Chris Garneau's piano swirls around a cubic bedroom with walls painted the color of the sea. Pale, warm gray-turquoise. The light is faint white and slippery, flooding down nose bridges, pooling under the the slopes from eyes, leaping ear crests. Men and women form two lines facing each other and step together like a minuet, limbs loose like puppets suspended. Their gazes are still, focused on something in the distance in a direction through their partner. If their souls were in their bodies, they would be gazing into each other's eyes.
A girl in a white thinly gilt-striped dress folds from the line, stretching one leg to cross the other and gathering her skirt in the movement. Her eyes break the long gaze, eyelashes dark sketches across her cheeks. Her counterpart is powdery pastel, his silk fingers jump meter and reach in reaction.
As one unit they step the line ajar.
He: Why are you doing this?
She: This is my tragedy.
He: You could dance with us.
She: I could but this is my tragedy. I could but I don't.
Extra glow accompanies his features. She turns fully away, the fine grain of light and shadow on her craned neck growing in contrast. She draws fingers to cloth elbows into herself. At once, they both imagine a door. She makes this her destination. He knows, dreading.
He reaches to her elbow. The other dancers turn in a tide of alertness toward her, arrayed around her as the crown of a shell. Their fingers shout out suddenly and linger, more human than their glass eyes.
The colors of all concentrate, pink blushes to rose, yellow to gold, aqua stream to bright azure sea. Shadows' hands reach farther up from collars to jaws, just tip the lips and diamond frame the eyes.
She turns for them with resigned doubt and light tumbles across her as a kaleidoscope to switch its place on her form.
She: Why do you want me to stay?
Them: You could dance with us.
She: But I can't, because that's a tragedy. I could but I don't.
Them: Do you know what you're doing?
She: I'm aware.
He: Why don't you choose happiness?
She: I have to tell a tragic story.
He: Tragedy already exists without you telling it.
She: I can't believe it.
Their bodies cinch around her. The glinting eye cluster of the insistent, suctioning group and the warm, personal pair of the partner ahead of her.
Them: Stay with us.
He: Stay with me.
She: I can't I can't I can't! She shrieks. I can't! I can't! I can't! I can't!
They rush at her, hands under heels, legs, back, lift her up. They carry her and her blobbed mouth of running oil paint. The train of her dress, which has become wedding-y, lags in a swath behind her trail as they circle.
"This is absolute trash," said Uncle Steve, clapping the stapled, paper book shut. "These young poets don't know how to evoke real images."
"It's supposed to be dream-like," inserted Angela quickly. A bell of panic dangling on her right Christmas tree rib rang.
"You can do it. When I read your poem, I saw a real image. The rest of this is garbage. Living in a tragedy? Why would you live a tragedy?"
He didn't say the last two sentences, but she would have liked that. Her imagination had overstepped its purpose and its place.
"How do I know which story is real?" her imaginary, comfortable self asked imaginary, comfortable-around Uncle Steve.
"Well, Angela," replied Uncle Steve, securing a striped scarf around his neck, "One story feels different from another. One feels like a bird fluttering in your chest, and the other feels like a fizz, an electric streak, pops and ripples. One is soil turned over (and over), and one is a sprout that feels like you're actually living a new story. Because you are."
Imagining listening, Angela patted the pillow under her ankles and sang-song, "C'mere, Waffle." Waffle clicked away to his own bed, a profile plastic zoo animal soldered to his own platform.
The thick dreaming parts. My actual dog in front of my actual eyes, ignored for this.
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