Worship In Red and In All The Wrong Places

The final note hangs, thin as wire, flawless. Silence cups it. Then the room detonates. Applause crashes over me, a surf so loud I lose my breath inside it. I bow, smiling the way I was taught to smile, heat drilling into my face from the lights. Something is off. The sound doesn’t fall away. It thickens. I squint into the house and see what the noise is doing to them. Hands coming together too hard, again and again, faces locked in bright, broken grins. The clapping doesn’t slow; it accelerates. Their skin splits and blood freckles the air. Palms burst and keep going. Bone knocks bone, no one recoils. Their eyes stay pinned on me, like if they stop I won’t exist. Backstage should muffle it. It doesn’t. The applause swells, hammering the doors until the hinges cry. My manager squeezes my shoulder, “You should be grateful,” he says. “They’re here for you.” They chant and they scream and they clap and they bleed. Barriers fold. Bodies pour through the hall. A girl without fingers keeps time with red stumps. Another woman, arms snapped loose at the elbows, can’t clap anymore, so she throws her head into the wall, again and again, painting it dark, trying to make the sound. When her eyes catch mine, there’s relief in them. As if I’ve forgiven her. Security drags me out. The limo door open, cameras burst like flares. I’m inside, but they’re already there too. The lot is a single organism, climbing itself, pressing against the glass. Their hands peel to bone and the applause turns meaty. A man’s arm tears free and he keeps going, they never stop smiling. The tires scream and so do they, they never stop. It lives in my chest now. It judges. It grows. Home is worse. My phone vibrates with it, videos, loops of smiling mouths and ruined hands. Our queen deserves this. We’ll give everything. The TV is only me: my face, my song, my habits dissected and replayed. Clapping drowns the anchors. A corner bug blinks: #ClapForHer. I can’t remember where I end. Neither can they. From my bed, Malibu glassed and black, I see them at the windows, clapping for what they think I am. What frightens me isn’t that they’ll never stop. It’s that one day they will and when the sound dies, I’ll be hollowed out, unrecognizable, holding the echo where a self used to be.