The dancer

I was all at once trying on cheap Reebok sneakers at an indoor swap meet, interviewing this poor young dancer and coaching this dancer to death, the final incarnation of which saw the young man pirouetting, barefoot, on the rough cement and rock of the ceiling of a great cathedral, buried beneath us. I screamed at him to work harder, to bleed for his art. How was he going to perform before the masses if he couldn’t do it now?

I edged toward him. The enclosure I was standing in could just have easily been a cave, the rocks uneven, the doorway behind me jagged and grey. The dancer spun. He kept on dancing. I looked at his feet. Were they wrapped? I couldn’t see slippers or shoes. He abruptly stopped and moved to an area where cement gave through to exposed, old wooden flooring. The dancer started stamping on the wood, putting rust-red stains on it as he kicked a hole barely wide enough to fall through. I looked down - 100 feet, maybe more - to the floor below where another crumbling floor was. Below that, hundreds of feet, beyond my vision, was another floor. Outside of the enclosure, where I was yelling from, the ground was level hard-packed soil, a little grass. Inside, looking down, I was looking underground at a vast, crumbling old cathedral that was buried, built long ago. 

I told him to jump, as part of his training. He did. He jumped and pulled in his arms - this happened a mere moment after he’d kicked the hole and I’m not even sure he waited for me to tell him. 

I waited to hear him hit the floor below. Waited so sickeningly long. I heard a faint thud that could have just as easily been my own heartbeat.