I wrote this piece for last term's fiction course. The professor requested that we write on three different subjects and splice them together. I didn't exactly nail the assignment, but I still like the effect of what I produced. That sounds arrogant, doesn't it. Does it? I have no idea. And no perspective. I have ceased to be able to discern my own words. I wrote so much last term and in such a hurry and I stopped being able to feel something about most of it, most of the time. If that's bad or good, don't tell me. I'm scared to know.
Danceaphobia
She watched Mitch pace back and forth across the front of the room. His movements were arrhythmic and jumpy. Occasionally he stuck his hands into the pockets of his jeans as he walked, and it made him look like a scarecrow being jerked about by capricious winds. She didn’t think he resembled a scarecrow, per se, just that the movements seemed herky-jerky like one. Like if a scarecrow could dance, it would dance irregularly. Probably because they don’t have hearts to produce rhythms. No, no, that’s the Tin Man. By that logic, the Tin Man couldn’t dance either. How did Dorothy stand those two? What woman can stand a man who can’t dance? Then again, the thought of seeing Mitch dancing sort of made her want to vomit involuntarily. His hands just seemed so awkward. Out of place within the framework of a rhythmic series of movements. It seemed pitiable, sort of, which was the thing that brought on the involuntary vomit feeling. She couldn’t force herself to imagine him as less than totally, wonderfully adaptable, almost magically so. It hurt her to try.
Dancelation
The troupe who would be performing for the audience gathered in the packed gymnasium lined up against the far wall, where one of the basketball hoops hung. They waited. The music began; it was a soft, three-cornered rhythm, with a metallic ring evocative of a kitchen instrument, like a wire whisk being banged around inside a pan. Joining the metallic rhythm next was the drum, a steady da-da-dum, da-da-dum, urgent and soft. The hands on the drum’s surface sounded as if they had been wrapped in flour. The troupe began clapping along, all of them in their row. Then out from the row of people against the wall leaped a boy wearing the same white pants and navy blue t-shirt as the rest of the male members of the troupe; he kicked out a leg, then the other leg. He both swayed along with the rhythmic sounds and simultaneously leaped, kicking and spinning, then began no-handed cartwheels in the air. The audience applauded in excitement. He was joined after a few moments by another troupe member, this time a girl. She wore the white pants but instead of a navy blue shirt, she wore a white, fitted tank top. She spun similarly, but with her own, unique, dance moves intermingled. The two of them spun around each other, kicking and swaying and leaping, spinning into various shapes of cartwheels and hand-stands and other movements that all wove together, beautifully, in their dance. Shortly, another member of the troupe, another male, spun into their group and the first fellow departed. The new man and the first girl spun and kicked and wove in and out, dancing and weaving, never touching but always interacting, until she was joined by another man, and she departed. This happened again and again, sometimes with a woman and sometimes a man, and it was exciting and unsettling. How did they never accidentally touch, never accidentally kick one of themselves or miss the beat? Their bodies, all puzzled together so neatly, mesmerized the audience. Everyone was clapping along, humming along. There was an audience-wide enchantment. People nudged one another, comparing and contrasting their feelings of astonishment at witnessing such impressive ability on that scale.
Dance
Grass grew up in slim tufts between the shale step-stones. There was pea gravel laid between the stones, too, but the grass had once inhabited this place and it clung to its old routine and pattern. Strawberries spilled along the edge of the stones and into the path, tiny and effervescent in their brilliance. Their bottoms were all scarred from the slugs that had arrived and plundered before another could strike, but the tops of the berries shone and glittered in the bright day. The lavender stalks waved a little, now, in the slight breeze, the scent blasting out over the rest of the garden. A ghost-white butterfly moth wandered along the tips of the lavender, swooping down to investigate the strawberries. It jerked and beat in its soft, little hovering manner, the sun so bright on its wings it nearly disappeared into the late-summer air. The little white being came to rest on the top of a rust-orange Shasta daisy, drowsing in the warmth, for the briefest moment. Then up, up, aloft on a criss-cross current, it burst like a bubble, jigging itself away, away from the lavender and berries and daisies and tufts of grass, born into the nearby green spaces it must visit in its daily haunts.
