the necessary notes

In the house next door, the one with the missing shutter, the old woman had begun dancing again. Adi could feel it, the woman’s feet shuffling across the floor, along the run of his back. A thousand steps in an old softshoe shoving him further into the sheets as he lay in bed, waiting for her to stop, flip the record, again begin. Sometimes it felt like there was no end to her dance; she went on for hours, playing god knows what as her toes walked the valley of his ribs.

This was Thursday.

Friday, Adi awoke to an odd hambone in his lungs. It was a step- a stomp, rather, he corrected himself, that kept knocking about in his chest. He coughed twice, involuntarily. Twice more, voluntarily, hoping to dislodge it, but the stomp, which had now transitioned into a stately promenade, didn’t waver. His breaths, when they came, fluttered rhythmically; his abdomen felt full of shoes.

For one brief moment, Adi considered telephoning the old woman who was dancing inside him at her residence on his left, but decided against it. Once, some months ago, when the dancing had continued for hours, eventually reaching a tempo that made Adi too nauseated to stand, he had called her. It took minutes longer than he would have liked; information was hesitant to release her number based solely on her address and although Adi hadn’t her name or the wish to argue, he also could no longer stand the leading steps that slid into his throat.

When she answered, the dancing stopped. Adi nearly cried.

“Yes?” she had asked. Her tone was reedy, featherlight and flexible. “Hello?”

He hadn’t considered what he’d say to her, this woman whose legs kicked at his heart. The unanswered query hung between them on a breaking thread; his answer, his request unspeakable. She hung up. Muttering, he followed suit and began to wait for her to begin.

Today, Friday, he looked at her number hanging on his wall where he had pinned it above the phone and called in instead to work.

“No. I’m sorry. Terrible cough. I can’t,” said Adi to his supervisor once she had been fully apprised and picked up the phone. It was as little a lie as he could possibly tell. Soon, possibly tomorrow, they would fire him for his absences. He could hear it in her voice, the “Feel better, Adi” closing the call.

Around nine, after almost an hour of quiet, he could feel her stretching, preparing for another go with her infernal music, the counterpoint he never heard. The dance came quickly, a rough tarantella that softened up his kidneys with pointed execution. He felt vomitous and quickly dashed to the bathroom to make space for her.

For two hours it went, the steps a mixture of slows and quicks, a sketch of the dance’s line wound between his organs and through his bones. Adi lay completely still on his bed, dressed in clothes of two days ago, his bare feet straight, and his eyes open. He tried to picture her, this practicing coryphée.

She was beautiful, her face only slightly weathered with age, wrinkles of concentration and laughter; her arms and legs strong from a thousand days danced beneath the ceiling of his skin; her body clothed in a dress of simple cut that emphasized her length.

On his bed, the mattress sponging sweat, Adi closed his eyes and gave himself the escape of the vision.

Before him now, beneath red draperies and beside the tall unmarked columns, she stood, a model of poise and grace. He could see her in his head, standing motionless and ready. Ever deaf to what moved her, he could tell when the music began only by the fragmentary smile that broke through the wall of her face and the flutter, the involuntary seize, of his diaphragm.

Then she moved. Fluid, strong steps that took her away and then back to him as he watched. She hopped nimbly across the floor, flinging her hands up over her head, her dress billowing softly. Sometimes she moved out of the light into the darkness at the edges of the floor; he could only feel her then, moving in spectral precision, but he waited patiently for her return. And there she was, in front of him again, her hands on his. This dance was for him, if he wanted it.

Adi escorted her to the center of the floor and waited for the music to begin.