The Fan Dancers

I.

Her name is Elizabeth and she sleeps in a room down the hall. Her room is always blasting: with prisms, sonic flares, her pores everywhere. Eliza , the prisms whisper, Beth, the sonic flares, Eliza, her pores.  Beth. Eliza sleeps in a room. Beth listens.

Sleeping unlistening,
listening unsleeping,

they unconflict.

Eliza Beth cannot be two, she must be

Elizabeth,

simply.

Her name is Elizabeth and she wakes to find her room ablaze: prisms refract light; sonic flares arrest ears; smoke seeps from her pores. Everywhere, gray whispers

floating

through the air.

Her room is gross, packed with smoke and light, things Elizabeth appreciates only because others do. She leaves

often

barely returning except to sleep. She goes without plan or discernment, here first, then there.

To his bed, first, then hers.

To sleep.

His name is Salazar and he does not sleep when she’s in bed. He watches. Like salt on slugs, a sledgehammer smashing a child’s second thumb, a man spiked through hands and feet, or a woman living burning. She is burning alive, he thinks. She is light and sound, and smoke is seeping from her pores. What woman is this?

Beneath, Salazar crackles. He is delayed satisfaction, so he watches Elizabeth. Years ago, he found her in a grey corner, lodged and smoldering. He brought her water, this stranger woman he wanted to help. Years ago, though it could have been minutes instead. Time, for them, has broken, or has it expanded? There are no clocks. Measurement in breaths. She breathes. Time beats on. The rise and fall of her chest.

For Salazar, she is, and there is nothing else, not even time while Elizabeth is sleeping, breathing as though this is just life and Salazar is a pause, a moment, a sigh, and he is nothing, not even time.

Elizabeth is sleeping,

whole and breathing.

Elizabeth is sleeping,

creaked and cracking.

Elizabeth is sleeping,

seeping creeps from her pores,

and she is sound, boiling under, sound, coming out; it would be subtle, untraceable, if Salazar were not so near & observant. What woman is this? What woman is this? She is not any kind of woman Salazar has put into his bed before, and he wonders if she will ever leave. She will never leave, he thinks, and this is acceptable. It must be. She has been here, it seems, forever. She may stay as long as she likes. He wants her to stay. Forever. But will she wake? Does he want her to?

Elizabeth sleeps and sleeps, he’s sure she will never wake. Only Salazar has never read fairy tales and does not know what to do, though certainly, even a kiss dusty with magic cannot raise a woman so worn from fire.

He kisses her,

full-lipped and breathing.

He kisses her,

his lips cracking.

He kisses her,

inhaling her smoke,

and he nearly chokes. He coughs, spits up an apple peel and pulls it from his open mouth. He feels it unravel in his throat. It lies in a spiral between their bodies. It is red, like her hair, like flames. But in the dark, he cannot see the redness. He infers color, to match her, his Elizabeth, sleeping soundfully. The apple is green, bruised brown. Salazar sees unblemished red and blushes. This has happened once before. Pomegranate seeds, one by one, hiccuped up, when his mother drowned. He didn’t know she’d walked into the lake. He didn’t find out for two weeks. In all that time he hiccuped. In all that time, he spat out seeds. They left red stains on the cement, beneath his shoes. When men in white coats told Salazar about his mother, an entire pomegranate came up from his throat, unpeeled. The pressure of his bones crushed the seeds, red falling along his chin and lips. The men in white coats had no choice. He had to be restrained. For this reason, he loves Elizabeth. He knows her need to sleep. When he slept, he was unprotected. He will protect her as restraint protected him: caught in folds on fabric, arms twisting longer and longer, pomegranate jam dripping. Elizabeth flashes him backwards to that day he found out his mother died. The lake was cold then. It was always cold. The water was never warm. It still isn’t warm, although with Elizabeth and all her fire, she could, by mere proximity, bring the whole thing to a boil.

The skin of Salazar’s mother was thin linen, her traveled flavor hidden in the coldness of lake, but now that Elizabeth is so near, Salazar can smell her,

his dead mother,

and so he must protect Elizabeth, watch Elizabeth,

watching,

ever closer,

sweating.

II.

The fan dancers dance and fan themselves and each other as they twirl, their long dresses swirling around their ankles, their fans fanning into geometric patterns: flowers, bobbing in the breeze; air, waving with the clouds; daughters, dancing and holding fans in fields of wheat beneath the sun.

Beneath the sun, all these fan dancers are dancing and fanning, but there is one in particular whose feet tumble under her swirling ankles, whose fingers tangle in the webbing of fans.

But she is the one I love to watch, the one whose wrist I want to touch. If nothing else, she knows how to work her wrists. Her fans snap shut like the crack of a whip, spread open like waves on shore.

Here, there is no shore, no ocean, no water, but here she is, making my knees crash against the surf and tide. I watch her, closely, and her eyes never rise. She does not even know I’m here.

III.

The night it begins to snow, for the first time
in twelve years, my wife dies. We are old.
She’d been sick. Not unexpected. My wife
dies in red flannel pajamas, her hair bubbled
with knots, her skin flaked pastry. Before
going to sleep, I take off her clothes to rub
vegetable fat over her body, and I slip
beside her, because she can’t tell me to stop,
now that she is dead. When we were young,
I’d slip beside her and she’d say, “Don’t stop.”
I never did. We were so young. I felt I could
never stop, even if I’d wanted to. And when
we got older, I’d slip beside her, and she’d say,
“Stop,” when I know she meant, “Don’t stop.”
I felt I could never stop, even if I’d wanted to.
When we were young, her lips were apples
I could hold in my teeth for hours. Impenetrable
skin; the flesh within; the seeds, her teeth. Her
white teeth. She bares them at me now. Lovely
is not a way to describe a dead woman, not even
one I’ve loved so much over the years these hours
feel crumpling around me. My woman, my wife,
your lips so red, its skin so taut, now in my mouth,
my tongue sliding, my teeth unyielding, unyielding,
beneath there is fruit, sweet fruit, and I
hold you tight

and bite.

IV.

Elizabeth used to never sleep. She used to have her coffee thick into the night and long into the day and never stopping until all the weeks scattered away. Elizabeth misses that time. She wishes she could find her way back.

To then.

Then: when day extended beyond and past, along and within.

Then: when nothing was irrelevant, every thing became vital and urgent, not unlike air or food.

Then: when a simple apple or a comb through the hair was not just pleasure but fabulist fantasy.

To them.

Them: who knew no days.

Them: who are irrelevant now, though she does not know this.

Them: who fed and groomed her way back when.

When Elizabeth used to never sleep, you never slept, a man, a big man, with coffeed, hazelnut, eyes, brown  eyes on your shoulders all the time, would bring a basket of apples and comb her hair, he combed your hair, while she, while you, ate them. She would sit, carefully, on the floor, legs, crossed tightly, folded under, and he would sit on a chair, rocking chair, behind her, you, her, your, hair unwinding, uncoiling, apple peels long and around. Everywhere, her nectared hair, you should  cut it when you wake, Elizabeth. Let Salazar.

Now, Elizabeth sleeps and sleeps and she never rises.

If she rose, she would find Salazar, paring knife ready, apples tiled along the floor, leering.

But does she wake?

Will she ever?

Salazar is waiting.

V.

The fan dancer’s arms curve up, around. She floats, it seems. She rises, lightly. Her toes must be so strong. I want to brush the bottom of her feet with my lips. My salted lips, her dirtied skin. This is desire. This is what desire has always been.

I want to feel her bones, her delicate bones, between my                                                                                               teeth, in my two hands. I want to wrap her hair around                                                                                                my fingers. I want to put my tongue against her pulse,                                                                                                feel it beating, feel her neck pulse throb.

The fan dancer: her body encircling, her fingers looping, she is rapture. The fan’s paper flutes and bends, almost ripping, like my spleen and bladder, hair and throat. Watching her, I am uncontainable.

I want to rush onstage and ravish her, but the last time I                                                                                           did that I swore that would be the last time I did that.

Last time I did that, she was another fan dancer, another                                                                                           woman entirely.