Dusk to Dawn

A porcelain-pale flapper drifts through gas-lit parlours and oceanic ballrooms, her psyche cleaved like a split reel: by day she is Eveline, prim stenographer who inks other people’s memoirs; by twilight she blossoms into Lina, sequin-draped cabaret sylph who shoplifts strangers’ desires. Between the two selves stands a moon-faced psychiatrist who owns a cinematograph instead of a couch, projecting her dreams onto peeling plaster while the ticking metronome of a broken cuckoo clock counts down to fusion or fracture. Love arrives wearing two masks—an upright law clerk clutching probate ledgers and a morphine-addicted magician palming white rabbits—and each swain courts a different woman without knowing they share the same skin. When a murderous letter addressed to both identities lands on the same mahogany tray, the selves turn predator and prey, stalking one another through corridors that elongate like over-cranked footage, until the final reel burns in the projector’s gate, leaving only a single silhouette that may be either savior or assassin.