Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.
No one saw me, but they certainly saw you: lithe and swan-armed, assured in your poses. You had a way with the steps. The light followed wherever you danced.
Same with eyes. The corps tried not to look, but their gazes eventually flickered center stage. The dance master held you up as the example. Round and round you went. Piqué. Pirouette. Fouetté. So extended you seemed more liquid than flesh.
A perfect windup doll on that dusty practice stage, with a string from your head that pulled you straight to heaven. A star soloist forming before us all.
You kept your hair modest. Barefaced and stoic, you never looked at your reflection for longer than you had to. If only you had looked a little longer, a little harder, you might have glimpsed me in the mirror. You might have predicted what was coming to you.
Under different circumstances, I think you could have gotten away intact.
Long after the others went home, you danced on, relentless. You spent hours on that rehearsal stage, leaping for starlight and oblivious to all else. Resin on the ends of your pointe shoes, and plenty of bandages under the satin. I knew behind the polished pink was a red bloom of throbbing feet, cracked toenails, tortured skin.
The audience sees only the end performance, but the dancers know what a hard road it is to get there. The grueling practice time, the restrictive diets, the endless effort—all of which you brushed aside so lightly when the interviewers asked what they always asked. “Does it hurt?”
Dancers don’t talk about pain in public. In my opinion, they never give themselves enough credit. No one talks about the blood.
The truth is, there are only a few acceptable palettes within the form: ballet pink and soft white and a limited definition of nude, which really means light beige. Other tones are apparently obscene, including red. Fire and passion aren’t appropriate for our art.
Red: the hidden reality of all dancers. Maybe we should embrace it; modesty be damned. And I wonder if it’s so bad to have loved the red itself.
To love it still, even now.
The week of your recital, you barely ate or slept. You spun to recordings of piano music while I watched on, silent as always. The patter of your shoes brought me back to my old days.
Sweat trailed down your neck during that last rehearsal, where I was your sole audience member. If I could have warned you, I would have; I swear it. I sympathized with your effort. The damp mess of your leotard. Your chignon falling loose. The music played on while you danced. And danced.
And danced.
They couldn’t pry the shoes off you. Not even after you fell. By the time the dance master discovered your body, your feet were swollen beyond recognition. Your pointe shoes, they’d turned red, the other dancers whispered. Bright red seeping all the way through. It was a shame, but they would find a new dancer for the role. They always did.
I’d been a dancer once, too.
Based on “The Red Shoes” by Hans Christian Andersen