Grace

Grace

Grace.

The word rings through your brain, spinning, leaping, tumbling with you, falling to a roll and finally splaying its limbs elegantly against the snow, a tangle of pale flesh and crimson cloth.

You rise again, wondering at how they applaud no matter what. It doesn’t matter that you fell, or that you’re bleeding, they still clap loudly at your attempt at grace. You rise and bow, smiling through the haze of colours that swim across your field of vision, trying to make you dizzy. You can’t afford to be dizzy, dizzy equals loss of grace.

When you were little, your mother told you that grace meant innocence, and people loved innocence.

Since then, you’ve been graceful. You have to be, because it’s what the people want. After every performance, the reviews spread across headlines and papers—“Grace of an Innocent Child.”

You appeal to the hearts of the audience, to their “inner child.” They want to be like you, young and carefree, graceful in everything you do.

Grace. Never anything but.

Sometimes you consider telling them you’re not graceful, you’re actually very clumsy. Reporters are astonished if they come for interviews and see you trip walking into the room. They always ask questions about it.

“Is your gracefulness for the ice only?”

Inevitably, it leads to the defect question.

“Is there something wrong with one of your legs? Are you only truly yourself when you’re on the ice?”

You answer as honestly as you can, each time, and each time they quote you out of context. They take you and twist you into something else, someone you don’t even recognize anymore.

You’re detached, now. It’s like you’re trapped inside a snowglobe, or, better yet, on a music box. You twist and bend and dance and sing when someone winds you up, but once it’s finished, you’re nothing anymore. Like the flakes in a snowglobe you float to the bottom, like the ballerina on the music box you stop spinning and stand still, posing forever.

The picture of grace.

Tonight’s the last time, you decide suddenly, as you bow again to the roaring applause. Fire, not ice, rushes through your veins, lighting you up until you can’t even think properly. You’ve got one left, one last dance.

Last chance for one last dance, you own voice, calm and clear and distant, rings through your mind. Make it wonderful.

You’re not thinking anymore. The leaps and spins and spirals all fly to the tips of your feet in one graceful pattern, coordinating flawlessly—you don’t even have to think about it. There’s nothing left to think about, you’re on fire out here, and all you can wonder at is how no one seems to notice. You’re at the brink with this, going faster, faster, you’re out of time with the music and your director signals frantically for you to slow down but you’re just going so fast and so beautifully and this is grace, purely, because there’s nothing to stop it and suddenly you understand, and that’s why you have to quit, not because you’re not graceful, but because you are, and because there’s nothing in the world but this fire that matters anymore.

The songs ends with a triple spin and it turns into one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven spins, each one faster and more dangerous than the last and finally the music catches up with you and stops and you collapse to the ice, trembling and shaking and coughing hard, but perfect because now you understand the point to the whole thing, and that makes it all worth it, somehow.

You stand up to a shocked silence. You can hardly breathe for the fire, but you bow, once, and stumble, because the grace has gone, now. It came for one brief, shining, beautiful moment of glory, but now it’s left you and you’re clumsy again. You trip over your skates as you leave the arena, smiling and shaking your head at the reporters—you can’t talk, not now.

Your director stares at you as you tumble past, clutching at things to keep yourself upright, and opens her mouth to say something. You ignore her, just keep on walking, searching and searching until finally you find it in a haze—the bench. You sink to it, your knees paining at the release as much as they did for the tension. The audience is still silent, and you think dizzily, I did good. The fire is fading from your veins and you’re losing concentration. Pictures swim lazily in front of your eyes as you try to undo your skate laces, swirling in little patterns and doing loop-the-loops right in front of you. You smile as your boss turns fully upside-down and back upright again without her feet ever leaving the floor. It must be some kind of magic.

You had magic, too, just a little while ago. That fire, rushing through your veins. You know you’ll never do it again. You can never perform again, and you certainly can’t do that anymore. The fire came once, to prove to you that grace was real, that it wasn’t just something your mother gave you, not just something the people loved. Grace was you, is you, and now you know that. You don’t have to do anymore shows, you don’t have to look for it in the faces of the people as they watch, enthralled.

The world stops spinning and instead fades away, sinking into a deep, blissful black.

You look down from the sky, floating on bits of air and cloud, as the doctor explains something to your mother.

“She had a heart attack,” he says gently, as though your mother might shatter at any second, should he speak too loud. “She over-exerted herself, and her heart worked too hard to get oxygen to her body.”

Your mother nods, her face tight. You smile, waving to her, and frown when she doesn’t see you. But surely, now, she can see you, since you’ve become so graceful. You float wherever you wish, because you’re made up of little bits of air and cloud, and you can move in whichever way you want to. You never regained that fire, but you’ve got something else, another kind of grace.

Around the coffin, people are somber, dressed in black. One holds a newspaper, and you can see it reads, “The Fall of Grace.” You wonder at this—you didn’t fall, you rose up, up, up, higher than you’d ever been, at your most graceful.

But then, reporters never do get anything right.

Some of them are crying, others wring their hands, still others stand silently, looking at their feet. You will them to look upwards, to find that which makes them whole, and reach for it.

They don’t, because they don’t understand grace, do they? No, of course not. They don’t understand the purity of that cleansing fire rushing through your veins, forcing you to spin faster and faster until you’re surrounded by grace and fire and ice and there’s nothing left in the world but that, nothing left to live for and everything to die for, as long as that feeling doesn’t go away, so you spin faster and faster and then it lifts you up and takes you away because that’s what grace is, but they’ll never understand that.

They’re just too grounded, you decide, and you laugh, catching a draft of wind and flying up with the bits of air and cloud, spinning and twirling and laughing in the sheer delight of grace.

Fin