Copper Wire Dreams

Written in response to: "Write a story where a background character steals the spotlight."

Fiction

The ghost light cast skeletal shadows across the Palais Garnier's empty stage, but Mikhael Rostas wasn't there for phantoms—he was hunting metal. His bare feet found the silence between floorboards as he studied the massive theatrical spotlight, its chrome housing dulled by decades of heat and ambition. He ran his fingers along the casing's edge, feeling for the junction points where German engineering met French theatrical excess.

The lockpick slid home with a whisper. Svetlana's hands had guided his through this same motion on countless jewelry boxes, her tobacco-stained fingers teaching him to read metal like Braille. Never force, păpuşă. The mechanism has a heartbeat.

Outside, September rain hammered the opera house's glass dome with the persistence of unpaid bills. Inside, fifteen-year-old Mikhael worked with the methodical precision of someone who understood that mistakes cost more than time—they cost lives.

The housing opened to reveal exactly what he'd prayed for—thick-gauge copper wound in perfect spirals, enough to trade for real medicine instead of the herb teas that made Anya cough blood onto her pillow each morning. He pulled out wire strippers worn smooth by his father's ghost-hands, the tool's weight familiar as prayer beads, heavy with the memory of callused palms that would never teach him anything again.

The first length of copper came free with a snap that echoed through the empty theater like applause for a performance only he could see.

"Hé! Arrêtez-vous!"

The shout cracked like a whip across the velvet seats. Mikhael's head jerked up to see a security guard charging down the aisle, his considerable frame moving with the particular fury of a man who'd been made fool of once too often. The uniform stretched tight across a barrel chest, and his face carried twenty years of night shifts and thankless vigilance etched in permanent scowl lines.

Mikhael stuffed copper into his jacket and ran.

The chase exploded through narrow corridors that reeked of sawdust, old greasepaint, and the ghost of a thousand opening nights. Mikhael's advantage was immediate—three months of mapping service entrances and forgotten doors, learning the cleaning crews' rhythms and the building's blind spots like a pickpocket learns the city's wallet pockets. Behind him, the guard—his nameplate read BERNARD in block letters that had been refilled with black ink too many times—crashed through the maze like an ox in porcelain, his breathing already labored.

The boy knew these passages like rosary beads. Left at the costume storage, right past the orchestra pit access, straight through the scene shop where tomorrow's dreams were hammered into wood and canvas. His feet remembered every loose board, every door that squeaked, every shortcut the day shift had forgotten existed.

They burst onto Rue de la Paix where Saturday night's digital carnival blazed under LED prayer wheels that promised salvation through metrics.

A cluster of influencers had transformed the corner into their personal shrine, ring lights burning like miniature suns around a girl whose face had been surgically sculpted into algorithmic perfection. Her cheekbones could cut glass, her lips swollen with the particular kind of hope that lived inside syringes.

"Paris fashion week is literally dying, and here's why," she declared to her phone's camera, while teenage disciples clutched designer knockoffs and hung on every syllable like it contained the secrets of transformation. Their faces glowed blue in the phone light, young and desperate and beautiful in the way that only comes from believing salvation was just one viral moment away.

Mikhael vaulted their equipment. Phones scattered like startled pigeons. Ring lights toppled, their perfect circles of artificial sun spinning across wet pavement.

"Putain! That's three thousand people watching!" The girl's mask of composure cracked, revealing something raw and terrified underneath.

"Police business!" Bernard wheezed, trying to navigate the wreckage of tripods and wounded vanity.

But they both knew this wasn't about police. This was about something else entirely, something that lived in the spaces between what people claimed to want and what they actually needed.

Two blocks down, outside Café de la Regence, a different kind of theater unfolded. A chess grandmaster held court against five opponents simultaneously, his moves drawing gasps from admirers who photographed each brilliant sacrifice like tourists capturing monuments. Victory brought wine. Wine brought attention. Attention brought the young woman who slipped him her number between games, her fingers lingering on his wrist long enough to suggest possibilities that had nothing to do with chess.

The grandmaster's eyes never left the boards, but his smile suggested he was playing more games than the ones visible on wooden squares.

Mikhael weaved through the chess tables, Bernard's heavy footfalls echoing behind like a metronome keeping time for this strange ballet. But in a shop window's reflection, the boy caught something unexpected in the guard's eyes—not just duty or anger, but recognition. As if he were chasing a ghost of himself through these same streets, twenty years younger and just as desperate.

The pursuit spilled onto the Champs-Élysées where the real performance had begun. Street musicians battled mime artists for tourist coins while portrait painters sketched flattering lies with charcoal stubs that left their fingers permanently stained. Above them all, literally and figuratively, rose the social media towers.

A YouTuber with two million subscribers staged an elaborate prank involving counterfeit Hermès and hidden cameras, his crew filming tourists' faces when they discovered the deception. They captured embarrassment like hunters collecting trophies, each mortified expression worth thousands of views, each view worth fractions of cents that somehow added up to rent money in a studio apartment overlooking someone else's dreams.

"This is going to break the internet," he announced to his cameraman, as if the internet were something fragile instead of an endless appetite consuming everything in its path, digesting human dignity and excreting engagement metrics.

Nearby, a TikTok star filmed her twentieth take of the same thirty-second dance, her ring light turning raindrops into diamonds on the wet pavement. Between takes, she checked her phone obsessively, watching numbers climb like a fever chart. Her smile never wavered, but her eyes held the particular exhaustion of someone who'd discovered that fame was just another kind of factory work.

They were all harvesting light, Mikhael realized as he ran. Stealing attention the way his people stole anything that could be converted into survival, hoarding likes and shares the way Svetlana hoarded bread crusts during the lean months. But he wasn't stealing the spotlight—he was stealing an actual spotlight, reducing it to its essential elements: copper, cash, medicine, hope.

Bernard was gaining ground, his training finally overcoming Mikhael's youth. The boy's jacket, heavy with wire, had begun to slow him down like guilt made manifest.

A group of street performers had claimed the space outside Galeries Lafayette, their audience forming a perfect circle around a fire-breather whose flames painted shadows that danced like demons on the surrounding walls. Coins clinked into his hat with the irregular rhythm of charity dispensed by people who wanted to feel good about themselves without actually examining why someone needed to breathe fire for spare change.

Mikhael pushed through the crowd, Bernard close behind. The fire-breather's eyes met the boy's for just an instant—one performer recognizing another, one person making themselves visible understanding someone else who desperately needed to remain unseen.

They careened into Place Vendôme where the stealing became more refined, wrapped in velvet gloves and charitable tax deductions. Through Cartier's windows, he glimpsed the apex predators—socialites dripping conflict diamonds like tears that never fell, tech entrepreneurs whose third startup would definitely revolutionize everything this time, crypto millionaires whose fortunes existed only as mathematics made flesh through expensive watches that told time in currencies that didn't exist yet.

A red carpet stretched across the square like a tongue waiting to taste fame. Photographers clustered around it, their cameras hungry as wolves, while celebrities performed spontaneous moments that had been rehearsed with their personal coaches until spontaneity became another kind of choreography. Each smile was a blade cutting through someone else's relevance.

"Over here, darling!" "The dress! Show the dress!" "Now look surprised! More surprised!" "Think about your first love!" "Now think about your taxes!"

The flashes strobed like lightning, disorienting and beautiful and meaningless. Mikhael stumbled on wet cobblestones worn smooth by centuries of feet seeking the same destination: somewhere else, somewhere better, somewhere that mattered more than where they'd been.

Bernard's hand closed on his shoulder with the weight of finality.

"Là. Finished."

Up close, the security guard was older than speed had suggested—maybe sixty, with lines carved by decades of watching other people's dreams unfold in theaters he'd never afford to attend as anything but staff. His uniform was clean but mended at the elbows, the careful stitching of someone who made things last because replacement was a luxury reserved for other people's lives.

His shoes were polished but worn thin at the heels. His belt was good leather but had been moved to new holes as his body changed shape around twenty years of night shifts and vending machine dinners. His hands were clean but scarred, marked by the small accidents that came from maintaining other people's beautiful things.

They stood in the space between streetlights, breathing hard, studying each other with the wariness of animals who'd discovered they belonged to the same endangered species.

"The wire," Bernard said finally, his voice carrying the particular exhaustion of someone who'd spent decades asking questions he already knew the answers to.

"German. Thick gauge."

"Worth running for?"

Mikhael's hand moved instinctively to his jacket pocket where the copper nested like sleeping snakes, warm from his body heat and heavy with possibility. "Depends."

"On?"

"Whether you've ever watched someone cough blood into her pillow."

Bernard's grip loosened slightly. Around them, the carnival continued its eternal rotation—influencers chasing metrics that disappeared as quickly as they appeared, performers chasing coins that barely covered the cost of existing, celebrities chasing relevance in a world that replaced them as easily as changing channels, everyone chasing the light that might finally prove they existed, that they mattered, that their brief time on this stage meant something more than random biological accident.

"Twenty years," Bernard said, not to Mikhael but to the rain-slicked streets where his career had dissolved one catastrophic night when spotlights failed during Carmen's opening aria and soprano voices cracked in darkness while an audience of critics sat in judgment.

"Twenty years of what?"

"Watching people take things." Bernard released his shoulder entirely, his hands falling to his sides like flags surrendering to gravity. "Usually not what they need."

They stood in silence while the city performed its nightly theater around them. A fashion blogger posed against a Lamborghini that belonged to someone else's life, her smile bright enough to power streetlights while her eyes held the particular desperation of someone who'd discovered that borrowed luxury felt exactly like poverty with better lighting.

A motivational speaker promised transformation to followers who'd buy his course but never apply his lessons, selling hope to people who couldn't afford rent but could afford dreams. A lifestyle guru sold the fantasy of effortless perfection to people who couldn't afford their own reality, peddling the lie that success was just a matter of wanting it badly enough.

"Storage room," Bernard said eventually, his voice carrying the weight of someone who'd decided to stop fighting gravity. "Basement level, service corridor C. Old equipment scheduled for disposal."

"When?"

"Tomorrow's Sunday. Cleaning crew finishes by eleven."

Mikhael nodded once, understanding passing between them like contraband, like secrets traded in the currency of shared exhaustion.

"Door sticks sometimes," Bernard added, studying his watch as if it held answers to questions he'd forgotten how to ask. "Have to give it a good push around 11:30."

"If someone knew where to push."

"If someone knew."

Bernard's fingers drummed against his radio, a nervous habit that had worn the plastic smooth over years of night shifts spent listening to other people's emergencies. "Basement gets cold. Person might want to wear something warm."

"Gloves?"

"Good idea. Wire can be sharp."

They separated without handshakes or promises, walking in opposite directions like actors exiting a stage where the real performance had happened in the spaces between words, in the pauses between questions, in the careful geography of things left unsaid.

Mikhael disappeared into the maze of narrow streets that led back to the camp where Svetlana waited with herb tea and prayer candles, where Anya slept fitfully on a mattress that smelled like damp cardboard and fading hope.

Bernard walked back toward the opera house, his footsteps echoing off buildings that had witnessed centuries of small kindnesses performed by people who would never be remembered, never be celebrated, never steal anyone's spotlight.

Three days later, Anya's cough began to clear. The antibiotics worked exactly as medicine should, purchased with euros that had once been copper that had once been light captured and focused and given purpose. She never asked about the money's source, and Mikhael never mentioned the security guard who'd chosen to look the other way when institutional rules collided with human need.

But sometimes, passing the Palais Garnier, Mikhael would catch sight of Bernard at his post. The guard would be checking his watch or adjusting his cap or performing any of the small rituals that fill the spaces between significant moments. And sometimes, Bernard would glance toward the street where a boy might be walking past, carrying his sister's clear breathing like a secret victory in his chest.

They never spoke again. In a city of people desperate to be seen, they'd discovered the radical act of truly seeing each other—and then stepping back into the shadows where the real work of survival happened, where mercy lived in the spaces between regulations, where kindness grew in the cracks between what was legal and what was necessary.

The influencers kept influencing, their ring lights burning bright as funeral pyres for attention spans that died a little more each day. The performers kept performing, their coins accumulating like prayers in collection plates for gods that never answered. The lights kept burning for whoever could steal them, could claim them, could make them shine on faces that desperately needed to be seen.

But in the basement of the opera house, old spotlights waited in darkness, their copper hearts beating with the patient rhythm of things that understood their purpose: not to blind, but to illuminate exactly what needed to be seen, exactly when someone needed to see it.

The ghost light continued its vigil on the empty stage, casting shadows that danced like memories of all the small heroisms that would never trend, never go viral, never steal anyone's spotlight.

Because the most important light wasn't the one that made you visible to everyone else.

It was the one that helped you see yourself clearly enough to choose kindness over rules, mercy over duty, and recognition over reputation—even when no one was watching.

Especially when no one was watching.

In a world where everyone was stealing the spotlight, two people had discovered something more valuable: the ability to share the darkness, and trust each other to find their way through it.

Posted Sep 03, 2025
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RBE | Illustrated Short Stories | 2024-06

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