Water Dance

Story by Linda Seed

They look like ballerinas, Angela thought. Bodies like pink and white tutus moving gracefully through the water.

So much to see here at the aquarium, so many creatures in so many varieties and colors, but Angela keeps coming here, to the jellies moving ethereally through their tank.

It’s like they’re flying.

They might as well have supernatural powers, these creatures, so insubstantial and yet so sublime. Like ballerinas.

She remembers her own days as a dancer, her own efforts to balance power with the appearance that she was insubstantial, a whisper of a girl who might vanish in a light wind.

Gone now, those days. The girl she had been has vanished into the ether of memory. Now she has a hip problem, a nagging pain her constant companion. Now she has arthritis in her knees. Now it’s hard to climb a flight of stairs.

Even then, though, there was pain. An injury she had to perform through. The constant, brutal assault on her feet. The effortless grace was never more than an illusion, a sleight of hand masking the daily, grueling difficulty of her art.

Unlike these creatures in their artificial habitat, Angela had only ever appeared to float.