My friends and I are in an on-again/off-again writing club where the rules are simple. Every two weeks you have to submit three short stories that it took you 20 minutes or less to write. These are the results.

Backstage Before The Show

Backstage before the show goes on – about 5 minutes before to be exact – all the actors have different things that they do. Everyone is nervous, and everyone has a different way of dealing with their anxiety.

Albert is a ham onstage, and he’s not much different when he’s off. He speaks nonsensical phrases in accents that switch with every sentence to Emily, who banters with him in accents that are even worse than Albert’s. They do this loudly at first, but quiet down as the audience takes their seat, eventually diminishing their chatter to a whisper that they take part in all the way until just before taking the stage. They have their faces really close to one another near the end so they can hear each other. It’s borderline sensual.

Anna, the best actor of the bunch who’s sadly held back only by her stage fright, simply sits on a chair and looks to the floor as her knees bounce up and down. If anyone talks to her, or if Albert and Emily try to involve her in their vaudevillian schtick, she looks up quickly and smiles, perhaps sharing a dismissive word before going back to her floor staring. Even when she speaks, her knees never cease bouncing.

Liz and Paul are also directors of the show as well as actors, so they fill their time by obsessively making sure everything is ready. Unwritten rules state that they can’t be seen by the audience at this point, so the fidgeting they desire to do onstage can’t be done, thus they must relegate themselves needless details in the back. They hang up schedules and set times that no one pays attention to. They ask questions and give directions that no one can hear at this time. They discuss amongst each other things that are too late to implement for the current show, and ideas for future shows that will be forgotten the second the curtain rises.

Kevin obsesses over the crowd, always looking through small holes in the wall between stage and backstage, scanning for people he knows, then texting people he thought were going to show up but haven’t arrived yet. If there’s someone he doesn’t recognize, he asks everyone if they know who it is. If no one knows the person, he ponders out loud how they found out about the performance, and rattles through all the possibilities.

Me, I pace back and forth across the little area we’re all clustered in, and watch everyone else. It’s the only thing I can do to get my mind off how nervous I am.