Written by: Jenna Ulizio
Winner of The Edward R. and Frances Schreiber Collins Literary Prize
- When you leave, don’t make a sound. Getting out of the Painted Lady is the test. How do you want to be seen in the city tonight? Or, how do you not want to be seen?
Slipping out into the rush of the parlor, I blend into the crowd. Going unseen is impossible. Everyone in this city wants to look at everything. The trick is to exist at their periphery, noticed just at the leaving. The nights when I get stopped by a stranger stumbling from the bar or with a hand curling too tightly around my wrist are the nights that turn my stomach.
The other girls around the room never make eye contact with me. The few that know what I’m doing don’t like it. The others just don’t like me. I wade through clouds of perfume and smoke as if I belong, and then leave out the front door before anyone thinks to stop me.
2. Don’t check your pockets. You have what you need.
Night is in full swing. The sidewalks are packed with revelers despite the late hour. It was the hardest thing to get used to. The countryside hushes as darkness falls, save for the humming of insects and the occasional cry of an animal. In a sense, the night still hums and is punctuated by shouts, but now it is with electricity humming under the streets, shattered glass symphonies, and fights turning to euphoria at the drop of a hat.
I step in with the crowd, sticking just close enough to a group of bar hoppers to blend in without drawing attention. The streetlamps cast halos of light on the ground, turning everything a sickly orange. The sky is a gaping black mouth, the high-rise buildings on both sides the teeth. Even with the sun gone, the city burns. I’m dressed up for this meeting as usual, my best blouse and skirt, and I can feel sweat sticking the fine material to my back. Summers were never this hot back home. I ache for the days where I can wear a sweater, knit in the winter when the snow locked the whole family inside. This heat does little to sway the revelers, only deepening their thirst as the group I had surreptitiously joined crushes into another bar. I duck down, slipping two fingers down my boot before I can remember the rules. Just as my fingers brush against it, another group blows out of the pub like a hurricane. I bite my lip. Stupid. Careless. Move on. I slip forward and slot myself into their ranks.
I remember days when my sisters buzzed in preparation for dances. They would rush through their duties and fight for the hot water to wash off the smell of livestock. As the sun set, they marched two miles arm-in-arm to the town hall. They would be wearing their nice dresses, the same ones they always wore because they each only had one.
They made fun of me for arriving late in my overalls with dirt under my nails. I know they only did that because they knew I didn’t care about any of it. No. I would walk in unnoticed, standing off to the side, observing. Then a new song would strike up. No one would see me walking to the center of the dance floor. Only when I started dancing then would every eye in the room land on me. It was the only time I could bear to be visible to anyone else. My footsteps would herald the sunrise behind me, and the cheers of the town followed us back home in the morning. Their applause would ring in my ears, but it was the music that bounced in my head for days.
I carry on up the length of the city, revelers thinning out as I go. The heights of buildings shrink. Trees sprout up in between streetlamps. Lawns of manicured green grass, something unheard of in the lower streets, grow and grow. The signs of money are everywhere in the gilded canal yards. I walk farther up, past white trim houses with columns and rose bushes. House numbers tick up and up (3. Don’t talk to yourself. Everyone thinks it’s weird). 759… 763…767. 771.
4. Don’t break in. The front door is best. There is always another woman, a paramour, a maid, a staffer. They are named and known. You are faceless. The women entering that onlookers shouldn’t know about makes people uncomfortable. The witnesses will keep your secrets.
Tonight, I am at the low-ranking bureaucrat’s door. (Labor department. Likes to gamble. Likes even more to have someone pretty watch him win. He has a name, a name attached to family money, but I do my best not to know it. I don’t like to remember their names.) I’ve been here enough times to know to look under the mat. The key is cold between my fingers as I unlock the door and step inside.
5. Don’t assume the house is empty. Obvious, but an easy thing to believe. Bitemarks scar your ankle from the last time you did that.
Speaking of, I give a short, sharp whistle into the darkened house. The clack of nails on hardwood skitters closer, but they’re well trained. The dogs don’t bark, only slide in front of me with looks of blind adoration in their eyes. Running a hand over their fur steadies me, familiar in a way that goes beyond this house. A lightning flash of memory, of practicing the same routine for hours on end. The herd dog finds me, trying to play but getting in my way. I had to swerve to avoid kicking him, and the whole routine got so ridiculous I collapsed into a fit of giggles on top of him.
The house’s grandeur draws my attention back. My footsteps are soft upon the hardwood floors. Elegant trim curtains block the light from the lamps outside. The air in the house is like a cool breeze on the back of my clammy neck. Velvet couches, oil paintings, and porcelain vases make the house more akin to a museum. I feel uprooted amongst so many displaced things. It is like this in every room I pass through.
6. Don’t hide. They’re meant to find you.
And 7. Stop thinking about your rules. In fact, it’s better not to think at all.
The bedroom is on the second floor. Clothes are thrown everywhere. Files litter the tops of dressers. The bed might be the most obscene thing in this house. I find myself unable to sleep much anymore, but when I do, it’s never on anything this soft. I allow myself one second of pure relief as I sit on it, head tilted back, and eyes shut.
Then I straighten my back, clasp my hands, and wait. I am no stranger to standing at rest with every nerve on alert. Standing in the dark, each step mapped ahead of me, just waiting for the lights to come on. Still, after an hour passes, it is tempting to drift back down into the kitchen and pull a glass from the cupboards. The water on this side of the city is practically sweet. But that’s just the part of me looking to put on a show when I know the choreography has gone stale.
- Don’t startle when–
The front door clangs open. I am too well-trained to flinch. I can feel my breathing quickening as if a spotlight has now landed on me. I could leave right now if I…
I remember callused hands smoothing my shoulders down before a performance. Fingers in my hair as they redo my braid. The smell from the glass perfume bottle kept beneath the floorboards with the few valuables we had. My mother’s face swims in front of me. It has been so long that I can’t remember if her eyes are blue or green. But her smile changed her whole face, soothing the hard lines of worry. I flex my wrist and feel the ribbons tied to it, one for each family member. I can still see all of them, crowded in the doorway at dawn, waving as my father drove me to the port.
It takes everything in me not to shudder as I close that door in my mind. What am I to them now? A starlet knocked off course and dirtied on the ground. Only if they know, only if they find out. And they will never hear of this from me.
I could leave, right now. I hold no debts. I have enough money saved away to board the next boat, skills enough to get myself all the way back to the countryside alone. My nerves, always so steely, so unbendable now that I doubt even the familiar sight of endless rolling fields would be enough to scare me away in shame. They would know, as soon as they saw me walking up the dirt road, what had happened. I will never tell them how I survived, but their guesses would be truth enough. There would be no future for me in the lights of the city, dancing the night away. They would welcome me back, and I would be enveloped into the rhythm of the farm. The first dance I ever learned, yet I doubt I could hear the music anymore.
I can still be theirs in those memories. I can still fit into that place, in their arms and in their lives. I can hardly imagine it, if only because I hardly know how to think of myself.
It’s easier to track the sound of steps up the stairs.
I meet his eyes as he enters the room. The confusion on his face is drunkenly slow, but tonight he doesn’t seem to care about the surprise.
“Well, isn’t my luck on fire tonight?”
9. Don’t hesitate.
If I had fallen into a different story, perhaps we would be lovers meeting in the night, laughing as we crashed together. Instead, I lunge up from the bed. There’s a whistle as my knife whips through the air. I cut a clean red line across his neck.
I used to expect a fight. Now I just wipe the splatter from my face as he stills.
The blood pools out on the floor. In the pale moonlight coming from the window, it shimmers. Three weeks of work slowly rolling out towards my feet like a tide. They gave me a name and a deadline, and this is what I created.
10. Don’t stand there after it’s done (yet you do this every time).
The house is quiet– true quiet, the kind of quiet that makes the blood in my head roar in a great storm. There should be an audience on the other end of it, waiting in bated-breath anticipation. But here it is just a dead man and my pounding head in this quiet. No one to witness the things I can do with a blade.
The blood roars in my ears as I stand there. My vision narrows, and in the dark I’m back on stage. There was a two second window after a performance when my body would not shake. I would hold my final position, my breath caught in my chest, beating to get out. I was frozen, waiting. Then the silence would shatter as the audience broke open with applause, and when I took that first breath, my body slammed back into action.
All I can think, as my chest heaves, is how nice the cool temperature feels on my skin. I think maybe this will be the time I can just walk away. Then, longing crashes over me like the fight I was expecting. So thick it’s suffocating, I see it: This house is big enough that every sister could have her own room. No one would worry about a leak or a chill in the winter. We could make a place for tired bones to rest. I think of having a garden in the backyard for the sole purpose of marveling at gladiolas in the summer.
I have never wanted anything more. I had it all, and I just wanted a little more.
A few months before I left, I was awarded a solo in the annual performance. I had practiced so hard to get it that my heels split open and my ankles blistered. They bled so much my stockings were permanently stained. Still, I walked home smiling.
The next day, the girl below me ran her nails down my back. The only thing I remember is that she had bits of yellow fabric stuck in her nails. Now the scars are thick and long, aching when I twist too far.
I told myself I would kill for that dream, for the chance to dance myself into dust. Well, now I have. Repeatedly. The claw marks on my back ache, and I know what drove that girl to want to tear me to pieces. I’m clawing my way to a dream so ruthlessly I think I’m shredding it more with each passing second. No, I’m reaching for it, each job getting me closer. It has to get me closer. But it takes me farther away, too, from that place in my mind, where I can rest without their names coming back to me.
On nights where I do not have a job, I am afraid of never changing. Now I stand over the latest body, and I find it hard to recognize my own.
My eyes are heavy. I’m pulled out of my stupor only by the concern I might fall asleep next to the body if I don’t leave.
11. No matter how hard you try, you cannot wash the blood off.
I close the bedroom door before I go, so the dogs don’t have to see the body. Out the window and lifting onto the roof, I see this awful city sprawl around me. I wish I could see home from here, or some far-off green hill that I can pretend is mine. The shingles are molten through my boots. I don’t want to spend the pay from this job on new soles. There’s an audition across the city in three days, and I need thread to repair my stockings again. Before the familiar vertigo grabs me, I leap. I race over rooftops, arcing farther and farther away, a bird against the night sky, flying once again.
It is not as if arriving in the city truly changed me. I still knew all the places to cut with a knife. I had been called enough names to know I was cold. Even this flight by night was not new to me. Back when my family and home felt small, I stole away. One time, a traveling show came to town. It was mainlander fare, so most people saw it as a high-class distraction. But I saw one glimpse of the poster and none of that mattered to me. I still remember how cold it was that night as the field grass brushed against me. Slipping into the rafters as the curtain rose was trickier but I did it.
Then the whole world faded away as the dancers stepped onstage. The music wrapped around them– no, they wrapped the music around their bodies, perfect instruments commanding the universe. I should have kept my eyes on those closest to my skill in the company, to know how they did it, to mirror their perfect bodies the next day until I surpassed them, but I was fascinated by the principal dancer.
Her every movement was so refined it looked natural. I could hardly begin to break down how she did it. For once, I was one with the crowd. I was not a single step ahead, instead drawn up higher and higher on the ecstasy of her movements. She danced in a fervor, commanding the stage as she flew, twisted and reached. Then came the climax, the music bursting. The crowd gasped, as in a blink, the lead was covered in blood. It might have been fake, but I suddenly understood. There was something in that woman’s blood that pushed against her skin, that was burning her alive. The only path to salvation was to give into its call and dance. Dance to that insatiable song, pounding away at the ache in bones, moving so fast that feet barely touch the stage, on the run and unstoppable.
That’s the night I knew it was in my blood, too.
I feel the blood on my skin, just like her. The blood never washes off. I do not know if I ever tried. The siren song never stops. I could not wash it off from my stockings, so I kept dancing to afford thread to sew new ones. When the blood would not wash out of my costume, I made a new one in all black so no one would ever see bloodstains on it. I danced and became more precise, held my back straighter, got more ruthless as I clawed to the top.
I danced my way through town, and when that did not satisfy me, I flew away to the biggest city there was. Maybe it killed my family to do that. Maybe it’s killing me still.
I thought I might die of homesickness when I first arrived. That’s the ugly truth. Dancing never kept me warm like the fire in the hearth at winter. Dancing meant I never learned my grandmother’s recipes before she passed. But then I was turned away from audition after audition, and I realized I would die of not dancing. I turned that ruthlessness and precision on this city instead.
This leaping from rooftops and shadowing targets and slipping from room to giant room on tiptoes is my dancing now. Arms extended, legs out, hair flying behind me, that is where the joy remains. The escape is when I fall in love again, even if I am covered in blood. A laugh punches out of me as I land. I don’t even hesitate as I spin and leap again. I dance across rooftops, knowing in the morning my performance will have garnered another glowing review in the papers.