Dramatis Personae

The mask touched her, formed her face, and she felt a strange reversal, like a stopping heart, like electric shock. For centuries she had felt herself growing fainter; now the ghost-image that lived only inside her mind was suddenly standing in the middle of the workshop, more solid and real than she had ever been even in life. Her feet were bare, and they were touching the tile floor, and in danger of stepping on a needle. Her elbows strained the sleeves of a smock gone two years too small. Her hair was heavy, not tangled but not washed, either, and she had a moment’s idea that she ought to go at it with a duck’s egg and some lavender. These are the masks, but whose faces lie beneath? Here are lovers and weavers, hedge-witches and liars, greenmen and mermaids and all the masks of self and seeming-even the faces of time, and death, and transformation. We are what we wear. What we remember and what we desire. Who are you? Come and see.