Publishing "Rehearsal" by Abigail Cain

The following piece was written by Abigail Cain, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, during the one-day Salon we held there in February 2006. The exercise: Describe a room in order to evoke an emotion, without specifying what that emotion is. Write for 10 minutes.

In this piece Abby shows a nail-sharp eye for detail, and a shape-shifter's ability to slip in an eyeblink from one point of view to another: real and imagined, present and future, inside and outside the glass. We hope you enjoy its visceral immediacy as much as we did.

The room, which was lined with full-length mirrors, smelled of sweat and dirt. From the morning, when forty beautiful people walked in, and the girls put on their make-up at the mirrors while the gay men plucked their eyebrows, and everyone was fabulous, there were now slippers and leg warmers thrown about, Tupperware containers of carrots left behind, and droplets of sweat and snot on the floor that would dry long before they were bleached. Hair that was clean and perfectly in buns that morning was now flopping around in ragged ponytails as if begging to be washed. Eyes that had been bright were now sunken into dark circles on the faces of those whose make-up had mixed with perspiration and ended up on hands, and other people, and who knows where else. Backs had cracked and muscles stretched, so that now they shook as everyone looked at the clock as the director stopped the music and the dancing to yell about how they sucked, but they all knew: fifteen more minutes. Children walked by the wall of windows going to their own class, as they examined their dreams in front of them, manifested, so everyone tried to look a little happier, but the director was still yelling because he couldn’t go get a drink yet.