Poetry of the Damned
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 24: Something private
The Costuming Room
She gave me her name the moment the door was shut. Not “what’s yours” — “I’m Sefa,” first, low, because she knew which of us was frightened and that a name is a thing you hand a frightened person to hold. I gave her mine. Then she looked me over head to foot, brisk, the way you’d size up a horse you’ve an hour to ready, and said, “You’ve not done this service before.”
“No. House. Kitchen, mostly.”
“And he’s brought you here.” Not the fool, but it was in it. She was already pulling things from a press — the red, the stockings, a coil of fine cord I didn’t understand yet. “Right. Show me what you do know. There’s no shy down here, it only costs us time.”
So she checked me, kitchen and bed both, plain and unfussed, a stage-manager finding out what the new player can carry before the curtain. It didn’t take long. I knew almost nothing of the bed sort — a house girl, a man’s poor tub, his the only bed, and that was the whole of it. She nodded as if that were useful and not a failing, which it was, useful, because she was already building the evening around it in her head. She slid my dress off, and considered what she saw, and gave me an approving smile.
“Good. Then here’s how it’ll go, and once told you’ll know the whole night, and knowing it is half of bearing it.” And she told me — the dinner, the playing-at-the-side, the kiss between courses, the bath. She said bath and watched my face. “Aye. That’s where it goes. Both of us, both of them, and then they swap us — that’s the whole point of it for his lordship, that’s what your master’s really here to be given. The swapping binds them. Two men in a thing they can’t take back, and we’re the seal on it. It’s not wanting. It’s business between the men, and we’re the paper it’s signed on.” No heat in it. The weather, explained to a traveller. “It’s coming, and there’s no door out, and I’ll not insult you pretending there is.”
Then she asked me a thing no one had ever asked me.
“What do you want out of it? Because here’s what the lumps never work out — we can enjoy ourselves, you and me, right there in front of them, if that’s a thing you’d want; there’s worse ways through a bad night. Or we keep it all back, nothing real, and they’ll not know the difference, not ever. Tell me which way to lead it.”
And I stood before her, naked and bare, and tried to say it lightly and could not. It came up out of me before I could dress it — that no, I did not want that, I wanted none of it, that I had not chosen this and most of all not her, who I would have chosen for a friend in another life and could not abide for this, and that I did not want one single part of it to be real, did not want to give these men even the smallest true thing, wanted to keep the whole of myself so far back they’d never find the edge of me — and somewhere in the middle of it my voice went, and I had to stop and hold the press-edge and get my breath, because I had not said any of that out loud to a living soul and had not known it was all sitting there at the top of me, that close to the surface, waiting.
She did not look away and she did not hurry me, which was its own kindness. When I had it back she said, gently, “Then we keep it all back, every bit we can. And the keeping’s easier than you’d think — below the water, where they can’t see, you needn’t do anything you don’t want to do, and I won’t do anything you don’t do. Your hand at the top of my leg, pretending that’s somewhere else. Just follow me. Watch what I do and do the like, and if you can’t, fake it, and they’ll never know — men furnish the dark themselves, they’ll build whatever they came hoping for out of nothing. The hidden part’s the easy part. You can be a hundred miles off behind your own eyes and they’ll swear you were with them.” She paused, and the brisk went out of her, because now came the true hard thing. “It’s the seen part you’ll have to find a way through. What we do where they’re watching — the kissing, and our chests, the things they want us do to each other in plain sight — that can’t be faked, because they’re looking right at it. That part you have to commit to. You have to find a place inside yourself you can do it from and mean it enough that it holds. I can lead it. I can make it as little as it can be. But I can’t get inside you and do the committing for you. That’s yours. You’ll have to find your own way to be a person who can do that thing and not break, while they watch.” She looked at me steadily. “I’m sorry. The under part I can hide for you all night. The part in the light — that’s the one nobody can do but you.”
I have carried that since — that there was a place even she could not follow me into, the worst place, and that she was sorry, honestly sorry, and told me so plainly instead of pretending it away. It is in everything I have done since. The hiding she gave me.
The other part I have always had to find alone.
But then, she turned me, to look at the rest of me. There was silence, and then she very carefully traced her fingers along the fresh marks on my back. “That’s the way of it, is it?” she asked, quietly. “I’ve not seen the likes of this before.”
Then she taught me, and took her time, because the teaching was the armour — and she made me laugh, twice, which I would not have thought possible, telling me about them while she dressed me.
“The water’s a mercy, you’ll see. Above it they see, so it’s true — face, sounds, shoulders, spend it like water, don’t ration the top, that’s where the new ones get caught. Below it’s yours and they furnish the dark themselves with whatever they came hoping for. This one—” your master “—he’ll want you a wonder, and he’ll make you one in his own head out of nothing, they’re the easiest sort. His lordship’s harder; he watches; but he watches the show, not the seams, and the show’s the part I’ll run.” She held up the cord — hundreds of them, deep on a band. “And this is the kindest thing in the press and I picked it for you. It hangs deep, it moves, and you move it — you decide every second what’s behind it. He thinks he sees. He sees what you let him. The reins of the whole night, and he’ll never know there were reins.” She put it on me. “Now the walk. Half of it’s the walk, and we’ll not rush it.”
And while she dressed me, her hands moving over me, it was the way I had done it for my Lady, and I did not know how to bear that. She was gentle, but careful. As I had been. She did not spread oil on, but perfume. But her hands, the same. And she said for me to touch her there, her magnificent chest, so I would know her.
When she’d done she turned me to the glass and I did not, for a moment, find myself in it. There was a girl there in red and cords with her hair down and her face lit to something, and she was not me, and the strangeness of that went through me cold — that a body could be mine and a stranger’s at once, that they could take the plain thing I’d worn unremarked through two years of a man’s house and make it, in an hour, into this, a thing built to be looked at. And I understood, looking, that the not-knowing-myself was the first of Sefa’s lessons before she’d said a word of it: that this in the glass was the made thing, and I was the one watching it, and the two need not be the same, and there was a kind of safety in the gap if I could keep standing in it.
The cold was honest, at least. Sheer stuff and the legs of me bare and a house that wasn’t mine — I was cold, plainly, animal cold, wanting to cover myself and knowing I’d not be let, and the cold was the truest thing on me, because the men would read all this as something rich and wanted and what it was, against my skin, was a draught. They’d see the argument about what could be afforded. I’d feel the gooseflesh under it. That gap was the whole of the costume and I had it before I left the room.
Only the cords steadied me, and it shamed me a little how much. Hundreds of them, and mine to move, and Sefa had given me that on purpose — one rein, one thing in the whole night I’d decide — and feeling it answer, feeling that I could send a man’s eye where I chose and keep it off where I chose, was the first scrap of say-so I’d had since he told me I was coming, and I held to it the way you hold to one handful of mane on a bolting horse. Not pleasure. Nothing so whole as that. The plain relief of one hand on one rein.
And one thing she did that was not like the rest of it, because the rest of it was paint. The cords would come off at the door. The colour would wash from my face and the scent wear away and Sefa herself, after, would clean the whole evening off my skin and hand me back to myself. But this she did to the body, not the surface — laid me on my back, and remade me to the night’s spec very carefully with a razor in a way that would not wash away with a cloth — and so this was the one thing of that evening I would carry out of the house and home, into my own lane and my own days, growing slowly back over the weeks if I let it while I traded the fish and fed the beggars and lived my life, a part of me still, all that time, the thing the evening had made, when everything else had long since washed off. And she was done handling me there, she warned me: my master will like it.
And under all of it the cold true thing I’d half known for two years and now knew to the bone: that they were looking at me. All of them would, all night. The one time in my life men could not take their eyes off me — and what they could not take their eyes off was not me, was the red and the cords and the lit face, the made thing, the her-that-wasn’t. I’d been plain and unseen for a year in his house, and the hour they finally looked was the hour I’d been turned into something that wasn’t there. That is what it is, I learned, to be a girl no one looks at: not that they never look. That when they do, you’ve had to become a thing that isn’t you to earn it, and the looking lands on the thing and not on you, and you stand behind it in the cold, more alone with their eyes on you than you ever were unwatched.
And she taught me to walk — slow, over and over, patient as anyone has ever been with me, no, slower, make them think your moving at all is a thing they earned, the turn of it, the cords doing the work so my own body barely had to — and between the teaching she gossiped them, dry and wicked, who liked what and who fancied himself and which grand man went to pieces like a boy, the small ridiculous true things she knew from a year of being sent to them, so that by the end I was less afraid of them, because you cannot be quite so afraid of men a woman has just made you laugh about. That was deliberate too. I see it now. Everything she did was deliberate, and all of it was kind.
“Why give me all this,” I said, near the end. “You don’t know me.”
She looked at her work, which was me, made into a thing I didn’t know. “You’re one of us tonight. And because I saw your back. And someone told me, the once, when I sat where you’re sitting and shook the way you’re not letting yourself shake. You’ll tell the next one.” Road to road, a small flat smile. “Now. Chin. Let’s go be wonderful for the terrible men.”
The Dismissed Hour
“Make yourselves scarce,” he said, and Sefa had me by the hand before the words were cold, down a back stair I’d never have found, sure as a woman who knows every unwatched inch of a house she’s never free in. “Come down. An hour at least, the talking. They always think the talking’s the part that matters.”
She took me to the warm kitchen with the others, sat me on a stool near the fire and got warm water and a cloth, and cleaned me up. I had thought, if I’d thought about it, that I would do it myself, or that no one would, that you were left to put yourself back together after a thing like that the way you were left to bear it. But she did it for me, unhurried, the way you’d see to a child or a horse or a thing you valued — wiped the paint from my face and the man from my skin, worked the perfume she’d put on me back off again, all of it gentle, all of it careful, the same hands that had dressed me hours before and made me into the thing the evening wanted.
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