Opener
by Garth Miró
Someone has to go first: so I will. I’ll blunt the hate. Warm them up. I’ll get eaten in service of someone greater. Here I go. I’m getting on stage. Easy. No big deal. People aren’t here for me. I’m a decoration while they order drinks and food. I talk, they eat. Here goes my first line. Did it land? Are they laughing? Can’t see. It’s just this blaze of light, and beyond that a hard wall of gelatin black. I’m on an island. I have to survive up here for my allotted time, or I’m dead—well, not dead, but I’m sure some would prefer it that way. That if I fail they get the option to press a button and drop me down a pit, or thresher. Blood spraying back on their faces. Bloody smiling faces. In the black. I finish my second bit. Good? I still can’t tell. Does it matter? This is an interzone. An anti-sacred place. And I willingly stepped up here. Do I really exist? To check, I start taking off my shirt. I feel hot. I take off my pants, too. Now the black’s even more silent. I take off all my clothes and stand stark naked. I feel heat on my prick. They’re staring at my crotch, and it’s alive! No, but that’s good. I don’t know what I’d do without a crotch. My main motivation. I can feel the crowd now staring at other parts and I feel heat there also. They bring me to life, part-by-part. Stomach. Feet. Legs. Nipples. Arms. Neck. Forehead. I’m alive and can do anything. This is my stage, for now. What shall I do? Hmm. OK, got it. I go and sign a lease. A big apartment. Nice place. I get myself situated. Buy furniture and put it in the correct places. I buy a car. I start a job, to pay for all this stuff. I do real well. I do everything on stage. My boss pats my head. My boss closes and locks the door and unzips. I’m scared. But if I don’t suck, I’ll lose the apartment and furniture and car. A dilemma. I tell him to fuck himself, that I value my freedom. I’m fired. Now I have freedom. It’s terrifying. The crowd gasps. What will I do with all this freedom? It’s too much. I have no money. My world starts to shrink. I have to do things I don’t want to do to stay free, to stay alive, which makes me feel less free. That’s the trade. I go to the park and sell dolls I make out of corncobs. People look down on me. Some old guy propositions me and says he’ll let me stay in his apartment—if I just help him out. He unzips. This time, I understand freedom better and suck real good. I suck there on stage and take it all down. I don’t forget to massage the balls. The crowd cheers! I live in the apartment with the man. Wear a little collar. But, after a while, the man gets bored and tells me he’s kicking me out. No. I kill him. Push him out the window. The cops say it’s clearly suicide. He was a sick man, a fetishist who liked to take in young ones off the street and dress them up as purebred malamutes. Yes, I say. That’s correct. I stay in the apartment. It’s empty now. Freedom. I have parties. I have a lot of friends. I get famous with the art crowd for my parties. Important people come over. They’re interested in my life. They call it “my story.” Say I should make it into a one-man show. I get very drunk. I start to hate everyone. They all look so ugly. Like Dog the Bounty Hunter. I build a set to look like a stage in a theater and practice my one-man show. They say it would make a great movie. I make a movie of the one-man show of my life, filming the stage. This new life is expensive. There’s lots of types of shoes involved. To keep up, I adapt the movie version of my life, of the one-man show version of my life, into a comedy act, and then perform this on a stage in real life, on a stage built to look like the stage I built before, much like the one I’m on now. This is a version. Lights scream in my face. I feel really hot. I tell my final joke and a wave of laughter hits me and I feel sublime putrid freedom, because I’m only the opener, and that’s my time.
Garth Miró is a writer from Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Litro, Sundog Lit, XRAY, Expat, Hash, Bullshit Lit, Misery Tourism, Shark Reef, and PoliticsNY.com. He was a semifinalist for North American Review's 2021 Kurt Vonnegut Prize.