Bonnie May

In the hush of a candle-scented drawing-room, a waif-thin wisp of a girl—Bonnie May—drifts through the gilded doors of Mrs. Baron’s mausoleum-mansion, clutching a single scuffed valise and the kind of hope that glimmers like a cracked mirror. The play she is hired to perform is a private whimsy, never meant for the rabble outside the wrought-iron gates; its lines were penned in the violet hours by Victor Baron, the household’s reclusive, consumptive heir whose spine is as brittle as the parchment he inks. Each dusk the salon becomes a trembling proscenium: velvet drapes exhale dust, crystal prisms scatter amber ghosts across the wainscoting, and Bonnie—half waif, half will-o’-the-wisp—speaks Victor’s syllables until they sound like prayers. Between rehearsals she wanders the corridors, humming show-tunes to the portraits; the ancestral eyes thaw, the butler’s stoop straightens, even the monocled mastiff in the hallway thumps approval. Victor, fever-bright, watches from a wheeled chaise and begins to live twice—once in his skin, once in her incandescent retelling. When the final performance ends without applause (etiquette forbids it), the house exhales a collective sob: the illusion is over. Victor begs her to stay, to co-author a second dream before his lungs betray him; Bonnie, sensing the chill of permanence, bargains with her own ambition, her own dread of becoming another mute face on the wall. Their compact is sealed in midnight whispers, ink smudged by tears and candle grease, while outside the mansion the world spins on, oblivious to the microcosm of art and ache blooming within.