Dance of the Sand Particles

         The room was only mild, and the broad, light-welcoming windows seemed to shut off the heat that the forceful sunlight attempted to throw into the interior.  The Celtic-patterned tiles did not drink up the light but instead remained cool and stony for the dancers’ feet to practise on. 
If only a more convenient place could be found, rather than a bleak castle, thought Kevyn, who, despite the resistant behaviour of the windows and tiles, knew that in the small matter of ten minutes the room would be like a pressure cooker.
         The gold-threaded blue dress that she wore was designed to be more inclined to swish around her legs for easier and fancier movements.  The sleeves swallowed her thin arms, and the girdle hanging around her waist was equipped with a deceptively light fake-rusty-key.  Not that it opened anything; her attempts to get it cut into a skeleton key failed miserably as she was told by the cutter how much it would cost.

*          *          *
         “FORTY DOLLARS!  Are you insane?  This should cost less than FIVE!”  She had wiggled her sharp nails in the ugly man’s face.
         He had simply shrugged with nonchalance, “You wanna skeleton key? ’Snot easy, you know, it’s ackshilly illegal.”
         “Illegal indeed.” She had snatched back the fake, rusting, tin dress-piece and stalked off.
*          *          *

         Gardyne Castle was Kevyn’s nightmare.  The only room they used was the old ballroom; she, the other young students from St. Agatha’s, and her anachronistic dance teacher, Sir George, as he was called.  But the actual exterior was a horror to approach on what would seem like a warm Saturday morning in Nashville.  It reminded some of an old man’s smiling, wrinkly face, but to Kevyn and most others it resembled an old Maths teacher, whose malicious eyes and gnashing teeth were mirrored uncannily in the cracking stone, prickly spires and slits of spyholes.  The Department of Historical Preservation sighed thankfully when the Court gave Gardyne to the Local Council to be demolished; the head historian, Mr. Steven Jossenwhite, possibly would have suffered a stroke had he been instructed to preserve the hideous face of the ruin.
         But no; it came about that a certain Mr. Fielding was elected as mayor of Nashville and his sentimental disposition had overran most of the petitions and complaints about the ugly stone house of horrors.  He gave it as ‘charity’ to the local girls’ boarding school, St. Agatha’s.
         Who in turn began to use it for the obscure and unpopular Handsworth* Dancing classes. 
         Kevyn stretched her shoulders languidly, waiting for Sir George to start the music and call them into line.  As his grey hand stretched to the play button, the arm of his spectacles wedged in his fingers, the lenses reflecting and redirecting the light shining through them, Kevyn felt the same feeling of exhilaration crawling up her back.  It was time to dance!

         She drew out her English long sword, making sure that the sound of it exiting its sheath coincided with the lethality of the music playing; music that was deceptively playful, music that was fighting against what it conducted – a dance. 

         “One!  Two!  One two three!  Duck!”  Sir George intoned exultantly.
         Kevyn whipped her sword in and out with her partner’s; the swords barely touched; they were a hair’s breadth away from touching; they were the uncolliding lips of Romeo and Juliet; they shivered in expectation, they were lurched back from their partner in sharp, ruthless arcs; they pounced on the sunlight and speared it back against walls and windows and Ada, reading in the corner, head tilted and sharp pen poised over a susceptibly glossy magazine, did not look up. 
         Music, oh! the notes of the melody!  How they both adored and hated the patterns being played out in tune to it; loving the painful closeness of the swords to flesh, hating the lack of an appropriate crimson-splaying climax!
         Hair, ribbon, and the excess silk of the dresses flooded the empty, lurking air of the room; they came dangerously close to the whistling swords, both attracted and wary of the sharp silver edges; they coloured the room and contoured the slashing, winding, charging, plunging metal!
*          *          *

         “I need to see more…unison,” Sir George bristled, grey skin stretched over the bones of his pointing hands.  Girls sat around the room, sipping at their mineral waters, and Ada, Sir George’s relation, was immobile over her piece of trashy literature, her underarms slowly crying out more and more sweat into the cotton tissue of her shirt.  Sighs tore the air, and Kevyn’s groan went unnoticed.
         “Unison?” she parroted, “Why? Aren’t we all individual?”
         The question was met with a smirk, a curl of the thin lips, “Dancing means unison.”
         “But…” her hands flailed.  Her head bowed.  “But then we’re all the same.  One after the other, we’re all a copy of each other.  Not that we are bad in the first place, but that we lose originality after the first round.  Doesn’t originality mean anything these days?”
         Ada’s eyebrows rose, but her eyes remained on the article she was reading.  It was a short story winner.  Littered with clichés and attempts at mimicking mature literary geniuses, Ada wasn’t surprised that it had won.
         She knew the answer to Kevyn’s question.
         “UNISON! Unison above all!” roared Sir George, eyes roving up to the dragon carving in the opposite wall. The girl’s chin jutted childishly, “Then we’re all like sand…one after the other, we look exactly the same, and there’s lots of us!  Over and over the same look until we fill a whole desert with our plainness!  And what then? In a desert there’s nothing but more sand!  We build up over what we’ve done until the whole planet is desertified!”

         Ada looked up.  The girls, mostly intelligent, (they did go to St. Agatha’s) seemed to converge on Kevyn’s speech with nods and elbowing.  Sir George’s relation spoke, the first time she had released sound into the room: “Change it, then.  Change the whole dance.”
         The tape player stopped rewinding and emitted several loud “click-clicks”. 
         Admonition pirouetted over Kevyn’s face until it was bullied off the stage by Enthusiasm.
         “Yes, you could…”
         “No!”  Sir George’s eyes ripped away from the green, grinning dragon, “Why change something already beautiful?!  I may not give you girls credit, but you were…”
         “A vote!” exclaimed Kevyn to Sir George’s cragged features, “Let’s see what we want to do.  We need only be ready for Pentecost in two months, so we can change all we want.  Who’s for doing a new routine?”  Two girls raised lacy sleeved arms.  The other five were stationary; originality was ‘important’, but when it meant reworking an already tiresome routine…  Dismay mounted Kevyn’s peaking nose; an ashen expression conquered her visage. 

         Their teacher prodded the eject button and tugged the tape from the player.

         Gardyne Castle sneered vilely at the girl as she was pulled by the roaring machine to the place she lived.  She tried not to dwell on what was pressing upon her mind; she averted her eyes from the sword, the CD stacker, the rear-view mirror.  Pondering came to her however, like a dog to a lead.  Who on earth was Ada anyway?  Someone visiting Sir George?  A girl of her age?  An observer?  A critic?  A chronicler?  Someone who liked her reading, anyway.  Since attending their classes to watch, she had chosen the only seat in the room and positioned it in the corner the furthest distance from the sun.  She never looked up, never talked to any of them, not even Sir George.  She must have been an alien. 

*          *          *
         “…isn’t getting any…”
         “More fight…”
         “…evilly and stupidly.”
         Typical class at St. Agatha’s.  Bell rings.  Kevyn glides out.  Classes close.  Afternoon over.  Practise session now.  More practise.  Practise, practise.  Just her in her house.  No one else.  No music, no real sword, just a wooden practise piece.  Movements being carved, gradually.  Filed and smoothed with soft sandpaper.  This was the dance. 
         The one girl in the one place far from any imposing monolithic strongholds.  Barely a spirit in her own home, drifting and playing.  Her every lunge rocks the house’s foundations, and every delicate tread threatens to collapse the floor. 
         Also like a phantom, she may find herself living once more. 
         “But I need to find the key…” she half sings, half chants like a monk with a mantra.
*          *          *
         Pentecost morning was hell for the sheep: sniping black bats leapt over their heads, and danced in flurries between the woollen sodden legs of the creatures following the shepherd.  The crook waved, and the bats waved around it; perfection. 
         A golden CDR disk was what the sun looked like, and with this advanced technology, Gardyne Castle was rendered ancient and ugly, as it should be.  A disk…that was a sort of key, Kevyn wondered out loud.  You placed it in a slot and whiz bang!  There was your program, waiting healthily like a shaggy dog anticipating a slab of goat neck meat.  Her eyes rolled open as a goat bleated out from its missing neck, and black bats, shepherds and sheep all disappeared in the flick of an eyelash. 
         “Bleach,” she muttered, seeing that the time was three minutes past eight.  The kettle hooted out a good morning.  Pentecost had arrived.  After two months of hyperactive rehearsals, she was ready to launch out of the routine of the dance and instead perform her solo piece; hopefully in front of a poleaxed Sir George, hateful dance partners, and a very appreciative audience.  Nobody knew of her intentions; not even Ada, whose eyes penetrated her soul every Saturday of ordinary rehearsals.  The music would reach its aching pitch then…yes!  It would not go unfulfilled this time!  She would leap out of the sand line and become a tear drop against the army-like conformity of the sword dancers!  Simple.  Perfect.
         
         The stage was set.  The backdrop was one that connoted deep tranquillity – cotton sheets with fields of pixelated green, surrounded by a clouded mirror of a grey sky, centred with wooden beams that, put together by the instruction manual, seemed like a lopsided batmobile (it was intended to be a tractor, actually).  Swords lay prostrated at the front of the stage, tip to end, tip to end, eight along the line, all sheathed, all protected from rust, all ribboned by the girls’ personal colours, all possessed with fever, waiting to be taken up and ripped from their hoods!  The floor itself was plank wood – not sturdy, prone to rocking – and the hall was a bright sky blue colour – a mark of the St. Agatha’s “Intentio pro divum” tenet.  Parents and curious students took up the orange moulding seats, eyes roving from the stage to the roof to the “Sursum tumulosus” banner above the box of the stage. 
         
         Backstage, the girls were a-glitter with glow.  Most had their faces smeared with cold gummy glitter gel, and most had their hair bundled up into ridiculous, braided monstrosities.  The dresses had been laden on with satin and beads, and shoes had somehow gained an extra few centimetres in their stiletto heels.  All was ready.  Kevyn’s shoes stabbed the ground, and her waggling nails had come close to tugging out her hairstyle several times so far in the bustle of the wooden green room.  Her nails were bright with horrific pink nail polish, which matched the bright pink additions to her blue dress.  But one thing she did not modify or dress-up was her girdle and key.  She clutched the key compulsively, repeated her extra dance moves in her mind, over and over. 
         Lunge OUT!
         Step right and twist!
         FLICK sword to the left!
         Arc it down to the GROUND!
         Sweep it like scything the grass!
         Cross the stage in one huge leap!
         AND SPIRAL THE SWORD IN THE ‘VENTUS’PATTERN!

         “On stage in ONE MINUTE!” bellowed a strained Sir George. 
         
         One minute passed like a wind: going from a dragon’s lips to the lord it was roasting.
         And they entered the stage!
         Music began in hot, rhythmic beats, music framed with Celtic-accented vocals:
          “…do you know who Sir Thomas is? The knight of the leaping stag…!”
         The fighting dancers leant slim arms down in a wondrous arc, lifting their swords from the ground.
         “…and the cross Esquire, will fight like on fire! When he…”
         Partners formed like robots in two movements in two beats.  Ba-bum.  They faced each other.  Ba-bum.  They unsheathed swords.
         Ba-bum.
         Platinum polished lethalities whipped from covers, and they DANCED!
           
         “Ooh!” – “Ahh!”  Kevyn’s mind scorned the audience’s classic reaction, she would show them soon enough, she would shock them!  Like sand they whirled in a wispy tornado, the swords basked in and spat at the lights shining at them from up above, unreachable spotlights, making the girls’ beauty extreme and impassable!
         
         The music strained against the bounds of the speakers, where was the BLOOD?! It howled with horror, but Kevyn reassured it, as she stroked with practised grace at her partner, she promised it more than blood…
         The notes peaked, with the final line before its bountiful climax:
         “Will…they…everrrrrr…DIE?!”
         It was now! Kevyn’s sweating form coiled with flooding adrenalin – this was her mounting glory!
         
*          *          *          *          *
         As the man handed her back the key, she could not fail but feel disappointed.  A skeleton key allowed access to everything one could ever want.  So why didn’t she get one?  It was a small price to pay for what could be riches.
         A coldness swept past her.  A flicker of a thought entered her mind before she buried it under important facts. 
         And now it resurfaced.
         A skeleton key gives you everything.  It is the same for each door, each chest, each wardrobe.  The same key.  Uniformity. Conformity.  The one key that gave you complete individuality.  Separate keys.  Separate things.  All the same thing, for one purpose, cluster together in one fantastic leap of togetherness, like a rainbow.  All the same, but all different.  Like sand.  Like sand.

         This was the key.
*          *          *          *          *

         The dragon carved in the hall wall, “Spiritus incendia”, roared its applause as the girls finished the dance, in complete uniformity, all in exactly the same stance, swords perfect in their final interlocked star held high in the sweating sky!

         Kevyn’s legs shivered with excess and happiness…The key to it all!  She had discovered it!  She conformed to the dance!  Unison!  Unison!  It was the way of it all!
         Oh, joy!
         
         Sir George bellowed appreciation from backstage, and Ada was there, beside him, smug, proud, and wisdom in her large eyes poured its praise on Kevyn’s shaking, spent and rushing form.