Breadcrumb #620

DANIEL DIFRANCO

Margaret is backstage, arched away from the barre. Little by little the ribbons unfurl, and the autumn of youth collapses. The landscape, stuttering and rushing by as from a toy zoetrope, has forgotten its limberness. Headlights on the highway. Margaret has seen them all. She stretches. Reaches back farther. Swirling in a kaleidoscope without wings. She feels impatience—has known the impatience of hunger and all that it has robbed. 

The conductor commands in time—the bassoons are calling. Margaret enters. A pirouette. The piano and dancer now, an arabesque. A slow penché cracking. The swarm flutters. Applause for the ensemble. The season has passed.

“A slow penché cracking. The swarm flutters. ”

Margaret washes her shoes in the kitchen sink. Her feet hurt. Knees and back on their way out. The dream had been eclipsed. There’s no such thing as an old butterfly. There is either a butterfly, or there is not. She hangs her shoes to dry on a piece of string in front of the window. The city light obscures the moon and breaks in the room where she lies on the couch wrapped in a blanket drinking honeyed tea. The news calls for early snow.

Margaret falls asleep with the TV on. When she wakes up it is snowing. She stands and pulls the blanket around her body. She presses her face against the pane of glass and looks up at the blue black sky and straight into the confettied and never ending expanse of the universe. And oh, how it is beautiful—and oh, how she wishes she were dancing in the sand.

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