dance

No one knew exactly when the dancer hit the stage, precisely; all they were aware of was the slow pulse of music which told them s/he was there. Nothing could be seen; the stage was a giant consensual blind spot in the already dim-lit reality of the club, and the lights avoided the stage the way the eye avoids an impossibility, by making sure it didn't happen.

The darkness had a texture, and the rose flew within it. The rose was red, and black, and silver, and danced in the air above the black reflecting pools of the stage floor (oh...have the lights come up? I suppose they have. Well done; didn't see it happen at all, attention on other-) with its thorns a sharply gleaming silver, the silver of a light not born but reincarnated, sliding in invisibly from the dark spaces to impact on the rose and leap back outwards, questing for a human eye to caress with the cool hiss of a momentary wink of glare.

Behind the rose, now, a shape, but indistinct, a trick of the light that rode the dust motes down into the center. The dancer was visible mostly as an occlusion of the rose, of parts of the vision sliding softly behind midnight velvet curtains for just the smallest fraction of a moment, just enough to remind the watcher of the human agency behind the production, behind the show. The rose danced for five minutes, and never once did it relinquish the center of attention to its partner, who responded to its whims in twists and whirls and moves of supplication (Is is a girl? I can't tell, but not surprised, I can't see a thing back there, where is the light coming from, not over our shoulders, surely?) but yes, the blinding mistake of the head turned back towards the rear wall which was there a moment ago, only to be punished by the anguished scream of light rays dying an early death, shouting their disappointment and rage in a whorl of blazing white that seems to heat the eye over the distance of ten meters, to the point where the pain is no longer white but red and the head is forced to turn-

And the rose is gone, leaving only a miasma of strobing afterimages, and the light patter of stockinged feet on black polished linoleum, and a last stutter of an imaging laser across the curtains as it strikes a white thread caught there and throws out a last defiant bloody wavering into the dark.