Post by bronwyn on May 3, 2015 17:51:28 GMT 7
Hi guys! This is another early draft, a complete story about 1300 words. I thought the dancing story was appropriate to share this month in light of Marion's leaving celebrations. General comments/reactions appreciated as always on read-through, with a couple of questions at the bottom.
***
I take the stairs up out of the station with the stairs-walking people. We’re a sparse lot, outnumbered ten-to-one by the escalator people forming a throng to our left. Our leader today is a young man with a sports bag over his shoulder, leaping up two at a time because he can, perhaps, or because it’s part of his fitness regime. He looks like the type to have a fitness regime. He leaps with purpose.
Following him is a business woman on her phone who has separated herself from the crowd for ease of conversation, and an elderly gentleman who’d like to take the escalator except he fears it. Then there’s me, tappety-tappetting upwards for no real, other reason than the music is in me and I just have to dance.
You don’t know how much I have to dance. Back at the hospital my cousin’s newborn baby cried and it was music to me. I held him in my arms and moved my feet back and forth until his father said, “I know that song…” and took his phone out from his pocket and started playing something he used to listen to in the nineties. The two of us rocked that child right off to sleep. Then I gave him back.
Now I’m here, tappety-tappetting up the stairs after a man with a sports bag, and sliding onward to the bus stop. Now I’m resisting the urge to click my fingers and swivel my hips as I board the number six bus, choosing instead to give that pizzazz to the driver in the form of a brilliant smile. Bump bump. Bumpety yeah. It’s so good to be alive.
The music moves me. I’d like to tell you that I move to the music, but it just isn’t true. Familiar songs do it best, twisting me this way, shaking me there. My hands fly round and I feel the blood rush out to my fingertips. My body trembles with the force of my feet thumping down on the floor.
Sometimes I’m in the mood for a new song. I like to wrestle with it, dipping when I should be whirling, stepping when I should be kicking, failing to anticipate its rhythms until - BOOM! - I fall into it, note by note, my body synching with it randomly, then fully, as it draws me in and in. Sing it one more time, I beg. Let me lose myself again, til I forget to eat, til I forget to sleep. I will dance alone if I have to, but if anyone’s there, we can move together for a beat or four.
Once, my doctor recommended a dance class, and I nearly even went. But at the door I met this guy, tousle-haired and unshaven, looking like he wanted to go in but he couldn’t. “There are too many beautiful women in that room,” he told me, and he said, “I can’t handle it,” and I said, “Well, am I ugly enough that you could dance on my coffee table?”
The guy laughed at me, then he thought for a moment. “Yeah, let’s do that,” he said, and we walked together all the way to my home. He told me as we went that he could handle beautiful women better when he took more medication, but the high dose gave him jitters, “and then-” he explained- “I can’t dance anyway.”
He said he hated not being in control of his body. “Do you mean when you’re on the meds or off them?” I asked, and he didn’t reply except to look at me, and we both understood each other.
At my place, I poured him two consecutive beers and he drank them and lit a cigarette and went through to the lawn. There, he did what he called The Backyard Boogie. I hadn’t even put on any music. He wrapped his arms across his chest and shimmied into a ball and I said, “You are The Egg Man,” and he said, “Boop boop be doop.”
The number six bus takes me three stops, and as I waltz off, I let my skirt flare a little. My feet clack the pavement - clack clack, clackety-clack - and my hips swing with it - zing bam. I feel my hair bounce. Soon, I’m slipping sideways through a stream of commuters, yielding my body into the crowd as the music bubbles in me. Effervescence. Effervesce. I repeat this like a lyric, til it pops on my face in a grin.
When Dan, my husband, came home on the night of the dance class, he slicked the sweat from his 5k run off into the shower, then he looked around at the beer bottles and the cigarette butts. He watched me dancing with my new friend in the backyard, and his face showed the sort of wariness an experienced game keeper might reserve for a springing trap as it flings itself around an animal.
“Are you guys ok?” he asked, and I told him, “We are fabulous! We’re dancing!” but all the same, it reminded me of that time I was dancing by myself at that club, just me on the floor in front of the band, when it struck me that I might not exist to have purpose, but to give purpose. After all, if I wasn’t dancing, what use was it to have the band play? Except I left the dance floor in the end and I couldn’t help but notice that the band played on anyway.
Dan turned away from our back yard on dance class night and went back in to cook dinner. He cooks with purpose, that man. He’s never been jealous of my odd waifs and strays, because he knows we dance without any.
And now I’ve changed buses. I’m on the one-seven-four, still chugging away from my cousin’s newborn in the hospital, having done all I could there. I’ve never taken this bus before. I stand in the aisle and sway with its turns, I thrum with its motor, I tune to its groove. Its windows show me beauty (the world is so beautiful) and its wheels carry me onward - rumble-pum-pum. I am moving. I am going somewhere, I think. I am moving like I’m never going to stop.
But I will stop, I know it, though Dan takes this the hardest. I will I sink to the couch, and shrivel up from disuse. My mind will starve from the silence, and Dan will find me and see that I’ve forgotten not only to eat or to sleep, but I’ve also forgotten to die. Then he’ll cradle me in a schedule of properly-cooked meals and properly-prescribed pills, and he’ll try to dance with me, singing the music back in, willing me to believe that the song will return, like the one-seven-four bus I must leave now because we’ve reached the end of the line.
The driver asks if I’ve missed my stop. “No, no,” I say, because you can’t (can you?) miss what you’ve never even had, and I skip to the ground and stand staring at whatever there is to see here.
There’s nothing for me, I think, and I look across the bus stop at a row of apartment buildings in yellow and white, and a small shop selling bicycle parts. The things that are here are all for other people. But I look anyway, long enough that the idea starts to resonate: perhaps this is not here for anybody, or anything.
At the end of the line, this is always the hope that I ring with. It contains all my grief. And it provides me with absolution.
***
Questions:
- I need a title. Any suggestions?
- How did this piece make you feel?
***
I take the stairs up out of the station with the stairs-walking people. We’re a sparse lot, outnumbered ten-to-one by the escalator people forming a throng to our left. Our leader today is a young man with a sports bag over his shoulder, leaping up two at a time because he can, perhaps, or because it’s part of his fitness regime. He looks like the type to have a fitness regime. He leaps with purpose.
Following him is a business woman on her phone who has separated herself from the crowd for ease of conversation, and an elderly gentleman who’d like to take the escalator except he fears it. Then there’s me, tappety-tappetting upwards for no real, other reason than the music is in me and I just have to dance.
You don’t know how much I have to dance. Back at the hospital my cousin’s newborn baby cried and it was music to me. I held him in my arms and moved my feet back and forth until his father said, “I know that song…” and took his phone out from his pocket and started playing something he used to listen to in the nineties. The two of us rocked that child right off to sleep. Then I gave him back.
Now I’m here, tappety-tappetting up the stairs after a man with a sports bag, and sliding onward to the bus stop. Now I’m resisting the urge to click my fingers and swivel my hips as I board the number six bus, choosing instead to give that pizzazz to the driver in the form of a brilliant smile. Bump bump. Bumpety yeah. It’s so good to be alive.
The music moves me. I’d like to tell you that I move to the music, but it just isn’t true. Familiar songs do it best, twisting me this way, shaking me there. My hands fly round and I feel the blood rush out to my fingertips. My body trembles with the force of my feet thumping down on the floor.
Sometimes I’m in the mood for a new song. I like to wrestle with it, dipping when I should be whirling, stepping when I should be kicking, failing to anticipate its rhythms until - BOOM! - I fall into it, note by note, my body synching with it randomly, then fully, as it draws me in and in. Sing it one more time, I beg. Let me lose myself again, til I forget to eat, til I forget to sleep. I will dance alone if I have to, but if anyone’s there, we can move together for a beat or four.
Once, my doctor recommended a dance class, and I nearly even went. But at the door I met this guy, tousle-haired and unshaven, looking like he wanted to go in but he couldn’t. “There are too many beautiful women in that room,” he told me, and he said, “I can’t handle it,” and I said, “Well, am I ugly enough that you could dance on my coffee table?”
The guy laughed at me, then he thought for a moment. “Yeah, let’s do that,” he said, and we walked together all the way to my home. He told me as we went that he could handle beautiful women better when he took more medication, but the high dose gave him jitters, “and then-” he explained- “I can’t dance anyway.”
He said he hated not being in control of his body. “Do you mean when you’re on the meds or off them?” I asked, and he didn’t reply except to look at me, and we both understood each other.
At my place, I poured him two consecutive beers and he drank them and lit a cigarette and went through to the lawn. There, he did what he called The Backyard Boogie. I hadn’t even put on any music. He wrapped his arms across his chest and shimmied into a ball and I said, “You are The Egg Man,” and he said, “Boop boop be doop.”
The number six bus takes me three stops, and as I waltz off, I let my skirt flare a little. My feet clack the pavement - clack clack, clackety-clack - and my hips swing with it - zing bam. I feel my hair bounce. Soon, I’m slipping sideways through a stream of commuters, yielding my body into the crowd as the music bubbles in me. Effervescence. Effervesce. I repeat this like a lyric, til it pops on my face in a grin.
When Dan, my husband, came home on the night of the dance class, he slicked the sweat from his 5k run off into the shower, then he looked around at the beer bottles and the cigarette butts. He watched me dancing with my new friend in the backyard, and his face showed the sort of wariness an experienced game keeper might reserve for a springing trap as it flings itself around an animal.
“Are you guys ok?” he asked, and I told him, “We are fabulous! We’re dancing!” but all the same, it reminded me of that time I was dancing by myself at that club, just me on the floor in front of the band, when it struck me that I might not exist to have purpose, but to give purpose. After all, if I wasn’t dancing, what use was it to have the band play? Except I left the dance floor in the end and I couldn’t help but notice that the band played on anyway.
Dan turned away from our back yard on dance class night and went back in to cook dinner. He cooks with purpose, that man. He’s never been jealous of my odd waifs and strays, because he knows we dance without any.
And now I’ve changed buses. I’m on the one-seven-four, still chugging away from my cousin’s newborn in the hospital, having done all I could there. I’ve never taken this bus before. I stand in the aisle and sway with its turns, I thrum with its motor, I tune to its groove. Its windows show me beauty (the world is so beautiful) and its wheels carry me onward - rumble-pum-pum. I am moving. I am going somewhere, I think. I am moving like I’m never going to stop.
But I will stop, I know it, though Dan takes this the hardest. I will I sink to the couch, and shrivel up from disuse. My mind will starve from the silence, and Dan will find me and see that I’ve forgotten not only to eat or to sleep, but I’ve also forgotten to die. Then he’ll cradle me in a schedule of properly-cooked meals and properly-prescribed pills, and he’ll try to dance with me, singing the music back in, willing me to believe that the song will return, like the one-seven-four bus I must leave now because we’ve reached the end of the line.
The driver asks if I’ve missed my stop. “No, no,” I say, because you can’t (can you?) miss what you’ve never even had, and I skip to the ground and stand staring at whatever there is to see here.
There’s nothing for me, I think, and I look across the bus stop at a row of apartment buildings in yellow and white, and a small shop selling bicycle parts. The things that are here are all for other people. But I look anyway, long enough that the idea starts to resonate: perhaps this is not here for anybody, or anything.
At the end of the line, this is always the hope that I ring with. It contains all my grief. And it provides me with absolution.
***
Questions:
- I need a title. Any suggestions?
- How did this piece make you feel?
