The Rehearsal Is a Loaded Gun

Each sphere had been meticulously arranged, suspended by microfilament wires to catch the light. Now it was just a heap of glittering dust and jagged shards. Someone had not merely knocked it over; they had taken a hammer or a pipe and pulverised it, piece by piece. This was surgical. This was personal.

“An animal, maybe,” Marta, the property’s caretaker, said, her voice devoid of emotion as she swept the mess into a dustpan. A fat black squirrel chittered from a rafter high above, as if on cue. “A raccoon got in last summer. Wrecked the kiln.”

Siobhan hugged her arms around herself, the chill of the hall seeping into her bones despite the humid July air. “A raccoon wouldn’t have unscrewed the mounting bracket from the beam, Marta. Or stacked the pieces in a neat little pyramid.” She pointed a trembling finger at the small, funereal pile of larger glass fragments in the centre of the destruction.

Marta shrugged, her expression unreadable. “Artists. You’re all very… particular.” She finished sweeping and left Siobhan alone in the vast, empty space. The silence that followed was accusatory.

There were only five of them here. Five artists hand-picked for the prestigious, if underfunded, Blackwood Inlet Residency. Five people, including herself, isolated on this spit of land in coastal British Columbia for two months to create a final, collaborative showcase. And one of them was a saboteur.

Her mind immediately went to Julien. His performance piece was about the ‘violence of creation.’ He was all brooding intensity and black turtlenecks, even in the height of summer. His work was brilliant, but it was also unsettling. He’d argued against her constellation concept, calling it ‘pretty, decorative sentimentality.’ Now, her pretty sentimentality was a pile of garbage, and his piece, a stark, aggressive solo dance, would inevitably become the showcase’s main event.

She found him on the small, rocky beach, meticulously building a cairn of flat stones. He didn't look up as she approached, his focus absolute.

“It was a beautiful piece, Siobhan,” he said, his voice smooth and calm. “A shame something happened to it.”

“Don’t,” she snapped, her voice sharper than she intended. “Don’t pretend you’re sorry. You hated it.”

He finally looked at her, his dark eyes placid. “I didn’t hate it. I disagreed with its artistic premise. There’s a difference.” He placed another stone, its balance perfect. “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. Your piece was designed to comfort the comfortable. It was… safe.”

“And what you do is dangerous?” The accusation was plain.

He smiled, a faint, humourless twitch of his lips. “All meaningful art is dangerous. It risks failure. It risks rejection. It risks telling a truth people don’t want to hear.” He looked back at his cairn. “And sometimes, things have to be broken to make way for something truer.”

His denial was a masterpiece of misdirection, a philosophical feint that left her feeling wrong-footed and foolish. She was accusing a man of vandalism, and he was turning it into a debate on aesthetics. She walked away, the crunch of her boots on the gravel sounding like an admission of defeat.

Flicker, Glitch, Erase

The residency’s main building had a single, low-resolution security camera focused on the entrance to the rehearsal hall. It was an old system, grainy and unreliable. Siobhan spent an hour scrolling through the footage from the previous night. She watched herself lock up at 10:02 PM. She watched the shadows lengthen and the fog roll in off the water. Then, at 1:17 AM, the screen dissolved into a wash of static. For exactly fifteen minutes. At 1:32 AM, the image returned. The hall was empty. The door was still locked.

It wasn’t a power surge. The timestamp kept running. It was a deliberate, targeted interruption. Someone had used a signal jammer. The thought sent a fresh wave of ice through her veins. A squirrel or a raccoon didn’t carry a signal jammer. This was premeditated. This was hostile.

She backed away from the monitor, her heart hammering against her ribs. The isolation of the inlet, once a source of creative focus, now felt like a trap. The whispering of the cedars in the wind sounded like voices. The cry of a distant gull sounded like a scream.

She retreated to her small cabin, needing to ground herself in her own work. She pulled out her notebook, the pages filled with her meticulous choreography diagrams—arrows, counts, stick figures twisted into impossible shapes. She needed to re-block the entire finale, work around the gaping hole left by the destroyed constellation.

She flipped to the final sequence. And stopped. The notes were wrong. Her clean, precise lines were still there, but someone had drawn over them. In a faint, spidery pencil script, new instructions had been added. The elegant lift at the crescendo was crossed out. Beside it, a new note: *Let her fall.* The final tableau, a gesture of hope towards the sky, was violently scribbled over. The new instruction read: *Claw at your own face.*

Siobhan stared at the page, her blood running cold. It was her notebook. She always kept it with her. No one could have accessed it. She flipped back a few pages, then forward again, a frantic, desperate search. More alterations. A graceful turn was replaced with a sketch of a dancer stumbling. A sequence of fluid arm movements was annotated with a single word: *Break.*

Then she saw it. Tucked into the margin of the final page, a tiny, meticulous drawing of a shattered glass sphere. It was undeniably Julien’s style, his obsessive, precise cross-hatching. But the handwriting… she leaned closer, her breath catching in her throat. The spidery, slanted script of the violent new directions. It looked… it looked horrifyingly, impossibly, like her own.