[Short Story] He Whispers Like Flowers

Mama told me not to get too close to the edge, but I fell anyways, cracked my bones in fourteen different places and wheelchaired out of the hospital bowlegged as a spider. Those bad ladies in the frills said I could never dance again. My legs didn’t heal right. I tried to demi-pointe when I pulled my skirts above my thighs and showed the mirror the knobbed, throbbing veins, the rigid dents and puckered purple bruises. I bit my lip when my ankles shivered. I whispered to my feet to shape themselves into birds like they used to, grow svelte skeletonshapes and taper right into butterfly shells, but they could not take the pressure of my urgency.

I was going to be the best dancer in France, even if I lived in Louisiana, and be called Madeline instead of Joann. I was going to dance in Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet company and transform my body into moth wings so I could metamorphosize right into the black curtain, paint the back of my wingblades with radioactive jewel eyes that would melt the bad ladies, their rulers against my knuckles, right into the floor. Except now my bones rubbed wrong against the back of my skin, and I couldn’t sleep without feeling the wrongness of their shape creasing against the mattress. I couldn’t bend down to pick up Kitty without the aching balls in my joints sharpening their crystal castles against my muscles. When I touched the static on the television screen, watching Chinese girls pirouette underneath Christmas Special lights, I heard her say “You’ll never dance again never dance again neverdanceneverdanceagain”, until the noise became so loud I devised schemes to steal pretty Chinese legs and create mechanical slippers that would let me Jesus-slide over lily water.

But I never got backstage with a hacksaw - so when I graduated I became a secretary from the top up, wearing pretty blouses and hiding my legs beneath the reception desk, blowing cherry colored kisses because I knew the men wouldn’t wrap their hands around my knees later, yelling, “squeeze, Petrushka, squeeze!” when I wouldn’t move underneath them. No, they recognized my warped bones and stayed away. My kisses couldn’t hide that.

I still tried to demi-pointe in my room after I pulled the curtains, but the shakeshivers had my cheeks turning blue. Mama kept trying to steal my slippers and throw them out. She thought I’d make myself sick with wasteland dreams, but I ended up sleeping with my soft ballet shoes pressed against my stomach like outlier wombs, and eventually she stopped trying to take them from me. On blue Saturdays I locked my door and dressed in my glittery lace wrappings and put on my slippers so I could dance the cripples dance, knocking over my jewelry box and smudging the window with my fingerprints and tearing all the sheets off my bed. I usually ended up on the floor, mascara wet, all cocooned in torn sheets, legs pulled up to my chest, trying to chase away the sweetest, mocking glittery fr a g me nts of the dance I used to know.

Then he came to me.
The devil woke me when he took off my slippers and kissed the curve of my feet – his lips smooth as snowcone ice, the buttons of his cool black suit glinting gold, bouncing off the reflection of his eyes. Those eyes – they were like sunsets freezing at the bottom of a lake.
“I can make you beautiful again,” he said, “Give you back your bones.”
I said nothing. I felt the hypnotic motions of his fingers rubbing circles against my feet, that hidden skin pinker than blind mole eyes.
“Not only that, I can give you your dreams. You could fly again. You could float.” He peeled back my bruises and kissed my knee. “Wouldn’t you like to dance?”
I whispered, “Yes.”
“I’ll want something in return.”

“What?” I asked.
He smiled. “You.”
The silence ballooned around us. I could not hear his breath.
“Do you want to dance?” he asked me gently.
“Yes.”
“Then you will dance.”

He took me in his arms and dragged nail marks against my cheeks. I kissed those cool lips and he whispered, “Sleep,” and I sank into the six-edged matrix of dreams. I could have forgotten. I didn’t.

In the months that passed my bones needle knit their restructure inside my legs. I did not see the devil but I dreamed of his face and remembering the way it lit-shimmered in the dark made butterflies rub up in my stomach. I said “Look Mama!” and showed her the corset work of my marrow, creating smooth dark vein lines where before there were only bent branches. She took me to the doctor and white coats placed me in a room alone with a lead vest and the machine, chunk chunk noises coming from its belly.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” the doctor said, as I sat on the examining table and he handled my legs in the stirrups like grandmother’s good china. Mama wanted to cry but her face wouldn’t let her. We walked out of the hospital with our hands interlocked, the bright sunlight sticking leech-like against the ribbons of my halter-top. When we got to the car she grabbed my face and kissed my forehead and laughed.

And the next time I tried to demi-pointe with the mirror watching, my feet and legs melted right into each other, like they were meant to before being crushed by thirty feet of steel milk air. I bit my lip out of habit, but when I realized those smooth lines wouldn’t splinter, my neck unclenched and my muscles stopped shakeshivering. I put on my ballet shoes, and when I laced them up my joints did not pop out of their sockets.

The bad ladies allowed me back into their dance studios, their musty ballrooms, their soft-as-rickets acoustic auditoriums with backstage tea and crumpling 18th century rib corsets. They pretended away that they ever called me crippled and ruined. They smiled when I entered the room lit up in tulle and glittering shiny as all Christmas lights, stretching away werewolf stretch marks on the beam. Look! Look how beautiful I am! I wanted to scream. I wanted to drag my teeth across their legs to show them the way medulla cracks under pressure, but as the dance grew inside me the angry flutterby folded her cracked wings.

I left the bad ladies behind and took my precious gauze eyes with me. I danced across the stages that crumbled in the black light. Doctors came to examine the smoothness of my body, so that when I stretched they blushed. They called me a medical miracle, as if I’d grown an exo-skeleton in their sterile laboratories. I never forgot the truth, though, that my medical miracle was a Hades miracle, something lovely and rich and rare.

And as much as I loved the dance, I’ll admit this, I waited for his return. When he would come back for me his teeth would dissolve my skin like sticky lavender. You'll see.

The spotlights creased against my back. And the boys wanted my marrow when I got all prettyfamous up there in the front row, my gracile figure dancing back swan dives in Paris and Italy, white masks and white powder, the world cheering for me in glittery blacklots and golden auditorium boxes. Those who knew I crushed my legs wanted to see the lines that the devil took away. Those who didn’t, well, they loved me anyways.

The years did their tumble and my body did not fade, but I grew tired up in those auditoriums waiting for him. I never gave my bones to another, my lips, my kiss, it all belonged to him. I arched my spine and dreamed the luciddreams that strung me from light to light in his frozen sunset eyes. The crowds continued to come in Friday lights; gentleman in tuxedos with ladies dressed in sweet colors, but after a while they became part of the scenery and I danced outside of their frequency. All of my limbs became thin and I struggled just to keep my head floating above my shoulders, as if in his absence my organs wanted to crush themselves into dust.

My blood stirred for him. My head became warm and chalk for him. I sat alone in the wardrobe room while the boys waited in the hall. They played violin and slipped love poems underneath the door, but it all belonged to him. Whenever the other dancers talked about their grandmother's broken hips or the men who no longer loved him they said they saw the devil sneaking up the portico into their lives and cutting at their arms with his teeth. I just thought, there goes the one I love. When I'm blinded at night dreaming of autographs written on my stomach with his tongue, when I dream of the one who can lay down beside me and unstick my body from the sheets, there goes the one I love.

Once after a performance, alone in the theater, I turned off the lights and danced on the stage in the dark. In the darkness he took my arm and kissed my collarbone and whispered, “Have you missed me?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve come for a dance,” he said, and we danced on the dark stage, the sore points gliding, melting underneath our shoes. His hands touched my skin. My fingers bent back his hair. He tasted like the snow my feet used to freeze in. Did you know the devil whispers like flowers? He does.

I kissed the devil. I ran my fingers through his cool black hair and pulled me into him so that our lips enmeshed and he purred from deep within his throat. I took his hand and pressed it into the secret place between my legs, into the place where I grew hot for him, my tulle skirt breaking like cinders against his nails.

“I've been waiting for you for so long,” I said, “I love you.”
But he only leaned forward and whispered into my ear.
“You don't know what love is,” he said, “but you know how to dance.”

He bit my ear.
“Now you dance.”

I dance. Walking on these puerile, grey eggshells of the dead, chasing the ruby throat of the devil’s orchestra. The underworld opened up and let me inside its painted walls. The devil swept the floor of Hades and let me demi-pointe and glide on the gray faces that encased the stone before his throne, before his kingdom come. Did you know beneath these ghost chandeliers there are no more veils? There is no more want for the empty stage and the uncooked legs that could make me beautiful. There is only the bare want, the need, cracked open on my skin like a bad egg.

I don't want to dance anymore.

But he said dance. He said dance and I am nothing but his blue-veined corpse.

The bad ladies are gone. Mommy gone. He takes my hand and my skeleton freezes in his eyes, as if submerged in snowcone ice.
I dance.

Follow me on twitter, facebook, or on my website. You can also buy my books here
Photo from pixabay
Self portrait by me canon t51

Some of my other posts you may be interested in:
Taking a Risk Isn't The Ultimate Answer, It's Only The Beginning // Writer's Journal
Essentials For A Writer's Wardrobe
How Shadow People From My Dreams Taught Me The Power of Fear and Improved My Writing
At the San Diego Dog Beach // PTSD // Recovery Journal
[Short Story] Letter to The Girl That Ate My Skin
[Flash Fiction] A Letter to My Imaginary Husband
What It's Like To Go From Ugly To Pretty