Prompt: Dancing

This round of A-U's Writing Prompt Contest was dancing, and this is my slightly random-ish entry. I'm not sure what I think of it. Comments and criticism are welcome :)

Heart of Fire

I sit on the outer edges of the bonfire, watching them dance.

I used to love Midsummer’s Eve. Nothing but play in the day, and in the night, dancing until your knees are weak. I used to be the best dancer of them all.

That was before the accident. I can remember, like a horrible dream, the day I knew I would never dance again. Next I remember the Midsummer’s Eve, a year ago, to which I hobbled on crutches – wooden legs that are no use for dancing - and tried to whirl around the blaze, tried to play the part of a dancer. I didn’t miss the looks of pity, not one. What a tragedy, they whispered behind their hands. Doesn’t she know she’s crippled? Why does she try?

And others answered: She used to be the best, didn’t you know?

After that night, I never tried again. The first thundershower in which I did not leap to the sky with my exultation and cavort with the storm was a month later. I sat at the window and watched lightning shatter the sky into millions of pieces, while thunder scattered them to the four winds. But the next day, the sky was miraculously whole again. My legs weren’t.

There was once. Once I escaped to the meadow and capered through the long grass as best as I knew how. That dance was more a hobble than a jig, but who could know? It was only me, and my heart knew how to dance, even if my legs were forever deaf to its pleas. There, I could fall and lie under the sun in the soft grass and pretend, if only for moments, that I was whole and free and happy. It was always worse, dragging myself home after that, but who in this world will not seize a minute of happiness over an hour of pain?

It gave me hope, for a while, to stretch my hands to the sky and tell it that I could dance, because it did not judge. But the little boys that hid in the bushes judged. Their titters told me what I thought, and their shrill voices told me, even across the meadow, what they saw. She looks like a frog, or a monkey. My mama said she’s crazy, and her mind went when her legs did.

How soon they forgot. And how soon, I knew, they would forget again. Since then I have never danced. If they can forget, why can I not? I asked myself. I will forget. Perhaps I will learn to spin or sew or work a loom, and when I see dancing, my heart will have forgotten, and so it will not twist in my breast like the tortured thing it is. Then there will be no whispers behind hands.

Did it work? No. Because here I sit, staring past wild silhouettes into a fire that beckons my spirit to join it in its darts and leaps of reckless abandon; but my spirit must overcome my body, and my body is too great a weight for it to carry. It wilts like the flowers in the meadow, and with it I wilt, too. This time, I try not to hear what they say behind their hands, but I know its hurt nonetheless. Every day I hear the same from my trapped soul, which beats itself senseless against bars – wooden bars like the legs that cannot dance – and falls, only to awake knowing that it must do the same again. Why won’t she get up again and keep going? We all know loss. This is no different.

Mayhap it isn’t. Mayhap I am only weak. But does a bird burrow like a mole because it loses its wings? Does a fish turn to building nests in trees because its fins fail? Does a heart cease its dancing because its body cannot carry it?

This Midsummer’s Eve, I can feel the flames that kindle in my breast. For a year, they were ashes like a phoenix’s death. But every phoenix is born again. Every heart must again catch the spark that once made it blaze.

Is there talking behind hands, hands that have no hearts? I don’t know. What do they say about me, the girl whose legs will not dance, but whose crutches will? I don’t care. Which is the worse – wooden legs, or no legs at all? The fire leaps and dances with wood.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. Because in the end, all that is left is my heart.

And my heart needs no legs to dance.