THURSDAY: Choreography of my History

BY HALEY M. DiRENZO

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THE SOUND my ankle makes when I land the final leap of the finale number tells me tomorrow won’t be my last performance ever, this will be. I have gone my whole career without a serious injury, but my body has finally betrayed me. At 36, my wilted hip bones know it is well past time to hang up the ballet shoes. The creaks of my knees have whispered it to me for a few years with their firecracker pops anytime I crouch down. But I got over-confident, pushed myself too hard, and now I hop to the wings to assess the damage, crouch to the floor, and see my ankle and foot already ballooning in my hands.

In the kitchen later that night, I sit with a bag of ice on my foot, staring at the ceiling. This whole summer, I anticipated the grief of the end, but now the catharsis has been ripped from my hands. I cry for the little girl who first stepped on stage at three years old with a tutu that hung to her ankles, feet pointed in a lopsided V, watching the instructor mime the movements from the side of the stage. And the preteen who was terrified at her first audition, fumbling a six-step across the floor, ecstatic when she made the cut, even as the understudy. I still use the tricks all those versions of me learned over the years – looking up high at the exit sign so the audience saw the lift of my chin, overlining my red lips so they popped even from the back row, and leaving any pain or sadness backstage when it was time to plaster on a smile and shine.

With those little girls are the waltzes of my grandmother, which I’d carried with me for 30 years in the curves of my pointed toes. I inherited her neck and shoulders held proud in ballroom dance competitions 60 years ago through blood lines into my own bones. I knew the muscle memory of the steps she taught my grandfather before their wedding day, at the center of the circle, her laced arms wrapped around his neck. In the twirl of my pirouette, I felt the way they danced in the glow of the TV. light on a Sunday evening, the fireflies outside hovering mid-air to catch a glimpse. Even though it was before I was born, I saw my mother stand on my grandfather’s toes while he box stepped and spun her around the room, her shrieking laughter echoing. The way her oversized pom poms perched on her hips was memorialized in old photo boxes in our basement. My high kicks and straddle leaps were hers before they were mine. It is the first year none of them are in the audience, but their choreography is my history.

And maybe that’s why I wake the next morning to find, somehow, that the blue hue that had blushed across my skin has faded, and my ankle has shrunk and can bear weight again. Because I had the ghosts of my ancestors’ dancers in my tendons, rebuilding what might have otherwise been broken.

So tonight, all of the little girls I used to be, and my grandmother, and my grandfather, and my mother, wait in the wings with me before I take my final bow. My face caked with an inch of makeup, hair hardened from thick aerosol spray that sparkles under the stage bulbs. I hear the first note, and for one last time, we all step from the darkness into the burning light.

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Haley M. DiRenzo is a writer, poet, and practicing attorney specializing in eviction defense. Her poetry and prose have appeared in BULL, Epistemic Literary, Eunoia Review, Flash Boulevard, 50-Word Stories, 365 Tomorrows, and Bright Flash Literary Review, among others. She lives in Colorado with her husband and dog.