The Edge of the Internet

“Dance for me with all your desires. Dance for me to make an old soul stir, a wounded heart skip to a happier beat.”

He leaned back onto red velvet and oak, the scent of the theatre box’s age a comfortable reminder of days gone by.

“Dance for me, twist, twirl, leap and bound. Do pirouettes, and little things with butterfly hands that make me want to fly.”

A slight smile split the corner of a craggy face, this was joy, a moment reaching for bliss. Callused, scarred hands that had seen strife and war, held his children and theirs with tenderness, crushed a man’s windpipe, stroked lovers to ecstasy gripped tight his knees so he could lean forward for a better view.

“Dance, dance away my years. Dance me to a youth without ruined eyes, failing hearing, aches, pains, and a constant need to pee. Dance with supple grace. You are air I am a rock. Make me wish it was not so.”

The stage became his world. His vision narrowed, to flit about absorbing detail after detail, a step there, a gesture here, the sway of a hip, the roll of a shoulder. Forms and styles blending into a whole, it was unique yet reminiscent. A fluttering feeling flitted about within him. Lightness grew, weights of thought and notions cascaded from his mind. There was only the dance.

“Dance away my regrets, my failures.”

The moment came, it was sublime. There it was a release. It was perfect, the moment they had been waiting for. The ultimate act of theatre watching, they were not just audience they were emotionally there on stage as much a part of the spectacle as witness. He could not help but smile, a giggle welled in his throat. He turned to his lover. Now was bliss.

But, Waldorf had already taken the poison, gulped it down in rush, a giddy smile still on his face as the light behind his eyes faded.

Steadler slumped. He’d been too slow, to enthralled, their pact to die upon seeing one pure true moment… gone.

With trembling hands, spotted with tears, he retrieved the theatre’s program.

“Let’s see what the frog has for us next.”