A Standing Ovation for a Stage Exit - MicroFiction

An ugly girl stepped across the stage and bowed down to her crowd.  They booed and jeered and pelted her with fruit and she kept on bowing to them.  In a long lost whisper in her mind, little more than a sound of a pin prick this young lady had lamented in private that she was not what they had envisioned.  Yet, she took it up on herself, and she gave it her all and she'd bow before them all and at first they were enthralled, but the mob turned in on itself, like  a snake, like an ouroboros, and here they were to sting her eyes with ripened tomatoes.  It was a long day for the girl.  Starting out with hollers that she wasn't fit for the part she had prepared for, her mind on the tightness of her costume gown, her eyes locked on the image of herself as she sang out loud in the mirror.   Her face contorted in strange ways and she realized they would mock the way she looked when she warbled like a crow into the crowd of patrons who paid top dollar to here the scorn of oblivion tear the eardrums till they bled out the canals and down the side of their faces.  In this exaggerated expectation she moved on with her time.  Her mind building up the horror that was herself, and the idea of seeing her performance through the minds of the denizens of the theater crowd.   She tip toed around her co-stars and she shook and trembled in her shoes and when she went to take a sip of water out of her glass the hand shook so that she spilled it all over her costume gown.   She took deep breaths, and there was further contortion in her reflection and her skin was blotchy, and her skin was fading into a rash.   It itched, her patches of skin, and she vomited into  a pail and saw that she too was pale as well.   In a moment of grave misdirection she picked up a stage pencil used for her eyes and she jabbed it into her cheek.   She stabbed in several hundred places so that she bled all over and she watched and was satisfied in her bloodied mask because it hid the hideous creature underneath.  They would never know, and she stabbed again, and the cheek flesh stuck to the tip of the pencil as she pulled it away and squired an emission of blood like the popping of a pompous pimple.  It sprawled a warning across the mirror and it dripped and ran down all over the counter top.   The people outside her room heard her graveness, heard her screams, and her crying and they pounded their frantic fists upon the dressing room door but to no avail as her abhorrent rage continued.  She washed off her face when the wounds had finally clotted and her ugliness was now real.   She opened up her door and everyone parted about her like a sea, and her face the staff.  It was time to commit to the horror of her life, for now when she cocked like the crow for every single songs moment, her face would match her disparaging facade and the people would welcome her.   But the audience did not smile, they did not laugh, they did not appreciate her committal.  They had paid top dollar, had memorized the playbill, for there had been no reason for her self destruction, but now she was as ugly on the outside as her soul had beckoned and the people were disturbed by what they'd seen.  So she worshiped them for their disconnect, for their intellects, for though the theater chairs had leaned out, their pockets she had cleaned out, and they had felt their joyous love of the theater stage had been dampened, by this monster in a costume gown with barely a face to give them.  With barely a face to give them.