Bolshoi Ballet

Category B: Second Place (2024) Monash Short Story Writing Competition
Author: Beant

The tune that accompanies my endless pirouettes bears memories of sun-soaked days, of linen blankets spread across the sky, merely draping the excited summer day. 

The confines of splintered mahogany, my permanent cambre: and the ankles are a testament to my tolerance for my art. I remember, with each turn of the rusted spring beneath my feet, a time when I danced freely. The stage was my domain, the spotlight my sun, and the applause my sustenance. Now, Daniel's eye is my sole audience, his gaze constantly laced with overt prurience.

Daniel. His name bitter on my porcelain tongue. Who plucked me from the world of the living and enshrined me in this gilded cage. Some boys take a beautiful woman and hide her away from the world, and so he did with me. His dresser became my stage, his room my universe.

The wooden box that houses me is both my shelter and my prison. Its ornate carvings mock me with their beauty, a cruel reflection of the world I can no longer touch. I spin and spin, my movements as graceful as ever, but to what end? The constraints, this world that values beauty only when it can be possessed, preserved for others to admire, subject to the audience.

Time, that fickle mistress of mortality, slips through the cracks of my wooden world like grains of sand through an hourglass turned sideways, its passage marked not by the steady tick-tock of clocks or the waxing and waning of moons, but by the gradual oxidation of my once-gleaming spring, the imperceptible dulling of my painted smile, the slow accumulation of dust on my outstretched arms; each pirouette becomes a year, each revolution a decade, until the very concept of minutes and hours dissolves into the endless waltz of my existence, leaving me suspended in a twilight realm where yesterday and tomorrow blur into one eternal, music-box present Is this what it means to age? To feel the weight of years not in wrinkles or grey hairs, but in the creaking of a mechanism that was once as smooth as my limbs?

I wonder as I pirouette in this perpetual ballet of confinement. Does Sol's golden chariot still race across the azure expanse, casting its life-giving warmth upon the undulating flesh of Gaia? Do diaphanous sheets of linen, those gossamer dreams made tangible, still billow and float upon the zephyrs of festival afternoons, draping the world in a gauzy veil of possibility and promise? Or has the relentless march of progress transformed the landscape of reality into an unrecognizable tableau, a futuristic phantasmagoria where my delicate form and antiquated grace stand as anachronistic curiosities, fragile echoes of a long-faded epoch?

Forever moving, yet eternally static.

Daniel winds my key with meticulous regularity. His fingers, once warm and alive against my skin, now feel cold and impersonal as they touch the metal protrusion in my back. Does he see me as I truly am? Or am I merely an object to him now, a sole curiosity to be displayed and admired?

There are moments, fleeting and precious when I almost feel alive again. When the sunlight streaming through the window catches me just so, and for a heartbeat, I am back on stage, basking in the warmth of the spotlight. But then reality reasserts itself, And I am once again ensnared within my wooden confines, my perpetual cambré an agonizing testament to the life I once embodied. The elegant arch of my back, once a graceful sweep, now feels like a cruel sculpture chiselled from the marble of my suffering. Each curve, each line etched into my form, whispers of the countless hours spent perfecting this pose, now frozen in a vignette of endless torment. The sinews of my being, stretched to their limits, cry out in silent rebellion, a symphony of pain that reverberates through the hollow chamber. 

The other objects on the dresser are my silent companions. The tarnished locket, the dusty photograph frame, the chipped porcelain figurine - we are all relics of a past that Daniel clings to. There are times when I hate Daniel. Hate him for reducing me to this, for trapping me in this half-life of eternal motion without purpose. But there are also times when I pity him. What kind of man feels the need to capture beauty rather than simply appreciate it? What wounds does he carry that make him fear the freedom of the things he loves?

The tune plays on, a melody that once filled me with joy now a haunting reminder of all I have lost. Yet still, I dance. I dance for the memory of who I was, for the dream of who I might have been.

As I spin, I dream. I dream of a day when the lid of my box will open, not for the brief moment it takes Daniel to wind my spring, but forever. I dream of stepping out, touching solid ground for the first time in an eternity. I dream of dancing across the dresser, past the other forgotten treasures, and out into a world that has continued to turn in my absence.

But these are just dreams, as insubstantial as the music that accompanies my eternal dance. The reality is the box, the spring, the dresser.

The reality is Daniel's eye, watching, always watching.

And so I dance. I dance because it is all I know, all I am. I dance because to stop would be to truly die, to become nothing more than the other lifeless objects that share this wooden stage with me. I dance because in the movement, in the music, I can almost remember what it felt like to be alive.

I am the ballerina, on his dresser. 

For as long as I dance, as long as I move to the music that only I can truly hear, I am more than just an object on a dresser.

I am a ballerina, and I dance.