The mare’s cigarette adds another few centimeters to her long head. It’s obtuse as always. Jutting out in front of her, lips pursed in a grimace. Uncomfortably close to the door upon which she has just knocked, where she lingers.

The gold doors of the Grand Hall stand in silence, unfazed by the both the toc-toc of her manicured knuckles and the anger simmering beneath her skin, boiling in both her cheeks.

“Look desperate,” Dutchie insisted, “but casual. You don’t have to be it for the Chore-ographer, just it enough to get gabbing.”

Real estate is the First Floor’s value, and Ø has nothing but. Swaths of distance between her and the crowded tables. Far from the rail lines where the auto-bartenders ride.

She’s alone, “and that’s on purpose. It’s his operation’s pièce a résistance,” Dutchie had laughed. “There’s, what, how many stiffs on that floor?” She paused, holding a wry grin rictal at the end of her cigarette holder. “They’ll all be staring.”

They do the First Floor patrons. From over the tops of martini glasses. Between pure-silk shoulders. Tossing down losing hands and turning, leaning on visiting suitors and cheep-cheep-cheeping. Onlookers’ lips contort, flashing fangs beneath lipstick, spitting wry scoffs of disgust. Men, indifferent, listen to their wives, pompous. Ø’s another woman in a compromising position, without cash, come to play prey to the Casino itself.

Something the chittering spectators will never do, of course.

Nor Dutchie, apparently.

The double-doors open. Behind is a disinterested face. Pasty white skin, hair cut short, licorice perfume wafting from a thin neck. Posture immaculate, voice synthetically deepened, her eyes are the only fleshy part of her body.

The android stares, taking in the mare, investigating from fetlocks to ears, three-dimensionally building and rebuilding Ø in her mind, possibly even transmitting the figure to some far-off server for analysis.

But as quickly as she’s arrived, the android shifts her weight, closing the door.

And she would’ve been successful, if not for the mare’s hoof stamped onto the floor.

“What’s the big idea?” the mare growls, cigarette thrown from her mouth in the ensuing struggle for supremacy.

“Madame,” the android chastises, “the revue begins three hours from now. Seating begins in two.”

“I’m not here for the show,” Ø huffs, dripping with venom originally meant for you.

“Then you must be lost, and—”

“Haydée!” commands a masculine voice. It’s far off. From beyond the android, down the decline towards the stage. Past the empty rows of seating, but before the lines of dancers in repose, resting only for a moment. “An excuse for forcing me to hold up our day’s penultimate practice?”

“A guest is lost!”

“I’m not lost!” Ø bellows, her shout enveloping the shoe-box hall.

Ø gives the door a kick, nearly denting its metallic façade. The smack of keratin is a loud clack that reverberates against the Great Hall’s smoothed walls. Her shoulder rests against the gold-plated exterior, pushing against the android’s weight, the two of them tied for strength.

“You’re not?” the man shouts from his audience seating.

He sits in a middle row, legs splayed, crowding the diazoma pathway. Circular Windsor glasses dip from his nose, saddle bent from use, nearly falling to the floor as he contorts into the aisle. The seat beneath him creaks. Its upholstery is a distressed white, gold piping around its rim, arms carved with francisque axes and laurels.

He’s old. But he used to be handsome. The way he carries himself, his posture purposefully unrefined, tactically disinterested, are the only remnants of a tired, rakish beauty.

Maybe his teeth were less brittle, or frame more imposing. Quicker on his long legs. His hair, wispy and white, now balding, once a forgotten chestnut-blonde mélange. Fingertips more comforting than bony, but deft and piercing instead. Sharp like the blue eyes through his thick frames, blinking through his recreational over-medication.

Whereas he may have smelled of cologne, of sandalwood and cinnamon, today he reeks of sweat and gin.

Just as the irascible artiste has reeked for the majority of his career.

“Young man, wouldn’t you say all are lost? A-tumble through our sleep-walking existences?” The man muses with the mare. “If not, then I say get lost! I'm trying to work!”

“I’m not lost!” Ø contends. “I’m here to speak with the Choreographer!”

“Well, you’ve found him! What’s left of him,” the man spits. “And you come to the Choreographer, to the revue to…”

“To,” Ø continues to shout across the rows of empty seats, as if she were on stage, performing poorly, “get some work. I was told you hire people like me when we’re short on cash.”

“I don’t hire people like you, no!”

“Then… Fillies like me?”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Fillies?”

Atop the Grand Hall’s platform, a menagerie. Pearl necklaces and pink feathers. Cabaret outfits on gaudy display, where white boots stare daggers, gloves stretching to elbow. Some android, some anthropomorph.

A cavalcade of hooves and heels scooped up for cheap, dames and molls dolled up in mutual destitution, coveting the climax of dismissal from their warm-ups, their combined craving for nicotine or opium able to bankrupt even the wealthiest prospective suitors.

The Choreographer squints through his spectacles. Wrinkles crease at the corners of his tired eyes. His lips turn with disgust, an intriguing emotion, one he hasn’t felt in several hours.

“Really? You certainly carry a… Praxagoric air, don’t you?”

Sufficiently enticed, the Choreographer claps. Once, twice. He waves his hands, whipping wrist. It’s the signal for the girlies on stage.

Their statures have already slouched. Manicured fingers wipe sweat from necks and thighs, unbunching the creases of their showgirl outfits. At the third clap, they’re dismissed, the peacocks strutting behind the curtain, jostling for position across the cramped stage. Like the android usher, they scurry into portholes, hidden crawlspaces, the Choreographer’s labyrinthine demesne fitted and refitted for ever-increasing dormitory space.

His captives will lounge on their wooden stools, sharing cigarettes in their back-room cages. Within the dormitory’s open-air cubicles, crammed two-to-a-bed, packed like harengs, they’ll reapply rouge in silence, casting backstabbing glances, each plotting their escape. From one another, from destitution, but most importantly, from the Choreographer.

Ø clip-clops down the aisle, filling the emptied hall with cacophony.

The auditorium is claustrophobic, box seating tumbling atop balcony, beneath the ceiling etchings of trombone and trumpet playing cherubs. Walls contort at angles, their geometry platted for auditory efficiency, the finest in the hemisphere. The aisle’s gentle decline makes her stumble, the natural equine physiognomy of her legs detesting a simple downward slope.

And as she approaches the seated Choreographer, his stench of gin reaches crescendo.

“Nevertheless, you’re right,” the man ruminates on his lonesome. “Sometimes, I indeed bring in pouliches like you. Not normally ones that look like you, of course…”

Despite her wobbliness, the mare arrives. Consciously putting on airs, she takes a seat next to the Choreographer, the empty chair creaking under her weight. She forces a smile, flashing a toothy grimace, coquettishly tilting her head in a display of aggressive mimicry.

“What are you doing,” the man scoffs, instinctually recoiling at her presence, “don’t sit. Stand. I need to get a look at you. I don’t want you lingering, interacting.”

“Only a look?” the mare coyly contends, barely covering her annoyance.

Normally, time on the First Floor is quick. In a blink, day is night, pots are won, fortunes lost. But as she wobbles back to her hooves, time is still, her professional humiliation dragging longer than thought possible.

She fights the urge for another cigarette.

“Of course. Only a look,” he replies.

“If all you’re gonna do is look,” Ø scoffs, “just check my file.”

“Files are not reality,” he hisses. “They’re imperfect representations of what I can see just fine. Wholly imperfect answers to questions that I can simply ask in this real world.”

“What if I lie?” she plays

“If you lie to me, you lie to me. I don’t mind. The liars, I’ll hire the liars sometimes. But I enjoy the truthful ones more. Every once in a while, though, you’ll find a girl who believes her own lies, to the point where she thinks she’s not a liar at all.” He tut-tuts. “They’re the girls I prefer.”

Ø’s stance is wide. Shoulder-width. A forced posture. Even with the conscious effort of looking presentable, she’s petulant. She can’t stop her neck from careening, nor brush back the bushels of hair obscuring her vision.

“So, the question,” the Choreographer starts.

He’s too slow. With words, actions, anything. Like you, only purposefully.

With a connoisseur’s air, he inspects the mare. He notes the mannish shoulders. The quadrangular bumpiness of an unloaded Narragansett stuffed at her waist. Her unsightly scar cutting through her left cheek, finally healed, discolored against sorrel fur and haphazardly concealed with blush.

His own taste of gin is overshadowed. She stinks of whiskey. It’s spilled, clearly, on the out-of-style, S-shape corset forced upon the mare.

She’s in dire straits, he thinks.

Ø’s vision drifts, too, to the hall’s double doors. They’re unlocked. Anyone can come and go. Only in theory, of course. But, like the docile bodies behind the curtain, destitute and with no other destination, Ø stays put as a semi-willing sacrifice.

“What, my name?” the mare finally interjects.

“Of course not, why would I need to know that?” he berates. “How’s your java?”

“I only drink alcohol.”

“The dance. Shim-sham, cancan. How is your dancing?”

“Well,” she scoffs, “I don’t dance.”

“No dancing. Singing?”

“No.”

“Done any modeling? Advertising?”

“No,” Ø whispers, “I kill people.”

She bends at the waist, towering over the old man. Her cigarette breath fogs his glasses, forcing him to draw backwards into the plushy seat. She’s intimidating, she knows. A femme fatale, an irresistible one, she believes. The Choreographer only smiles, shooting a wide grin.

Before long, he’s laughing, fingers morphing to symbolic pistols.

“And?” the man shakes his head with faux-astonishment. “Everyone kills people! Our clients, the girls, anyone can kill someone. We’ve been doing it here before The Flush!” He scoffs at her anger, ignoring her tapping hoof, the grinding of her teeth. “Even I’ve killed someone! When I was younger, frittering with a virility that only the young can abuse. But now? I hire people. And they’re cheap! Why would I need a girlie like you, when there’s someone stronger than you here, with less money, skulking through the Casino, who doesn’t need to linger, taking up space for girls I’d actually want, ones with talents beyond the subtle art of murder?” he toys.

It’s a hundred meters until the doors. Ø feels the old-fashioned glass in your right hand is empty, sucked of its calvados-whiskey-gin mixture. The auto-bartender you pass, baboon-like eyes scanning your slush fund behind its screen, hands you another drink to your left, dry gin topped with half a lemon’s squeezings, poured over ginger ale and shaken vigorously. The high-ball glass collides with your teeth as you stumble forward, past endless games of poker.

Ø can taste your lips. Campari, bitters, sparkling wine, apéritif dueling with digestif as you flood your stomach with booze. In two hundred meters, you’ve downed three drinks. You’re gambling on a tactic, a nervous tick, one you’ve learned from a certain mare.

The thought of you makes her nicker. She wants to stamp. Better yet, unfurl the Narragansett from beneath the dress’s frills and beat you over the head with it.

Her tone is louder, angrier, unable to suppress her emotions as always.

“Then I can work as an usher,” Ø argues.

“You just saw the usher, and she’s much better looking than you.”

“What if I kill her?” she growls.

“Then you will have killed a beautiful android, and the Casino’s hired security shall take you in,” he spits. The Choreographer’s gnarled fingers clasp the sides of his chair. His part is ending prematurely, the mare’s time wasted, his handprints left unfound. “Now, I admit, I admire your lack of money, forethought, whatever you’d call this performance, but—”

The Choreographer’s harangue is cut short by your arrival. Your uneven weight collides with the lacquered double-doors, their combined weights unable to withstand your inebriated confidence, unlocked in the face of your alcoholic bravado.

“Great, now who the devil is this?” the Choreographer scoffs.

“He’s,” Ø’s mouth moves, spitting words against her will, “my agent.”