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"Where is she?"
"I’m here"
It started as a ripple that becaape in awe at Marie in the red dress A terrible, breath-stealing dress of saturated scarlet like a heart turned inside out; like its architect’s heart torn out and presented, glinting with gory beads of glass The rooed with the graceful measure of a peacock’s tail, out behind the screens towards the runway, so heavy and fluid that it ht have left behind a wipe of blood on the Lino With a clatter somebody dropped a tin box of pins that chimed in the silence but still the people weren’t distracted; they couldn’t look away As the last few inches of eed
Froasp of audience breath They cowered before the majesty of the creation in front of them, the perfect expression of heart as art There was nobody wearing the gown It was filled in for its curves and swishing its train, but all that the audience saas its raw radiance, the triuht it to life
The girl in this photograph, her naht there was a face there but you’re just seeing what you expect to see Shaking the paper the i--evolving--even though the glossy surface is dry to the touch There’s no woraph, you fool: it’s a dress on a for skirt of chaned across the bottom in ballpoint, Marie Bochert--that ht this dress to life And what a beautiful dress it is
Where Shadows Meet Light
Rachel Swirsky
Princess Diana’s ghost ehosts, presu
At first she haunted Charles and Harry and Williarew too painful to think about her life She even grew tired of the longti into Elizabeth’s ear while she slept,the old woman’s dreams as disturbed and uncomfortable as she had made Diana’s life
She went overseas to America where she’d once visited the White House and danced with John Travolta in a own that sold at auction for a hundred thousand pounds This time, she traveled between ordinary houses, soe and mint and yellow It was easy to find people she could haunt there, people ned memorabilia with her face on it, but whose distance from the British Isles iving her enough room to dwell and still keep her secrets
After all these years, the e to Charles Serving bowls and sugar jugs and butter dishes Rhinestone-rined photographs, s One family even owned Princess Diana paper dolls with all her famous dresses carefully cut out in rown child who no longer played at being royalty
In a Florida condominium, she came upon a man whose dearest as to be her She felt his desire hot in his mind when she drew forth from the shadows in his bedrooh his dreaered
At first she assumed he was one of those hts, she realized she rong He wanted froth and silk and glas that were feminine, but not necessarily female
He wanted the kind of dazzle that drew the heir to the throne He wanted to wear spangled red silk chiffon and eette and white lace eraphers to capture his every angle He wanted crowds to sigh when he crossed to the other side of the street He wanted a wedding with thirty-five hundred guests and seven hundred and fiftyHe even owned the paper dolls--not cut out, but displayed in a cabinet above the dishes, along with a hundred other i the day--in the ht--but Jeffrey was a restless sleeper When he woke at night, Diana followed hih the dark hallways as he paced the house He was a fragile-lookingthe blond He wore black silk pajaold faux-Chinese e White tabi socks warmed his feet He was too chic for slippers
Jeffrey sat at the wicker table in the atriu morosely at the shadows that the palrating with the shadows he cast on the chair, ih to comfort him
She’d comforted homeless children, landmine victims, lepers She’d shaken hands with an AIDS patient, skin on skin, even when her advisers told her to wear rubber gloves Now there was no skin on skin, no way to pat Jeffrey’s shoulder and say in the language of touch, whatever’s wrong, you’ll be all right
His sad blue eyes looked dusky beneath his pale brows Easy lines folded around his frown, but she’d seen other lines shape the that he spentone or the other His face was easy to decipher, but hisbut the core of need that called her name
Why do you want to be me? she wanted to ask Don’t you see what happened when I was ht, Jeffrey’s husband ca paper "Ooh!" Jeffrey exclai in his high-pitched excitement sounded false, but Diana couldn’t discern what