These are not the shoes she wanted to wear. Crystalline eyes scrutinize the black Mary-Janes, the rips and wear across their sides. This is not what she wanted to present herself as, but she had been late and God forbid she wear thick boots to such an event.
The lights dim, the curtain falls, and the shoes are spared another moment of fatal glaring.
There are words she could use to describe the feeling of her chest relaxing, her bones poppling against each other beneath her skin and muscles and rags, but she quiets her mind for the High Mass of the Arts. The dancers twirl their bodies over the stage, twisting and contorting into elegant structures and for just a moment she begins to believe that a little girl's new dolly boy has been broken and she has shrunk to save him from the evil rat king who threatens the love budding between her blossoming breasts. She can almost believe the twisted tale of the broken jawed soldier doll swording the rat king and tossing out evil. But, alas, such a spiel is naught but fairyist propaganda, spelling out false immortality between the frontal lobes of the audience's collective mind.
Natalia has taught herself against propaganda, has distributed and believed too many times to fall once more to such a level of infidelity to honesty.
When The Nutcracker is over she remains in her seat, looking out at the crowd leaving the proud standing theatre and talking with such foolishness about costume and music and do they not see how disturbed she feels when the sinister tones of the mause[1] creeping up her spine like little triplets? Oh, how she loathes the ballet performance, she abhors it so vehemently and yet every time it comes anywhere reasonable she snatches tickets to a balcony in half a heartbeat. This time it was held in the United States, and she hopes that the voice behind her is not who she believes is talking to her. These clothes are rags, she is so afraid, and these shoes are not the ones she wanted to wear today. And so she stands with inrecognition of Alfred's words and runs from the little toy soldier like she was born to do. She is the ratess, the siastra cara pacuki[2], the princess who will watch as the King overthrows the tiny toy soldier, broken in ideals, throw him down and beat him brainless before the people he protects.
He is calling out to her, following her, grabbing her hand, and it is snowing.
"I will watch you fall, scaukunok[3,." she hisses, the words dripping off her palate virulentuously. They are a warning, though she wishes they were a threat. "You may be a soldier, but you are broken." She scowls, eyes razor thin and glowing. He does not look broken. He looks determined, strong, handsome, and she thinks, for a moment, if she is the girl and not the ratess. But she cannot play the role of the girl. She is not fit for the part, she cannot dance cannot twirl cannot spin cannot whirl and, "I cannot fix you," she tells him, her voice as dead as the marshland. "I do not love you."
-xxx-
1 German – mouse or rat.
2 Belarusian – sister of the rat king.
3 Belarusian – nutcracker.
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