Chapter 6: The Order

The olive floated lazily in the clear liquid, round and glistening like a tiny planet adrift.

Then, stab. A toothpick pierced its skin with a muffled, almost obscene pop, splitting the green flesh so its fragments drifted like wreckage.

Elisabeth tipped the glass and drank it down in one gulp. Then she set the empty vessel beside two others already lined up on the polished counter, a silent tally of her unraveling evening.

The bar exhaled a different kind of darkness than her apartment. Black-velvet walls muffled sound, jazz slinked through the air, and pools of lamplight exposed couples tucked into alcoves, whispering into each other's ears. Lovers, confidants, predators. She watched them with a kind of dull envy, her gaze moving from one pair of clasped hands to another.

Her reflection shimmered faintly in the mirrored back wall, her face a little too pale, her smile long gone, eyes rimmed with fatigue. Once, she would have been the center of the room's gravity. Now she was just another woman hiding in its shadows.

The bartender, young and slick-haired, caught her signal. He wordlessly began the ritual of shaking and pouring. Elisabeth didn't thank him. The drink wasn't a gift; it was an anesthetic.

She folded her hands together on the bar, pressing hard enough for her knuckles to whiten, and waited.

---

The apartment lay in darkness, its only witness the oversized photograph of Elisabeth Sparkle, forever smiling. That glossy, conquering grin watched over the room like a cruel joke while, from deeper inside, the sound of retching echoed down the hallway.

The roses on the table had withered in their cellophane coffin, their petals limp, their fragrance gone.

In the bathroom, Elisabeth clung to the toilet, her body shuddering with the violence of it. When she finally staggered upright, she leaned heavily against the sink and let the cold water run. She splashed her face again and again, as if drowning out the taste of bile, as if scrubbing away the memory of the evening. The towel she grabbed caught only half the water, smearing her makeup into black streaks. In the mirror, she didn't see herself so much as a caricature, a grotesque mask, eyes swollen, mascara dripping like greasepaint. A sad clown staring back at her.

She left the light behind and drifted into the living room. Beyond the glass, the city burned with indifferent brilliance. Billions of lights glimmered, moving and living. The world spun on without her.

Her gaze landed on the window ledge, crowded with the artifacts of her own mythology: framed photographs with famous smiles around her, little golden statues, mementos from premieres and parties, the impossible night she held the Oscar aloft. Proof she had existed, once.

She picked up a snow globe. Inside, a tiny doll-version of herself stood atop a pink star, her very own piece of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Elisabeth shook it, and golden flakes spiraled through the water like magic dust, drifting around the plastic figurine that had once been her dream. The glitter fell in slow motion, too beautiful to be real, too mocking to endure.

Her hand clenched. She spun, hurled the globe across the room. It exploded against the giant framed poster of herself. BAM!

Glass shattered. Liquid sprayed across the image, trailing down the bright smile frozen on the poster. A jagged crack split across one glossy eye, as though someone had punched her doppelgänger in the face.

Breathing hard, Elisabeth marched to the table, grabbed the bouquet of wilted flowers, their stems slimy in her grip, and stalked toward the kitchen.

She flung the wilted bouquet into the kitchen trash. Plastic stems crunched against coffee grounds and eggshells.

Then silence ensued.

A black silence that seemed to press in on her from all sides.

Clack.

The lid opened again. From the darkness of the bin, her own face hovered above like a pale apparition. Elisabeth hesitated, then reached in. Her fingers pushed through sticky refuse, slippery food scraps clinging to her skin, until she found it: the USB stick. She drew it out, slick with residue, as though it had been dredged from a swamp.

That night she sat on the edge of her bed, the lamp's weak glow carving a circle around her. The rest of the room was all shadow. The phone rested heavy in her hand, its dial tone steady, insistent. She pressed the number, and the line began to ring, slow, methodical, each crackle pulling her deeper into a place she wasn't sure she wanted to go.

Ring. Ring.

At last: a voice. Masculine. Low. A cavern more than a sound.

"Yes?"

The breathing on the other end was heavy and uneven. Elisabeth swallowed. Her voice came out softer than she intended:

"I'd like to… order?"

A pause. Then, flat and mechanical:

"Address?"

Panic. She hadn't prepared for this. She grabbed the nearest pen and scribbled as fast as she could, the numbers bleeding into the skin of her palm.

"1057 North Beverly Drive. Please note: 35 North Byron Alley."

The line went dead.

Elisabeth sat still, staring at the ink crawling across her hand. The silence of the room expanded around her until there was nothing left but the sound of her own breathing.

The next thing she knew, a mechanical whirring dragged her awake. Sunlight stabbed through the curtains. She was still in her dress, crumpled on top of the bedspread, her mouth dry as dust. Her skull felt too small for her brain.

She pushed herself upright, each movement stabbing into her temples, and stumbled toward the hall.

The hum grew louder. At the far end of the corridor, Maria, the cleaning lady, was pushing a vacuum, methodically sweeping up invisible dust.

Elisabeth managed a hoarse:

"Hello, Maria."

The woman straightened and smiled politely.

"Hello, ma'am."

The world had moved on without her, again.

---

The water pummeled her like a punishment. A white roar filled the shower stall, beating down on her scalp, flattening her hair until it clung to her skin in dark strands. She tilted her face upward, and the jet stripped away the smeared traces of last night, the mascara bleeding down the drain like ink, the foundation dissolving until there was nothing left but her bare, naked skin.

She let it wash over her until she felt nothing at all.

At the kitchen table, Elisabeth hunched in her bathrobe, steam still rising faintly from her damp hair. A glass hissed in front of her, a single aspirin fizzing and dissolving into cloudy water.

Across the room, Maria pushed the vacuum in perfect, mechanical lines—left to right, right to left—like a figurine locked into its groove, immune to chaos.

Elisabeth reached for the newspaper. She wasn't looking for anything in particular, only distraction. But her eyes caught the classifieds. She froze.

There it was. A casting call. The role of herself. Or rather, the role she had once embodied, already being offered to someone younger and fresher.

She forced herself to turn the page. To breathe and to regroup.

The paper went into the wastebasket with a crumple that felt final.

She sifted through the rest of the mail: glossy fliers, bills, envelopes she didn't care to open. And then, one that stopped her. White, handwritten. No stamp. No postmark. Someone had placed it there, directly into her life.

The seal on the back: a single, embossed S.

She tore it open. Inside, a plastic card. White and minimal. Only a number printed on the front: 503.

She flipped it over and there was nothing.

Her eyes flicked from the card to her palm. The inked address from last night had blurred under the shower, a ghost of letters and numbers, almost gone.

The vacuum droned on, unbearable now, chewing up silence with its endless, nasal insistence.

She gripped the card tighter, as if it were a lifeline.