No one knew as their hands cooled from the slapping applause and their ears calmed from the whistles and shouts of ‘encore—encore’ that the last act of the play was ready to be released. The silver boxes with red silk brocaded tassels were quietly being placed in the corners as the audience pressed itself across the rows and down the aisles and out the doors. Even with the doors open and the side windows pulled up wide, the air was still thick and hot from the living and could ignite a match if it were pulled from its box and held in the air. The thespians had released all they had and stumbled back to their dressing rooms and stared in blank faces in those lighted mirrors where a bulb was gray or sometimes just missing. Their stares waiting. A man clothed in black silk and sable went to each of them to touch up their makeup or seal their masks tighter with a brush of latex. He waved his hands and chanted over them.

Three members of the crew, who had been sworn to utmost secrecy, unlatched those boxes and took three steps back as the Wordgobblers and Lineguzzlers began their work. They were as large as juicy, fat beetles and iridescent like pearls freshly polished. Their wings unfolded in a crystal clinging click and they rose to the loges or tumbled back from seat to seat. Some even scurried on the floor between the programs and chewing gum wrappers. With their mouths they swallowed each magic word, each enchanted line that had been said that night. Their shells, as the shells of all beetles are, were hard and sturdy to hold those emotional laden lines. Their legs could hold a thousand times more than their weight, so those deep sighs and very heavy remorse could be carried without crumbling under the burden. Their tiny hooked feet were perfect for hilarious laughter that rose like helium towards the ceiling. There they could hang upside down and take it all in, ready to be retrieved.

Once not one syllable or consonant was left in the air or on the floor. They went back to their boxes and the three member crew took them back stage and sorted them according to act, line and actor and put them in separate boxes that you might confuse with expensive chocolates. Then they knocked on each door, it must have been habit to do such a thing, and they went in to the dressing tables and saw those empty stares in the mirrors. Even with their makeup and masks, those week old corpses were beginning to look thin and frail. They set the box on the table and left. They never knew if the cast might develop a taste for flesh. The actors who had once been deep in the earth knew what to do. They placed those beetles in their ears or carefully swallowed them in their mouths. It was miraculous, the lines for the play for the very next night were back in the folds of what was left of their brains. A small hum and echo could be heard coming from their skulls. They weren’t members of The Acting Guild, due to their acting method. They needed no food, no lodgings—-but after a few days a heavy dousing of perfume as well as a pull and pluck of maggots. Then when they had finally become has-beens, they were taken back to their graves. New ones were dug up to start their short star studded careers. It had become a very profitable business model.

The last to leave the theater for the night was the Necromancer who had found a way for his craft to bring delight to both the living and th dead. Comedy and drama. Life and death.