Abby Spinach

And him today (good lord).

The elderly man was there, sleeping; the chatty old women were not. The boy in the grey hat had nearly the whole back row to himself. Ella did something she’d never dared before, and took the seat next to him. He was not a sprawler; his concentration was that of being folded breathlessly forward. There was little chance he’d fling out an arm which would pass through her. Sitting next to him, Ella could see how the skin of his cheeks tightened and flushed and his lips parted when he was caught up in the music.

Ella pretended, in a way she didn’t usually let herself pretend, that they were friends come to the ballet together; that at any moment he would turn his excitement to her and insist that this was going to be the tragic ending, just look at how they were staging the trio dance; that afterward they would go out and continue to dissect it over cups of spiced wine.

The tile in her pocket gave a chill throb.

In the few years before she died she’d hardly gone at all. Her father claimed it now reminded him too painfully of her mother, and Patrice called it a waste of money. So to be able to go whenever she wanted—that was a rare thing Ella could point to and say this, this is a reason I’m glad to have died.

If she went midweek and stuck to the back of the highest balcony, there were always empty seats. Ella still flinched when strangers passed close to or through her invisible self, and relaxed in the shadowed corners of otherwise deserted rows.

She found the plays interesting and the operas impressive, but it was the ballet she returned to again and again. There was something about the way the dancers inhabited their bodies and the music and the stage all at once, as if they too had a skin of constraint which began at the backdrop and ended at the footlights, and they wanted nothing more than to be a frenzied and beautiful haunting of the space between.

It hurt exquisitely to witness this without a body of her own.