Dancing in the Afternoon

It was in the early spring that they found her.  In that halfway time between winter and summer that happens when the snow is gone but the rain is still cold and the world hasn’t yet started its renewal.  That gray time, when it is so easy to forget hope.

She had been dead two weeks.  Quietly expiring as she had lived the last twenty years, unnoticed, alone.

The town’s people tried to remember what she had looked like but they only had a few old memories.  Someone said she had come from the city, a widow or maybe divorced.  The postmaster remembered that she got letters from down south at one time.  The grocer’s boy, who had noticed her weekly deliveries piled on the porch and found her wrapped in a shawl and cold, said that he had never heard her speak.  A weird one, he thought.

In the corner, the old man sat and listened to them putting period to her life.  He remembered her dancing across the kitchen, her body taut and glowing, naked in the late afternoon sun.  He remembered the feeling of her hair as it brushed across his shoulders, warm and vibrating with life.  And oh God, he remembered the smell of her, the sweet smell of lavender and womanliness that had taken his breath away. He remembered how, in the aftermath of love, her voice had spoken of life and dreams and far away places.

He would have left his wife and home if she had only said maybe.  But time had drifted between them, his children, her past.  Finally, all that remained was a nod and a secret smile and then, not even that.

Slowly, she had floated away from reality and retired behind the lace curtains of her house.

No one had sought her out.

No one had noticed.

But he remembered and sometimes, when the late afternoon sun shone just right, he could see her dancing still.

© 2003