Headshot

by Rita Bullwinkel

She felt slightly sick because she knew that this was a community play that almost no one would attend, but she was drunk, still, had been drunk all her life with acting, and still felt that onstage, while trying to fit her face into the face of another, she was able to access a part of herself that no one could see. It was like the inside of her was so fragmented that it was only by acting, by consolidating her insides into the outward display of a fictional character, that she became whole, which is why this job of acting like her mother, this job of acting as a woman who had left her daughters, felt particularly terrible and awful to her, because this was not a role where she would be fitting her face into the face of another, but a role in which she would be fitting her face into the face of her mother. The drunkenness of acting, she wasn’t sure it would come to her if she tried to portray her mother, instead of portraying something already inside her, and there was no way for her to understand if her mother was inside her. It seemed shocking, and implausible, that she could ever be inside her winter-disappeared mother.