A Warning from the Joiceville Historical & Performing Arts Preservation Society (Est. Unclear)
It is not advisable to speak her name in full. Those who study such things — and in Joiceville, there are a troubling number of people who study such things — refer to her simply as Madame Voss, Drama Teacher, Vocal Director, and Keeper of the Wednesday Night Rehearsal That Never Quite Ends.
She arrived at Joiceville Regional High School in a year that the school board’s records describe, peculiarly, only as “the wet one.” She carried a leather satchel that smelled of cedar and something older than cedar. She wore sensible heels. She smiled when she introduced herself to the faculty.
That smile.
Several staff members requested transfers the following morning. They could not explain why, exactly. They simply noted in their paperwork that they had seen too many teeth. Mrs. Halpern from Accounting, a woman of iron constitution who had survived three audits and a mild haunting in the copy room, described the smile as “going back further than a smile should reasonably go.” She did not elaborate. She moved to Asheville. She seems fine now.
But the students — the students stayed. Because Madame Voss put on shows.
This is the part that confounds the researchers, the concerned parents, the two journalists who came to investigate and left reviewing their notes with glassy, satisfied eyes: the productions are extraordinary. Her 2019 staging of Grease won three regional awards and caused a woman in the third row to weep with a joy she described as “slightly too large for her body.” Her Into the Woods was reviewed in the Joiceville Gazette as “transcendent, unsettling, and somehow nutritious.”
And now — Hell-o, Dolly! opens next week.
The posters are already up. The tickets are already gone.
It is the rehearsals that concern us.
They begin at 3:15 PM, when the last bell releases its students into the merciful autumn air. The choir files into the auditorium — seventeen souls in matching black t-shirts, sheet music clutched to their chests like shields. They warm up on scales. They breathe together. They open their mouths, and something warm and golden rises from them, note by note, like steam off fresh bread.
Madame Voss stands at the piano. She does not sit. She never sits.
She eats the apple core.
This is the first sign. She will have eaten the apple itself during the day, in the faculty lounge, in the normal way that people eat apples. But she saves the core. And at precisely the moment the choir reaches full resonance — that shimmering, harmonized peak where seventeen young voices become briefly one voice — she places the core between her teeth and consumes it. Seeds. Stem. All of it. Slowly. Without breaking eye contact with the second sopranos.
The rehearsals run long.
How long is a matter of active theological debate in Joiceville. Parents report picking their children up at 9 PM, at 11 PM, at hours that clocks in the parking lot disagree about entirely. The students emerge flushed and bright-eyed and slightly thinner in a way that has nothing to do with weight. They are vibrating with something. They remember every note. They cannot, however, remember what they had for breakfast, or the name of their first pet, or the particular quality of silence in their childhood bedrooms — those soft, private, interior silences that belong to no one but themselves.
Madame Voss has impeccable pitch.
There have been attempts to document the phenomenon. A parent volunteer once installed a camera in the auditorium’s lighting rig. The footage, when reviewed, showed 94 minutes of normal choral rehearsal, followed by 47 minutes of static, followed by 6 seconds of Madame Voss looking directly into the lens with that smile and holding up a small, handwritten sign that read: From the top.
The parent withdrew their child from the program.
The child cried for a week.
The child is doing fine now, mostly, though they do occasionally harmonize involuntarily with appliances.
What is she? The Joiceville Historical & Performing Arts Preservation Society has considered many theories. Entity. Vessel. Something that found the shape of a drama teacher and decided it was, on balance, a reasonable arrangement. The apple cores suggest a hunger with very specific manners. The smile suggests geometry that predates the building codes of this or any adjacent dimension. The rehearsals suggest something is being collected — slowly, lovingly, the way a serious person collects anything: with patience, and criteria, and an absolute refusal to settle for less than perfect.
She takes only what makes the sound better.
Whatever she is, she files her grades on time. She responds to emails, if briefly. She has never, in eleven years at Joiceville Regional, missed a single performance.
The performances are flawless.
Hell-o, Dolly! opens Friday.
Doors at 7. Showtime at 7:30.
Bring cash for the program. Arrive early. Sit toward the middle — she prefers a full house, and the seats near the exits have, historically, experienced minor audio anomalies and one incident involving a fire door that opened onto a hallway that was not previously there.
Do not finish your apple before you arrive. She will know.
She always knows.
And for heaven’s sake — if she smiles at you from the stage —
Smile back.
It’s only polite.
— Posted by the Joiceville Historical & Performing Arts Preservation Society. We do not take responsibility for any spiritual inventory adjustments experienced during or after the production. All sales final. No refunds. Break a leg.
