Rusalka

There are two characters—Rossi, a police detective, and Lydia, a young woman— seated at a wooden table under an overhead light in Rusalka.  Lydia is describing a strange woman to Rossi, a woman who believed there were monsters everywhere and that the Devil was after her.  In answer to Rossi’s question, she tells him the woman was seeing a Russian guy but he moved to Texas.  She says the last time she saw the woman was in a dream and that dreams are real life that hasn’t happened yet.  The woman, she says, could not have gone to see the Russian guy because she could only live in places where it rains.  The Russian guy called her Rusalka, a nymph who lives in the water and sometimes in the woods and lures men to their destruction by tangling them in her long red hair and drowning them or sometimes tickling them to death.  But, Lydia says, the woman said she was no longer a Rusalka and was dating some other guy.  Rossi asks Lydia if she killed the woman because when Lydia came in she was covered in blood.  Lydia says it rained Devil’s blood and she and the woman danced naked in the rain.  The woman, she says, didn’t go to Texas to be with the Russian guy because she liked this other guy.  Lydia says she knows he is not some random police detective but the Devil, the other guy the woman was seeing.  Rossi says that Lydia’s punishment is that she will never see the woman again.  Lydia says his punishment is that the woman doesn’t love him, but loves her, and she will never tell him where she’s gone, no matter what he does to her.  She dares him to do something to her and they look at each other as the lights dim.