Thirteen steps in, nine steps right.
Un, deux, trois.
Follow the flow, dear. Don't lose faith. There we go.
Have you been practicing? It's much better than the last, much better. Yes, I know. It's too soon, isn't it? Keep practicing, though. Get the jumps right, dear, you do, ah, tangle those up, don't you?
****. He won't like the jumps then.
She quietly swore as Madame left the room. It would be minutes now (and it seemed like less) that she would feel his hands snaking around the arch of her spine, his emotionless voice softly murmuring 'A little right, you've got it. It's never too difficult for you.'
Effortlessly smiling. Surveying the smooth movements in her limbs his labor translated to.
Stop it. What was the point. He was gone before he even..oh, what the ****. It didn't matter.
And she gave up trying to resist his memory, because it was like smoke inside her head, clouding up her survival instincts and filling her with the warm drowsiness of his caress. With his breath on her shoulder and the faint scent of mint and depression that hung around him. She used to tell him that he would smell like hospitals and he would grin (not those idiotically crooked grins the boys in her other class would throw at her, but a proper, ridiculously wide grin that made him look fumbling and slightly simple and made her feel something special) and he'd tell her the story about the first time he broke his shin and he'd stayed for three days in a hospital room that had no ceiling, and it was the most incredible thing ever, because you could see the stars.
'Stargazing', he would tell her, 'is a bit like looking into the past and the future all at once. Light takes such a long time to reach Earth that the light that reaches us from, say, Deneb, which is one thousand four hundred and twenty five light years away, is exactly that many years old. One thousand four hundred and twenty five years old. And you can see the light now and your three year old cousin will see it when he grows up and life forms from other galaxies will see it a million years from now and you can never,never stop that light even though the star itself will one day explode and collapse itself into negative space. But the light, until it is seen by somebody, anybody, until it forms an image on someone's retinas, will stay alone in the universe forever.
Beautiful, forever.'
Or for at least one thousand four hundred and twenty five years.
He was a lot like his stars, she surmised. His after-image seemed brighter than him, enough to burn your eyes and leave your throat parched and make your heart start aching.
But the boy himself was full of ****.
It's sad how everyone says 'he was' now. Not is. Was. Past tense, like they couldn't see his light still running up his ******* one thousand however many years. Like the negative space he occupied wasn't ******* burning up the sky with its brightness.
Or maybe he was a black hole, mercilessly engulfing light into its emptiness, spitting it out into another dimension where only she existed. Where the light was only for her and was invisible to the rest.
Or maybe he was just plain gone.
She hated believing in death. As she danced to Prokofiev she thought about how much she hated believing in death but now she had to because she couldn't feel his presence, and there was this little hole gnawing at her going 'gonegonegonegone' because he was dead and she was dancing and she wanted to stop the unfairness of it all because he was always the better dancer. He was always the better everything.
His voice faded in her head and his arm slipped away. She wanted to turn and say 'No, no stay. Don't go, please love, staystaystay.'
She didn't.
She didn't say it.
So maybe it was good that he was dead to everyone else and dying to her because she liked the idea of him slipping away and her head being occupied by her own thoughts. So she just kept dancing because *******, that's what I loved doing before you came along. And she pliéd and battement glissé dégagéd into position, two steps forward, one step right, finale chassé
and
then
allegro cabriole.
The feeling of flying. Her legs crossing and extending in mid-air. Her muscles screamed in pain and her face broke into a smile.
And her feet hit the glossed wooden floor. En croix.
A sickening crack. Her feet gave way.
But she was smiling.
From the window, Madame watched and thanked her son's ghost for finally letting go.
As the final bars of Prokofiev's coda emptied its lucid notes into the rattling vacuum of the city's pandemonium outside, she contemplated going in and helping the girl,
but.
This
was
her
fight.
And what doesn't **** you.
Makes you wish
it
*did.