We were in the forest, but more than that it was hard to tell. Every time I looked up at the night sky, the moon was in a different phase. Every time I looked up at the night sky, the constellations above us had changed.
It was hard to tell what we danced around. Sometimes it seemed a roaring bonfire; sometimes it seemed a mossy boulder; sometimes it seemed a graven idol with many heads. The dance was difficult, absorbing, you could not ask questions and do it well.
She was sad, and I wished to ease her mind because she was beautiful. This is a law of the universe, and a source of much of its tragedy. I left the dance, I had to pull myself away, to walk to where she sat on a what might have been a log or a leather couch.
Her hair was black like a raven. Her skin was tan like a child of the sun. Her eyes were green except when they reflected the light of the fire, when they became red. She was dressed for a cold night, which it was not.
“You should dance with me,” I said, and held out my hand.
“No one dances with anyone in the circle,” she said. “We only dance.”
“Dance with me here,” I said, “where you sit.”
“Why?” she asked. And there was no answer except “because you are beautiful,” which was for me, not for her. I said: “I hope it will make you feel better,” which was not a lie.
“I am thinking,” she said, “of a pair of cold lips that I once kissed a long time ago. I am thinking of white roses. I am thinking of a place I once lived where the seasons did not change. I think I want to go back there.”
I pointed to the dancing that pulsed around what looked to be a lioness nursing her cubs. “This is better.”
She shook her head.
“Do you not think I’m beautiful?” I asked, though I knew I should not have.
She shook her head again. “You have nothing to offer me.”
I saw that this was true, and that I did not want to sit with her and dream of cold lips and pale flowers and seasons that never changed, though the truth is I might have if she had asked.
The bonfire flared again in her eyes’ reflection, and I turned and ran back to it, leaping in to the whirling throng and thrust and pivoted and swirled, until I would become someone else.
___
Benjamin Wachs has written for Village Voice Media, Playboy.com, and NPR among other venues. He archives his work at www.TheWachsGallery.com.
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