Performed by Val Cole

Get to know the writer:

1. What is your short story about?

It's a deceptive tale — subtle, misleading, designed to lead the reader astray. The true meaning only reveals itself in the very last line. To explain more would be to unravel the twist, and I wouldn't want to steal that moment of discovery.

2. What genres would you say this story is in?

Flash fiction, distilled and sharpened, shaped in a poetic register, lyrical in tone, yet rooted in psychological realism.

3. How would you describe this story in two words?

Don't trust.

(A) stranger.

4. What movie have you seen the most in your life?

Two films have stayed with me like old companions: Indochine (1992, dir. Régis Wargnier), a sweeping French period drama, and Titus (1999, dir. Julie Taymor), a fierce, surreal reimagining of Shakespeare's play. Both are vast and visceral, unapologetically emotional. I return to them again and again.

5. What is your favorite song?

That's a hard one. Maynard James Keenan's musical universe — whether with Tool, A Perfect Circle, or Puscifer — continues to shape my inner world. It's difficult to choose just one track; the whole body of work feels interconnected, like chapters in a long, dark gospel.

6. Do you have an all-time favorite novel?

For years, The Thibaults by Roger Martin du Gard was the book I returned to: expansive, introspective, humane. Recently, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver took my breath away. A towering novel: raw, urgent, and alive. I could hardly put it down. I could hardly breathe while reading it.

7. What motivated you to write this story?

I was living in a slum at the time. Every day, I saw people standing in silence, vacant-eyed, watching the world go by. Watching us. That image stayed with me, and though the rest is imagined, that gaze, that haunting stillness, is where the story was born.

8. If you could have dinner with one person (dead or alive), who would that be?

Anthony Hopkins. For the grace, the depth, the quiet thunder in everything he does.

9. Apart from writing, what else are you passionate about?

Theater, and contemporary circus. I've lived and worked in this world for more than a decade. I entered it as an outsider, an adult, and the circus slowly became my second home. Every performance is a fleeting act of magic, and I cherish being part of that ephemeral, glittering world.

10. What influenced you to enter your story to be performed?

There's a difference between reading a story and hearing it aloud. A voice gives breath to the text, and with it, a new kind of life. When I read my own work, I'm always revising, doubting, rewriting in my head. But when I hear it spoken by someone else, especially with such care and craft, the anxiety vanishes — and even I can simply listen and believe the story exists.

11. Any advice or tips you'd like to pass on to other writers?

Write every day. Not because inspiration strikes — but because it doesn't. The muse shows up after you've already begun.