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the brash lights, something not meant to be exposed. Unstopped, it might begin to burst, crease into blood orange, pulped. How will they know when it really hurts? The rubber men can’t really see or feel what they are doing either.
    Think, think about another place. The hotel where it all began. It was elegant, like her dreams, where she auditioned for the Northern Lights Contemporary Dance group at just eighteen. Twelve years of constant training, the whittled body eager, alive. She danced just like she knew she would, passionate and controlled, a wild animal available for hire. The movements were perfect, inspired, but her body rendered it false. The instrument was wrong. They didn’t like her look. Recalling it, her feet are twitching now, unhurt, unneeded, inexplicably cold. In her later life, it was the inside of her body that would be performed with, cared for. She is walking back down to her audition again and now she can feel her feet are numb, pressing into the plush red carpet of the hotel. Every step destroying something that should have formed, little flowers pulped into a mash. Her feet no longer belong to her, she does not need them. She wants her ballet shoes, to cover them up, russet like in the Michael Powell film,
The Red Shoes,
the film of her teenage dreams, but they are lost. Her nubile, trained body can no longer respond and dance. Trudging over the sumptuous, plush carpet, she probably doesn’t need the shoes to leap up, she goes along the intermittent corridor, the red carpet fading, murky, the walls jumping and dancing about, breaking up, the connection in her dream uncentered. She still believes she can make it, even though once you put the shoes on you have to dance until you die. Then she stops before a surprisingly workmanlike, steel utilitarian lift. Incongruous, that such a meat cart should be waiting here in this place that crushed her dreams. They had said her hips were overly luscious, breasts too firm. Perhaps her sex jutted too conspicuously from its leotard, her nose knelt too large in her face. She was eighteen, guys called her hot, and they could tell she had been fucked. The lift was also wrong, as fake as the yuppie elevator fuck set in
Fatal Attraction
that they only used to make it easier to film the pretend penetration long shots. Now the soles of her feet are sticking to the cold floor, she can hardly lift them, her body is so heavy. Even the square resistance of the buttons against her fingers in the lift seems massive, just pressing them hurts. The lift falls, ten years on, now she knows she will never be a dancer. Now she is back here, she doesn’t want to go out. Don’t think now, some things have to be blocked off, forgotten about, removed from the equation. The dancer’s body has been remade, laid and spread like a vestal virgin again, red on black.
    She shivered furtively, using a hidden reflex. It was important to remain expressionless, body dumb, limp. On the bed she was still, consumed with waiting, holding on to the edge of a prickling, mounting pain that, if she was to let go of it for a even second, would rise up and knock her down flat. And it wasn’t possible to think of why she was here, how she could be doing this. The center of meaning had moved down from the head, the capital, now it was at the pressure points that her idea of existence was scrabbling. The lights seemed to be shining more brightly now, she could feel tears trickling down her face unseen, a faint tickle that mocked, compared and contrasted, with the biting torment that the straps were inflicting elsewhere. Yes they had done it tightly, constricting the blood flow as she had requested. And something has to give.
    The pressure to cry out, go purple, thrash uncontrollably, say something, was mounting as if her very anguish was affecting the rules of gravity. Normal blood flow was being circumvented and she could hear the
tick tick
panic of her pulse stiffening and bludgeoning around the