Tiny Dancers

She woke up, heated her soup in the microwave oven in her closet then carried the soup to the bathroom where she climbed into the bathtub and ate it. After breakfast, she sat on the edge of the sink and peed.

From there, she drifted to the kitchen where she washed her body one part at a time, hand foot, rib in the sink with dishwashing detergent. The crystals exfoliated her skin nicely. She dried her body with a towel warmed in the oven. Once, in a hurry, she tried to broil the towel to warm it faster, but it burned.

Her clothes lay in neat piles on various window ledges and her books were carefully stacked in a dresser in her bedroom. She slept on the floor of her closet. At 5:33 am, she would push up on the cracked and peeling white paint of the window frame and climb out to her fire escape where she would dance naked as the sun started to rise.

Her friends had names she couldn’t remember. She had a TV once, but one of her friends threw it out the window. She only missed it for a little while. She wrote a eulogy for the TV on her living room wall where the TV had once rested against.

Her fragrance was mocha, which clung to her like an abandoned child. She used to make drinks at the coffee shop, but she didn’t like to listen to people’s orders. Instead, she made what she thought suited them. The people did not like this.

Her boss liked the sparkle in her eye and she didn’t complain if he groped her, so he kept her around. Some days it seemed like he paid her to dance but there were always more customers on the days she was there. They couldn’t resist a girl who used a mop as a dance partner, sugar as snow and a kiss on the cheek for everyone who came in.

***

After her toes tired from dancing, she wrote. Her pen pressed so strongly into the paper that it curled, as if she were trying to carve her ideas in stone. She used her failure to inspire her, the page as a bucket to be filled. If she didn’t fill it then a town would die of thirst somewhere.

She didn’t like stores or fluorescent lights, so she would go to the recycling center and steal paper for her notebooks. Once, she dreamt the recycling center had turned into an empty wasteland filled with dirty diapers and giant cockroaches. She couldn’t go back. Her notebook filled but her words spilled over so she would write on the margins of a newspaper or napkin from the coffee shop. The napkins were black so she could only trace the lines of what she thought. Then she wrote on her walls where stories intersected and began anew. When her pen ran dry, she would use ketchup, mustard, eyeliner, anything. With condiments, her writing would slow and each letter required gentle attentions and effort as if she were learning the beauty of each line and curve for the first time. The walls filled like her notebooks, so she would sing or scream the words which echoed back softly until she felt them in her streams of blood and consciousness.

She told stories to children, wrote poems she tried to sell on the streets. Sometimes she fed them to stray dogs. Sometimes, if she was really hungry, she ate a few herself; the poems, not the children although she thought about that, too. But she was a vegetarian.

When she loved she loved with every fiber of her being. She opened herself, heart and legs with no thought about it. She danced in her bed in the closet with them, her face at their feet, tickling and pulling their toes, as they would tickle her inside. She didn’t know that humans were the only people who could mate face to face. Or maybe she did know. She made the boys who pulled out cum in various jars that she kept lining the walls of her closet. Alone, she would dip her finger in and write secret words on her closet walls.

Some boys left little bits of themselves in her womb. She let their sperm wriggle inside her, tiny dancers in her belly until they died. If they didn’t, if they succeeded to grow, she would poke at them with a thin spear, or arrow she had found before the dumpster had become infested. She would squat on her fire escape and watch the blood get caught in the wind. A good thing no one looks up anymore. She was taken to the hospital several times for this and the doctors would lecture her, so hugged them. The doctors couldn’t stay mad. No one could really stay mad at her, but no one really stayed around for long either.

When they left, her heart hurt so she would draw hearts in bright red lipstick on her mirrors, then masturbate with a bar of soap.

***

She didn’t pay her rent so her landlord threw her out, but not before he danced with her in her closet. His toes were hairy. He yelled at her for the gibberish on the walls. What the hell did it say? ‘trains, stains, refrain, dance! dance!’ Before she left, she painted her walls with red paint and a toothbrush. The landlord wasn’t very happy about this and took her to the closet again. His toenails had grown. She danced her way through the streets, kissed her coffee shop goodbye and took some snow with her. Her notebooks were tucked into a sheet slung over her back.

Eventually she danced her way into the woods, where she made her home in a small cave. She ate berries and wrote poems with pine needles. The poems didn’t last long. She climbed trees to go to the bathroom and hid her notebooks in the river. She called to the animals and they called back. Some stayed for a while, some were afraid. She told secrets to the sun and worshipped the moon. She turned wild and forgot. .

Slowly, the winds turned cold and tried to chill her bones, so she danced harder and longer, until she collapsed. When she woke up, she danced some more, but the winds turned icy. She spun and twirled and finally the winds gave up and carried her away with them.

Artist’s Statement

I feel this story is almost done, but as with all my stories, I struggle with the thought that there should be more, or I should go further, or just let it alone. I had quite a few people want more of the story, and I also tried to take your direction of making her a little more backwards throughout the whole story, to keep the tone of the first page more consistent. I have cut back my use of ‘when’ although with each new sentence I wrote, a ‘when’ spontaneously appeared, so had to rethink a lot of sentences.