jimmy’s folder and lifted it into the light. “Yeah, I don’t think this headshot’s gon’na make the playbill.”
Jimmy and Matt immediately developed a sudden, fascinating interest in the opposite walls of the theater, their faces twisted into desperate grins. Cairn slowly rotated the paper to face the assembled cast.
The image printed on the page was a magnificent, unholy triumph of early-generation digital manipulation. Someone had meticulously sliced the stern, Shakespearean face of Sir Laurence Olivier and pasted it onto the impossibly voluptuous, hourglass ink-lines of Jessica Rabbit’s body. It stood there, a cross-hatched monument to theatrical absurdity, staring out at the room.
The theater erupted. The laughter was loud, chaotic, and infectious. Jimmy stood up, thoroughly enjoying his own genius, and treated the room to a small, aristocratic bow. The cast showered him with applause.
Geoffrey Greene did not applaud. His face remained a flat, gray stone of New Jersey stoicism.
Cairn waited for the noise to die down before reclaiming her territory. “For those of you who are new to the ‘Tam, welcome. If you thought this was the DMV, go back out, exit the parking lot to the right, go to the second light, turn left, and it is right across the bridge on the right. They moved out of the old Kmart three years ago.”
Another wave of giggles.
“I’m Cairn Albert, with a ‘C’, never with a ‘K’. C-A-I-R-N. It’s Scottish. You may think, ‘She doesn’t look Scottish.’ Well, you’re right.” She paused for a beat. “I’m Irish.”
The punchline landed cleanly. “I am the stage manager and assistant director. I’m the one who will find your ass if you don’t show up on time.”
“My ass?” Jimmy mumbled under his breath, just loud enough to carry three tables over. “That’s a little personal.”
“What was that, Old Man?” Cairn snapped. Jimmy immediately shrugged, looking around at the laughing crowd with an expression of pure, unadulterated innocence.
“Folks, if you don’t already know, this is Jimmy, one of our favorites. Save it for the stage, Jimmy. Okay, in a second, I’m turning you over to your director, Geoffrey Greene…”
She peered back toward the empty piano bench. “…and Musical Director Seth Sassoon should be back soon. Maybe. If not, we’ll work it out. Let’s move on. First, a couple of general announcements. One: Do NOT feed the big black and white dog backstage anything. Blanche is very good at making you think she hasn’t been fed, but she is lying.”
“And don’t feed the stray cats out there a damn thing,” Jimmy interjected, his voice rising with ancient authority. “It attracts possums and stoats and other haints and boogens.”
“Okay, well, calm down, Pa Kettle,” Cairn sighed.
“Haints?” Matt whispered, entirely lost in the regional taxonomy of folklore monsters.
Right on cue, a massive, unhurried block of black and white fur sauntered out from behind the stage curtain. Blanche the dog moved with the sluggish confidence of an animal that owned the building’s mortgage. She navigated to Cairn’s side and dropped onto the floorboards with a heavy, dramatic thud. Cairn extended an open palm down toward the floor, nodding like a game show host revealing a grand prize.
“This is my assistant, Blanche.”
The room gave up another round of laughter. At that exact moment, Mike Cheltham strolled back in from the lobby, completely ignoring the center-stage monologue. He backed himself directly up against the dining room wall and began moving his torso up and down, scratching his back against the drywall with the primal, unbothered rhythm of a grizzly bear utilizing a pine tree.
“Two: No more free sodas from the bar during rehearsal.” Cairn pointed a strict finger back toward the wall. “Mister Cheltham has been paying close attention to the syrup levels at the bar…”
“…And keep your dick-beaters off of it,” Mike bellowed from the back wall, not pausing his scratching for a single second.
Cairn froze, her eyes sliding sideways to give Mike a look of profound, cold judgment. Unfazed by the silence, Mike finished his business with the drywall and shuffled back out into the lobby. In rows two and three, Matt and Jimmy simultaneously raised their hands, flipping them back and forth and shaking their heads in a silent, perfectly synchronized gesture that translated to: Well, that’s Mike for you.
“Okay, have to get started,” Cairn said, recovering her stride. “As always, your director, Geoffrey Greene. Okay, Mr. DeMille. The floor is yours.”
“Thank you, Ms. Albert,” Geoffrey replied, his deep voice slicing through the room.
As Geoffrey marched forward to assume the coordinates of power, Cairn stepped back, retreating toward the quiet sanctuary of the rear wall. A polite, rhythmic patter of applause filled the space.
“Ginsberg, Ginsberg…” Jimmy chanted under his breath.
“Ginsberg, Ginsberg…” Matt joined in, a private, rhythmic joke echoing in their corner. Geoffrey Greene stepped into the spotlight at center stage, nodding and waving with the practiced, benevolent grace of a local politician visiting a county fair. He spun around to project his voice, only to find his path completely obstructed by Blanche. The dog had risen from her nap and was currently pushing her nose deep into Geoffrey’s sweater pocket, emitting a tiny, pathetic whine that completely undermined his directorial authority.
Without breaking eye contact with his cast, his face remaining entirely expressionless, Geoffrey slipped his hand into his pocket, retrieved a small brown liver treat, and dropped it into Blanche’s waiting jaws.
TAM’S PILOT — COMING SOON
Cairn is currently adjusting the headset. Jimmy is on the back deck with a bag of fries. Blanche is eyeing the doughnuts.
Tam’s Pilot is currently undergoing final staging and visual assembly before taking the main stage at Imaginal Press.
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