Dark and Deepest Red(70)

Emil had taught me that sometimes the only way to leave a wake was to stay still. And in these red shoes, staying still meant this. To stand my ground, I had to do the thing I feared.

I moved fast as the wind through the trees’ amber. I spun toward the light of the nearest road. I put my own fever into the red shoes. I moved fast enough to turn the red shoes to a blur of color, the glass beads a handful of flung pomegranate seeds.

I danced out of the woods and alongside the road. I danced past houses and mailboxes, past cars slowing to see the odd girl flitting along the soft shoulder.

With every turn, I brought my body farther into the light of the glimmer and the moon, the streetlamps and the spill of amber from windows. I caught silhouettes in those squares of light, but I didn’t stop.

So much of our town was out tonight, waiting for the glimmer to fade. Waiting like they had every year, for the spiders to stop weaving webs of silk so fast our town looked draped in lace shawls. Or for the stars to lose the pink tint they’d had for weeks.

I danced past them all. My family’s priest. The mayor and her wife and their children. Teachers I’d had in grade school.

My own mother and father, with their always Band-Aided hands.

I danced past the houses of girls I knew.

Aubrey and Graham, in their neat rows of similar constructions that always seemed newly painted.

Sylvie, in her family’s looming, crumbling Victorian.

Piper, in jeans and a moth-white sweater, the moon bleaching her hair almost as pale as she watched from the end of her tree-shadowed driveway.

With each twirl, I declared myself an Oliva girl, with my brush-brown body and my fingers made beautiful by the calluses of needlework. I was an Oliva daughter, whose great-grandparents had lost pieces of their fingers to the maquiladoras, and lived to make lives of their own by hand.

I was an Oliva, our history written in blood and thread and the glint of glass beads.

I had learned, from my own fearless abuela, to take what I feared, and use it.

I had learned, from a girl with rage-lit eyes and a blue dress, to grasp the blade the world held to me, and hold it myself.

With each twirl, I felt the shape of my own forming words, how they mirrored the ones I’d heard as a little girl, listening at the workroom door. I tasted my abuela’s defiance, the metallic glint of it, her willingness to destroy part of herself so no one could take it. I’ll save you the bother of carrying them home.

My story was not a fairy tale of a cruel-hearted girl whose shoes danced her to death, or a kindhearted one who threw her red shoes into the river. This was not a story about a wicked queen made to wear iron heels, or a lovely, golden-haired girl in slippers of glass.

This had been about a fever, a nightmare, a dance made into a curse.

It was about women turning their own fears into their sharpest blades.

When my own voice came, it was so brazen and laughing I didn’t recognize it. It sounded like a higher, filmier version of how I remembered my abuela’s voice, what my grandmother might have sounded like at my age.

I knew it was my own voice only by the feeling of it breaking out of my throat.

“I’ll save you the trouble of making me dance,” I said into the night air, to the glimmer, to the red shoes on my feet, to a fever that had come back after five hundred years.

With those words came the unsteady sense that the ground was breaking apart underneath me. Like my reckless dance had enough force to crack sidewalk and pavement and cold-packed dirt.

But when I looked down, it wasn’t the ground breaking apart.

It was the red shoes, tearing along their sewn-together seams. They split open across the red cloth, as though the shoes were being sliced to pieces again while still on my feet. As though my abuela’s scissors were dancing with me, unseen and flitting alongside each of my steps.

The shoes were tearing back into the confetti my abuela had cut years ago.

I drove my feet into the ground, dancing in time with the memory of my grandmother’s scissors, flashing silver.

I’ll save you the trouble.

I’ll dance myself.

I danced, my words their own blades. They slipped into the seams. They slid between the red cloth and my skin.

I’ll save you the trouble.

I’ll make myself dance.

And I danced the red shoes to pieces.





Strasbourg, 1518


All in Strasbourg must imagine them leaving to plague some other town, or vanishing into the mountains or forest. They walk deeper into the countryside, the rumor of their possession scaring away thieves. When they must walk at night, they dance and shriek as though they are afflicted, and none draw near.

Though she did not know it, Lala has kept good company in her fear of Li livres de jostice et de plet. So has Alifair, who is far from the only soul in Strasbourg whose being and heart do not match the name he was once christened with.

There are so many who live or love in ways they have had to hide.

There are others with them who carry different weights in their hearts. A girl and boy in love who would be made to marry others. A man who does not wish to marry at all. A woman who has learned blacksmithing at the side of her brothers and father, but would not be allowed to practice the trade.

They all follow not only Lala but Alifair, this boy whose kindness has been a lamp to them. They follow Tante Dorenia, who even with child walks in a way that leads.