Christine had accidentally walked in on Mads getting blown in green rooms before. That
on its own wasn’t the problem. Actually, it was a problem but one she continuously felt as
though she could push off to some later conversation. This time, Christine shut the door quickly
and walked away but not before noticing that there was an audience of a dozen people silently
watching Mads, his head thrown back over the edge of the chair while the guy worked away at
him. Who knew where they all came from or what the hell Mads was doing. She wasn’t going to
interrupt or ask questions.
#

        Christine jumped off the stage and walked through the open floor of The Plateau Theatre
towards the bar at the back of the room. As their hometown stop for this tour, it held a special
place on the schedule. The smell of the venue was a familiar one. Stale beer, burning dust, and a
grassy kind of mold. The kind of smell you can taste. A venue like this smells alive with decades
of lived experience. Not all of it good.

        Elle was working, setting up the bar for their show that evening. The band had dealt with
Elle before. She seemed to run everything about The Plateau, with only a few other people who
stood in as placeholders whenever she needed to be in several places at once. A pint of Griffon
Red Ale was already waiting for Christine on the freshly wiped down bar. A pint she did not ask
for but deeply appreciated right now. If nothing else, it was a distracting ritual. Elle remembered
her order from their last visit a year ago. Christine had enough of these pints last time to not

remember much, which is unfortunate because at the time, it was the biggest show they had

played in Montreal. She thanked Elle, who nodded from the other end of the bar, already on to
the next task.
#

        Touring was lonely. Their band, Tolerance (Endurance), was just the two of them. They met in university where they took biology classes together. Tolerance (Endurance) was the title of a slide in a set of class notes and they both thought it sounded good. Mads on guitar and Christine keeping time by punishing a floor tom and various percussion. They wrote folk songs but played them fast and distorted, aggressive enough to end up in punk clubs most nights. A segment of that audience had really taken to them. It worked. Neither finished their biology degrees.
        Mads had an easier time with the perpetual motion. He relished the discomfort, and it
informed his art in a way Christine knew was crucial to him. It was more difficult for Christine.
She needed a touchstone, something she could come back to and for the longest time that was
Mads. Her partner in all this. After performing, they would hit up a bar, a diner, a midnight
movie, or another show. They recouped, talked about what went right, what went wrong, wrote
lyrics on napkins, and drew dreamy album cover art on the inside pages of used paperbacks.
        These days, Christine was lucky if she could find Mads at all until the morning after the
show.
#

        When Mads finally came out of the green room and walked across the empty theater,
Christine waited to acknowledge his presence.
        “Chris, what are we playing tonight?” he asked, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his
hands. “I thought we could close with ‘shot through.’”
        “Sure.”
        Christine took a long pull from her pint and set it back down on the bar top, watching
Elle put her coat on, grabbing a shovel and a bag of salt from a storage closet. It had begun to
snow hard. This would have worried Christine in some cities, but Montreal reliably turned out a
crowd regardless of weather.
        Mads pulled up a stool next to Christine and took a sip of her beer. She turned around and
leaned back on the bar, folding her arms across her chest. She felt disproportionately upset. She
and Mads had been doing this for a long time and he knew she was starting to get tired and
disillusioned by the diminishing returns of performing. It was always easy for Mads to talk her
into sticking with it. He needed this so much. She knew that despite being brilliant, he didn’t
think much else gave him value.
        Mads was talking at her, breaking down what the set list should be and which of their old
university friends confirmed would come to the show. As he babbled, not expecting a response,
Christine watched as the people she had seen earlier in the green room filed out on the stage
across the room in perfect silence, other than subtle electric feedback which had begun to ring
out across the theater, amplifying rhythmically. Mads seemed not to notice. He just kept talking.
The group on stage formed a semi circle around one person, a small woman, everything about
her child like except for the hardened expression on her face, clearly visible from across the
theatre. They looked like performers. All of their movements were jerky and violent, from the
smallest step to thrown punches. It looked like organic, involuntary choreography to the building
static in the room. Christine couldn’t help but breathe a bit heavier as her senses became
overwhelmed, but she also couldn’t take her eyes away.
        The words came to her then.
        Take my skin
        My scalp, my lips, my fingertips
        On stage, the performers became more frantic, none more than the central woman who
appeared to be scared out of her mind, not trusting the semi-circle around her. She was right to
be concerned. A disembodied hand caught hold of her hair, a thick, tightly woven braid. It held
her in place. Her expression slackened but her chest heaved with effort. She could not move.
Suddenly and with incredible force, the braid was yanked forward, peeling her skin, detaching
with the audible pops of snapping tissues cutting through the wave of distortion now coming up
from the floorboards.
        Split between you
        Cut up pieces of my broken frame
        Christine had stopped breathing altogether. Every sense overwhelmed. She could
practically taste the adrenaline flooding her brain. She did not believe she was seeing what she
was seeing but her body could not tell the difference and responded accordingly. On the stage,
everyone took a two-handed hold of the sheet of skin which had covered the young woman’s
torso moments ago and pulled outwards. Invisible seams ripped in unpredictable zigs and zags
until everyone had their own piece. She stood there, a breathing mass of thinned out muscle and
patches of other glistening tissues.
        Breath goes in
        The static in the air leaves hints
        Dying tissues
        Stolen layers of all my built-up shame
        One by one, the performers overlaid their taken piece of skin directly on themselves,
sticking to the correct anatomical location. It was almost funny seeing a large man trying to slip
on a tube-like chunk of skin from her arm, his own skin bulging from either end. It was horrific
seeing a wild-eyed woman tip her head back to cover the lower half of her face from below her
nose to her chin. The woman’s teeth poked through the hole at the center, biting the stolen lips in
a grotesque seduction. Everyone on stage danced dangerously overjoyed spasms over what
they’d done, the skinned woman finally collapsed, the noise in the room reached a frenetic peak
and Christine felt her mind snap as static overtook her vision.
#

        Christine immediately came to in a quiet Plateau theatre, Mads staring at her with
concern and awkward discomfort.

        “What the fuck was that?” he asked.
        Christine knew that he had not experienced any of it. She ignored his question and asked
one of her own. “What were you doing in the green room earlier?”

 

        “I was sleeping. I barely slept last night so I took a nap. It didn’t help because I had some
awful fucking dreams. Seriously, what the fuck just happened? You completely zoned out and
said this.” He pointed to where he had scribbled the words that came to her on his arm in purple
ink. “These are good. Are these lyrics? Where have you been hiding these? We can use this.”
        Mads talked out what this new song could be. How they could use these words to
jumpstart something different, go in a more experimental direction with their new songs. He had
already lost interest in what had just caused Christine visible discomfort. Her stomach was in
knots and the corners of the room were now dark and distressing. But it was also exciting.
Something new to write about. Finally.
        She knew with certainty that her role in this band had an expiration date.
        But maybe not yet.