The Tempest

Luckily, she was good at focusing. In the bustle and noise of costume shop where the sun never shone in the basement of the Dramatic Arts building at San Diego State University, she threaded several needles with midnight blue thread and stabbed each of them into the enormous peach-coloured pin cushion which bristled like a porcupine with pins and needles. She appreciated her preparation, then liberated a needle and began to hem.

The trouser press hissed. Costumers discussed last night’s incident when the shoulder of the leading lady’s eighteenth-century gown tore when the leading man grappled with her. This needed to be repaired in situ during the few minutes she was off stage.

Opinions varied about him, since some of the ladies and their one and only man had a definite crush, while others speculated who would step into the gap when he finally graduated.

She liked hemming. It was something that the woman in charge of costuming said she did well. And nobody else enjoyed hemming, so this had become her niche.

Yesterday, with no needlework needed, she had been shown how to press the dozen trousers needed for the militia. Because she had been told to fold the trousers like you did for ironing, it had been revealed, to her blushes, that she had never touched a man’s trousers, not even those of a brother or a father. At home, she only ironed handkerchiefs as that was all her mother trusted her with doing.

Everyone pinning or hand-sewing or cutting out fabric with the scissors that had a huge bell attached to them so nobody would take them home as it made them uncomfortable to use—even those busy on the sewing machines that lined one of the walls—turned around to look at her.

Or so she felt at the time. She nearly ran away to never come back, but someone else began to speak, so she fell back into the obscurity where she was comfortable.

The costume shop was as close as she would ever get to the stage above them other than if she sat in the audience, of course. She had managed to press the dozen trousers, certain it took her twice as long as anyone else and, more so, that she had not done it half as well. Such a relief to be back doing more hemming today. 

She felt so privileged to be working on the midnight blue robe which Prospero wore during the dress rehearsal. So very glad that she had convinced herself to attend the afternoon event with the realisation that nobody would be looking at her while the performance was going on. 

The lightning and thunder during the shipwreck swept her straight into the story, much more vivid than what she imagined when she read the play for her Shakespeare class. With the actors embodying the characters and speaking the lines, it was much easier to understand everything as well. She might ask mother again whether it was okay if she attended an evening performance, though she doubted the no would turn into a yes that easily.

From that day when her Drama professor shepherded dozens of Introduction to Drama students on a complete tour of the fascinating building, explaining and demonstrating the mechanics of the stage which could be made to look as if infinity filled the background, she felt she belonged here, despite her perpetual shyness.

After wrestling with fears of rejection all weekend, she volunteered three units of her timetable to support the university theatre. Terrified to usher or sell tickets even over the phone, she gravitated to the costume shop.

“And he actually sat on the needle right in the middle of his long speech,” a costumer finished telling a story.

They all laughed. She contributed a smile as that was as far as she dared to go. She didn’t understand all the words they used or what they described, but she loved to listen. She would have done more hours but the two women who ruled the costume shop made sure she signed out on time. One of them kindly explained that they could not give her extra credit, not knowing that wasn’t what she wanted.

Silver spangles and intricate swirls of beading and fake gemstones covered the midnight blue garment she was hemming. At dress rehearsal, the actor playing Prospero found fault with the length, convinced he might trip on the hem when he strode across the stage with his equally ornamented staff which leaned on the wall nearby.

She loved working on such a magical robe, admiring the sparkling signs of the zodiac embroidered, the shooting stars and pentacles, the jagged lightnings. It could be worn by a wizard in the fantasy books she liked to read, in one of the stories she tried to write which she didn’t even share with her mother. She would have liked to try the robe on and look in a mirror, to see if a different face looked back, but would never dare to do so.

The glistening midnight blue robe flooded the table at which she sat. When she needed to rearrange it to stitch another area, she used both hands to shift the heavy fabric. In her element, she listened and hemmed, using one pre-threaded needle after another, hoping she could finish before her session volunteering ended for today.

“Last shell finally in situ,” their one male costumer proclaimed as he stood up and stretched at the other end of the table. He donned the gauzy, sparkling, seashell-encrusted garment to dance around the costume shop, exhibiting his own fluid grace as well as Ariel’s sprite costume which he had designed and created entirely on his own.

Everyone else stopped sewing, too, the hefty drone from one of the sewing machines stuttered into silence as all eyes watched him prowl toward the filing cabinet. With a reverent gesture, he lifted up the tawny silver, intricately feathered, artfully sequined owl head and raised it over his own.

In a resonant voice that she did not recognise, he sang, “Those are pearls that were his eyes; nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea change into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: ding-dong. Hark! now I hear them—ding-dong, bell.”

A shiver began at the base of her spine and ratcheted upward at speed, exploding where her spinal cord met the base of her brain to create wordless fireworks inside her mind.

She watched her feverish hands moving quickly as if observing someone more skilled winding the last of the midnight thread three times around the needle, then pushing and pulling it through to create a dark knot. She used the tiny hem ripper to free the needle, then stabbed it into the massive peach-coloured toadstool pin cushion.

Even standing up, because it might attract notice, usually took effort, but she rose as if tugged upward by a dozen balloons which resembled roses with snaky green stems attached to various parts of her body. 

Her hands clenched on the outspread robe, gathering the heavy folds toward her. She raised the closest edge and burrowed inside, delving until she could stuff fingers and hands into the armholes and wrestle the midnight blue robe over head and shoulders.

She emerged, weighed down by magic, chin raising as she smelled the tang of the ocean and heard the wash of the waves. 

Words clustered in her throat then spilled out and rang with unanticipated power. “How goes, my sprite? My fairy pet, dost thou perform all things exactly as I told thee?”

The slender, owl-faced sprite whirled toward her and sketched an elegant bow before somersaulting rapidly over the sand and racing to escape the caress of an encroaching wave. “Well and merrily so. All wander lost, some more forlorn than others, each and every one plagued by turmoil without and within.”

Looking up at the wrack of storm clouds that still occupied the heavens, feeling the solidity of the staff she held in one hand and how this rooted her to the earth as if transforming her into a tree, she said, “My storm shall break down the boundaries inside their minds, shatter their hearts so that they be made new with this resolve that not one of them will be the same person that my carefully wrought tempest shipwrecked on this blessed isle.”

Ariel’s golden owl eyes gazed at her and into her, then he raised gauzy, shell-encrusted wings and proclaimed, “This enchanted tempest which you visited on them descends upon you for creation turns on the creator and wreaks special havoc for you are not immune to your own magic.”

Power surged in her blood and bone as she replied, “Be that as it may, sprite, the game is worth the candle. Now hasten. You must summon every lesser and greater entity that serves you to execute my plan tirelessly and in exacting detail.”

“I shall, I will, I blaze only to serve you until you bate me of mine servitude,” declared Ariel, shimmering with scintillating magical force before fading from view.

Holding the staff in both hands and leaning on it heavily as exhaustion overcame her body from her metaphysical exertions, she murmured, “To sleep, perchance to dream. . .”

Twilight shrouded the cloudscape above, deepening swiftly into night as she knelt then, as the staff dropped from her grasp, collapsed forward onto the sand, the ebb and flow of the waves lulling her to sleep with the ceaseless repetition of their sighs.

On the edge of oblivion, she heard voices, remote and unimportant, as if she overheard some of Ariel’s servants discussing how best to guide the foaming fringes of the waves across the sandy shore.

“Help me move her into the recovery position. Get something soft to cushion her head.”

“Did anybody understand what she was babbling about?”

“What a trip! Whatever she’s taken, I want some.”

“Don’t be stupid. Isn’t her father a policeman?”

“Could she be pregnant?”

“Doubt it—she blushes if I even speak to her.”

“She’s like a little mouse, hardly ever says anything.”

“Sweet little mouse, hope she’ll be okay.”

She breathed in with the rush of the waves, breathed out as the saltwater subsided, watching a little mouse scramble over seaweed and scuttle down into a driftwood hole where sleep sustained it.

The last remnant of the fireworks in her brain dwindled into a depth of darkness where she could finally gain much needed respite as if her racing mind had circumnavigated the earth and attempted to launch itself to the stars that occupied the vault of heaven. 

She did not register any of the sounds made when the paramedics arrived to evaluate and extract her from the costume shop. 

She never noticed the yowling of the ambulance or her arrival at a medical facility where clever minds and gentle hands supported her recovery.

Eventually, everything was diagnosed and explained, medication prescribed to counteract the oddities of her brain and ease the symptoms which she had been masking since childhood in a bewildering attempt to fit into her perplexing environment.

Gradually adapting to a more cohesive life in which she was more of a participant rather than only an observer, she wrote different stories. 

In the fullness of time, she shared one of her stories with a friend, that young man who designed the costume for Ariel, sitting on a bench outside the library because even her mother could not class that kind of meeting as a date.   

When the next September arrived, she dared to enrol in a creative writing course with his encouragement. At the end of the semester, astonishing herself with her own bravery but compelled by her desire to share her stories with as many people as possible, she submitted a short story to a competition. To celebrate, her costume designer friend gave her a seagull feather, white and grey, which he told her could easily have been found along the strand on Prospero’s blessed isle.