Gait Training
Vicky pours her body into the ballet slippers standing en pointe. Red ribbons tie themselves around her ankles.
Pirouetting, leaping, sashaying, I followed you to a southern shore where the light shone brighter than any spotlight. But no one can understand why. No one can fill my shoes.
Eversion
When you rolled away from me in bed, I longed to return home with a click of my heels.
Prosthesis
Bold as a lipstick-smeared collar, or the bite of a polished apple, Vicky’s shoes pulse with the energy of a cartoon heart.
Acquired Amputation
Remember how Karen’s amputated feet continued to dance in the forest in the flagrant patent leather pumps? Had I not hacked at the tendons and ligaments binding us together, those could have been my steps.
Donning and Doffing
There’s no safety curtain on Vicky’s last stage. Just as flats and backdrops fall away, her toes teeter, gravel grating, stone crumbling, the horizon flipping. Clouds rush skywards, and she hurtles onto the train tracks. Smoke shrouds her limp body and seeps through the balustrade of the empty balcony on the Côte d’Azur. “Take off the shoes,” she says.
Phantom Limb
Ballet dancers razor their feet to remove bunions and corns, their bleeding toes gnarled in perfect satin. I cut you out of my life, but obsession is the scar tissue adhering me to you.
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Fiction - ISSUE #28