[ WP ] Three friends . Four AM . No dialogue

I almost laughed when I entered the room and saw the audience. There shouldn ’ t have been more than a half dozen seats filled at such a witching hour as four a.m. Tickets were at cost and still they filed in, until each breath was stacked high. 
 
 My eyes were tired and caked from wary celebration, creaking to the corner, finding hers. My jaw matched hers not by genetics, but by determination. I slid into the seat next to her, unable to talk. I could have given a sermon and gotten an amen and taken a collection but there was cotton at the top of my mouth and it pulled my thoughts down. 
 
 We had the best seats in the house for the debut event, and we each took our stories to the second show. In the papers, knit into our very dialogue, a major media event. Unwarranted attention, maybe; we came into it so untrained. And so the third and final viewing would be for the benefit of the third of us, the ghost in the room. 
 
 The curtain rose, the performer laid out. The swab, the pinprick, the syringe. Time of death: 04:15 

