Anusia Battersby

''You're back,'' it says softly.

''You're back like me.''

Violet smiles in return and hops down from the chair.

She crosses the room to the mirror and admires herself in the mirror.

She raises a hand to tussle her hair, but stops herself.

She's perfect, she reminds herself.

She is perfect, and there will be roses.

Opening night.

Violet Steele, 11 years old, bright under Fresnel, and cradled in a thousand-strong gaze, holds hands with a ghost.

She is Lady Macbeth's once-mentioned lost babe, aged despite its deadness, and gender-swapped for the irresistibility of dangling willow-tree-by-night hair and moonlight complexion.

Salt water is soaked into that hair, and there is glitter dashed across her cheekbones.

She feels grit beneath her bare toes, and shivers under the gossamer she is draped in as a facsimile of swaddling cloth.

She is a will-o'-wisp of tragedy, a siren of inevitability, a soundless call to Denouement.

She is the silk-string noose hanging loose around the neck of the piece, tickling, teasing, taunting.

She is pale and solid beside Lady Macbeth, as both of their toes curl over the edge of the plywood battlement.

Beside her, the ghost squeezes her hand.

She shivers into it and closes her eyes.

It squeezes harder.

Then, it jumps.

Violet gasps high and sharp, her first and only sound.