The Dance

The tips of her fingers feather across the zig-zagged folds of the scar where once her breast had been. Now, her chest more like an abandoned see-saw in the derelict playground of her body. Where once her child had received nourishment, where once she had received pleasure... cut away. Torn apart.

Her eyes shift from her bleak and bereaved image in the mirror, and her gaze meets her own…

“It’s time,” she says in a soft whisper and turns to face the figure waiting in the shadows of all her hopes and fears.

He is grotesquely gleeful in his coal-black robe, and he extends a bony hand to her as the music starts. He leads, she follows; she turns and twirls. Away she spins, towards him he pulls. Back and forth they go, dipping, skipping, and slowly she starts slipping into his cold, craddling grasp.

** “All is Vanity” is an illustration by Charles Allan Gilbert.