It was said that the gypsy's dance was the story of her life spelled out in movements rather than words. When she spun in circles under the summer sun, her body transformed into a book; her gentle footfalls echoed with the memories of the many lands through which she had tread.

She danced before a crowd; she was an outsider, put on display for the entertainment of others. Their applause sealed the distance between them, but she didn't stop dancing, because she longed to share some part of herself with them. With the people that rejected her. She longed to make them understand.

Her legs were like those of a stallion, galloping across bohemian plains, through fields of fallen hay. Her skirt billowed around her; it was the smoke of a campfire warming a makeshift village on a cold winter's night. The beat of the tambourine carried her away from the noise of the German carnival and into some other land of fantasy and dreams. Into the homeland she never known.

She was a patchwork quilt: a wanderer woven together by traces of the many places through which she had passed. But none of it felt real to her. She was a pretty façade masking the inner turmoil of a woman displaced by her own haunting dreams.

When twilight fell around the carnival and the crowd dispelled around her, her dance started to tell a different story. Clinging to her husband's broad shoulders, her hips swayed with bittersweet hypnosis, creating another world with the rhythm of her jagged breaths. A world of sand, and war, and death. This was the story only they understood: the story she would never speak of. Never share.

But in their dance, there was also hope. They had passed beyond death, only to meet at the other side of eternity. He had waited for her. He had waited to take her hand and lead her into the unknown, into a new life free from the shadows of tragedy.

"Do you remember," he would murmur against her cheek, night after night, his strong hands splaying out across her waist, "how we used to dance like this under the desert stars? I always dreamed of reaching for you, but at the time I believed it was impossible."

"We both did," she always assured him, softly tousling his hair, enjoying the coarse texture beneath her fingertips. And then, cracking a smile, she reached for his hand, hoping to wipe the strain from his stoic face. "But now our dreams have come true, Scarred Man. Now we can truly be free."

And then they ran together through the empty street, passing between tents and under the skeletons of abandon rides; she tugged at his wrist, and he begrudgingly obliged, prompted forward solely by the carefree grins she shot over her shoulder. When she paused, he caught her, scooping her up and planting kisses on her bronzed cheeks, brushing aside thick locks of gypsy hair.

He lifted her up into the little metal cart, and she tugged him closer, draping her arms around his neck as the Ferris Wheel jerked and swayed beneath them. He traced the muscled curves of her legs with his lips, and she sighed, whispering songs in a foreign tongue as the flew up together into the starry sky. The July night enveloped them in a blanket of comfort and relief; their worries drifted away with the gentle swaying of the trees.

As they neared the ride's zenith, they stared out together over the golden plains, crimson light from the gypsy campfires dancing across their eyes. Just above the horizon, the lights of the town cavorted above the darkness. A promise of their new home. Of the heaven they had found together beyond the reach of their tragic memories.

In his arms, her dance told a different story. One of love, and of triumph.