She had married young, divorced young, and now lived alone – a place with creaking boards and a wet, shadowy garden. The house was mostly windows, and she danced alone across the creaking boards, looking out.

The dancer had always been light. It was surprising, a little startling to her that the boards gave up any noise at all, when most often she felt the only things weighing her to the earth were her slippers and costumes, her theatrical make-up. The audience. The papers.

Sometimes she would come home after a performance and, out of her costume, out of her make-up, away from the audience and media, she would lift up. It was not like flying. It was like disappearing. Like un-becoming. She would lift up, and might have kept on lifting had her husband, when he was still there, not caught her by a slender ankle and gently pulled her down again.

One day he missed. Perhaps accidentally. Perhaps on purpose. He reached up too late, thick fingers brushing the underside of her foot. The dancer shivered without knowing why, and rose higher still. Days passed. Weeks. Eventually she came down of her own volition. But he was gone.

When he did not come back she took to dressing always in costume, giving less and less thought to the parts of herself which did not dance. The wife part of her had never danced, and she did not feel sorry that it was gone. Although sometimes she would shiver without knowing why.  

She gave less and less thought to the parts of herself which did not dance. She became lighter and lighter. The boards stopped creaking. The papers talked about how light she was. So light a child of five might have taken her on its shoulders. So light she might be blown about the room like smoke. So light that if she had not been the maiden Giselle, or Anthea the huntress, or Angeline the gravedigger’s wife, she might have lifted like a pale balloon and been lost to the world forever. She read the papers and she laughed backstage with the others, laughing pouring salt and methylated spirits over the open sores in their feet between acts, then going out to dance again.

During one of her closing performances, the gravedigger’s wife lost her step. The audience did not notice the first time it happened. Most did not even catch her second mistake. The dancer moved around the pain as though it did not belong to her, as she had done many times before. This pain was different somehow, closer. A burning in her right foot, like hot metal driven up against the bone. She tried to lift herself above it, but could manage no grace of that pain. It caught her by the slender ankle and hauled her down. The third time, she fell, and the audience saw perfectly. The crack of her knees on the wooden boards went through the place like a rifle shot. The orchestra dragged forward, but seemed itself wounded. The other dancers were wounded, the director wounded. The theatre. The whole company. Shot through the side. The dancer limped offstage before the curtain fell, and knew that she was finished. 

The audience who had loved her watched her go, no longer Angeline. No longer the gravedigger’s wife. Only a dancer who had landed badly, whose last exit from the city’s greatest stage was not masterful or even dignified, but clunky with pain and ugly, like unabashed sobbing.

Backstage, away from the audience and the papers and the lights, the dancer peeled off her damp slipper to find the flesh worn to the bare nerve, and reached instinctively for the bottle of methylated spirits. She heard her name on the radio. She was finished. She placed the bottle back on the dresser and took off her costume.

Her first thoughts were fast ones, hurtling rickety like runaway freight trains; get out of the city no the country change last name no whole name cut hair short go somewhere without dancing find a place without music there’s enough money enough money get out of the city...

The thoughts slowed eventually, and she became calm.

In the months that followed she felt a heaviness settle into her, as if she were dragging the weight of a dead dream. Her foot healed without scarring, still she did not dance. She tried to remember the parts of herself which had not danced. Some she re-established. Others she found unforgiving, or lost altogether. She read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, put on weight, thought sometimes of her husband. One evening she bought a packet of cigarettes, her first in years. She smoked most of them in one sitting, shivering out in the garden watching her breath carry the smoke through the wet leaves and thinking nothing, nothing, too much. In the morning she spat in the sink, and threw the rest of the cigarettes into the garbage.  

The director called several times, and finally came in person, to tell her she was taking it all too badly, that it was One. Single. Mistake, and no excuse for this extended flagellation. 

But she had been tracking a beacon and the beacon was gone, had been blown or burnt out on the night that she fell. She could stumble blindly in the direction she had been going, or she could wait for a new light. She was waiting.
He told her she was being ridiculous, that denying herself this way was ridiculous.

For the moment there was money. And she could be careful with it, yes, but it would run out eventually. Then she would have to go about getting more of it. Think of that, he warned her.

She was waiting, she told him. For whatever would come next. She was no longer a dancer, only a woman who had shared an existence with one. The director left. The woman who was no longer a dancer watched him go, feeling the dream cut loose. Feeling light again.

But there were nights long after, when the boards of the house would creak, and the woman lay awake, listening. Sometimes she would tear off the covers and run to the sound, hoping to catch just a glimpse of her former self. Haul her down by a slender ankle. But each night she was too late. Each night she stood alone, the boards gone silent. Her own breath loud in the room.