[Dark Magazine 05] • The Dark Issue 5 by Magazine The Dark

Author:Magazine, The Dark [Magazine, The Dark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Horror
Publisher: TDM Press
Published: 2014-08-01T11:38:25+00:00

Octavia Cade is a PhD candidate in science communication. She’s had a handful of short stories published before, in places like Strange Horizons, Cosmos, and Aurealis. Her first novella has recently been published by Masque Books.

Not the Grand Duke’s Dancer

by Emily B. Cataneo

I’m teaching earthworms how to dance ballet when the Grand Duke comes to steal me from Petrograd.

Earthworms are slow learners, but we speak the same slippery languages. I’m instructing them on how to pas de deux when stone scrapes on stone and the lid lifts off my new home. The Grand Duke’s long eyelashes and thin lips appear above me—thin lips I last saw telling me I couldn’t dance Swan Lake, saying he preferred to see his dancer in a comic ballet like Coppélia.

He scoops me out of my crushed velvet, clasps me against his chest as though I am a religious icon he has searched for his whole life. The brass buttons on his uniform stab into my ribs.

Then he spirits me through the Petrograd streets to Finland Station. I cringe at the touch of fragile summer light on parts of my body that have never before felt the sun. He installs me in his private train car and I watch the pearly sky over Lake Lagoda as the train steams west.

“Where, precisely, are you taking me?” I say. “I was starting an earthworm dance company. I was settling into my new home. I don’t want to be your dancer anymore, Sergei. I want . . . ”

His eyelashes brush his cheeks as he blinks at me, studying my femurs and the spread of my scapula.

And I realize he can’t hear me, because I no longer speak French or Russian, and he has yet to learn my language.

Although he rarely heard me even when I still spoke the languages of the living.

I didn’t always dance for the Grand Duke. Ballet was once my own, the burning light in my chest when I was a girl living among the smokestacks and tenements on the northern edge of Petrograd. In those years, I danced through dirty snow, pirouetting over pigeon-bones and practicing first through fifth position. I imagined I was twirling on the stage of Marinsky Theatre, that pastel-green puff of a building on the bank of a canal only a few miles away, but in another, glittering world.

After I graduated from academy on scholarship and stepped onto the theatre’s stage for the first time, I discovered nothing could make me happier than leaping across a resin-covered floor through hot lights.

But when I drew my last breath in the sanitarium, I found the dead no longer have the urge to dance, that as ropy muscle disintegrates and leaves only bone, we are quite content to lie in the quiet earth and instruct earthworms in the art of pas de deux.

That is my only desire now, to return to that hushed world, and as our train snakes west away from Petrograd, I resolve: I will take a different path this time.

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