The last laugh

The attic smells of dust and old greasepaint. You came up here with a flashlight and a garbage bag, intending to clear your great-aunt's house room by room, and instead you've spent an hour knee-deep in a steamer trunk that was never on any inventory: sequined leotards, a hoop skirt, a pair of red shoes the size of loaves of bread, a ruffled collar gone amber with age.

It's a joke. That's all it is. You sit down on a crate, wedge your feet into the enormous shoes — they fit, somehow, impossibly well — and loop the crackling collar around your neck, and take one photo for the group chat before the attic lights flicker. When you reach up to pull the collar off, it doesn't come. Neither do the shoes. The knot at your throat has vanished; the collar sits against your skin like it grew there.

You tell yourself the clasp is just stuck. You tell yourself that all the way down the attic stairs, all the way to the bathroom mirror, where you scrub at the collar with a washcloth while your reflection watches — and where, just before you look away, you're almost certain your mouth twitches upward without your permission.