First: Levitas and Gravitas were caught in a death spiral
If masks had talons, they’d be clasped
now in stubborn eroticism, an exchange
of personhood which has never been without
friction. If masks had beaks they’d be open, now, or
pecking down the other’s throat in a mad
approximation of human love; had they
feathers, the wind would tug them from their
accustomed softness, mutual venom shaping pillows

of air into a wedding bed of nettles—but alas, these
avian’t masks find themselves merely stuck, having
always travelled cheek-by-jowl, insistent that
the spinning can’t end until one or the other

concedes. Tragedy, it was often said, had no
respect for the rule of threes; Comedy—in a line
spat back as though rehearsed—had no respect
for anything at all. And that was the crux

of their mutual animosity; that, and the fact
that they were never not embroiled in some act
of passionate juxtaposition. Theatre historians will say
they were always going to end here:

Levitas—committed to the implicit suicide
of seeing a bit through—and Gravitas—too at home
at the end of things; if masks could weep, there
would’ve been no need for their facades, so
none could ever claim they died by halves. They were
more fragmented than that, cheating
out as though proscenium-framed when everyone
knows dying happens only in the round.
Then: the actors came
and knelt in the fragments until their knees’ tracing paper skin was shredded to stark bone, they
found the patches of earth where Comedy and Tragedy were scorched to ash by their own blind
passion and the actors—being actors—began to shovel it by the handful between cold lips,
frozen stiff when their muses fractured, wet tongues turning ash to paste and then to plaster,
mumbling something past the muck
about how
the absence of a thing
is still
the thing.
Finally: the curtains closed
The house lights came up.
The audience left, mute.
I don’t get it, they said without so much as a
murmur.
The actors slunk back to the greenroom and took off their costumes, which were
themselves.
They left the stagedoor one by one.
They never saw each other again.
The director burned the pages.
The playwright left the ashes where they were.
The stage manager wouldn’t exit the sound booth.
The theatre was shuttered.
There was no way to mourn.
No one remembered how.