Sticky Glass

The world was stuck in the aesthetic of a poorly photographed 90's laundromat, green, grey, and grainy with a too-high ISO.

Green cast its morning breath across the wooden floors. Touched the old wallpaper with delicate curiosity. It leaked through the doorway with no door on the far side of the room and painted everything with its broad brush an ugly, surreal jade.

The room was cool in a way only late autumn could be, creeping like frost across the wood, shoving its fingers through the cracks of the house and forcing its entry. A burglar stealing nothing but comfort.

And a man in a pale mustard sweater also gone green sat cross-legged in front of a mirror, watching as the abyss rolled over on her back and gave her belly to him.

He had been looking into the abyss too long.

The back of his dirty blond hair had a sick tint to it as the light rippled across it with slow movements as though he was stuck to the bottom of a very deep pool thick with algae. It rolled across his shoulders. Rolled over the stray hairs at the nape of his neck, fallen out of the tight bun above.

Weight settled across his chest. Settled on his shoulders. Squeezed around his belly like an ill-fitting belt and wrapped hands around his neck. There was no water but the physics of the situation had changed.

Dust floated toward the ceiling in an endless torrent seemingly lifting out of the wooden slats of the floor.

Alan trembled.

Then fell still.

Dark, grey-blue eyes flickered with the thought of fear as the dust sparkled around him, caught in the snare of the old fluorescent light shifting things putrid. He'd seen the show in this mirror before.

But in front of him, the mirror reflected nothing. The silver glass was black.

Footsteps thumped above. Tap, slide, slide. Thump, tap, tap. A ballet dancer. Alan was sure. A ballet dancer fleeing from the demons his choreography had summoned.

He was running too.

From the impossible.

Breath ballooned in his chest. The heavy brown brows twitched. Cracked lips opened, healed, then bled again as hot breath blew over them. Dried them like a desert wind. Alan inhaled again, a winter night prickling against the wet inside of his mouth.

Silver specks lifted in the glass, floating like plankton. Reaching for the surface. He wet his lips. The world was growing colder around him.

The ballet dancer cried out. A man. Alan blinked and the silver specks had turned to rain. It was a man broken by elegance. Quads and calves shredded by the effort of it now slack from ruptured tendons and bleeding dreams.

A drop of red fell to Alan's shoulder. A drop of saltwater. A drop of red. A drop of saltwater.

The rhythm of the dance above was gone.

Silence did not take its place.

Instead, muffled cries rode the back of the blood and tears dripping steadily from above, coating Alan in misery.

The room shook with his sobs. A sad, sorrowful melody sang on a sax, echoing down the hallway colored green from some other room of the house. The musician harmonized with the wails. Gave light to the agony. The wallpaper began to peel. The floor flooded. And the walls trembled.

Alan trembled too.

Tears slid unbidden down his face but he did not blink. He let them fall.

The sax cried out, screamed into the house, and then fell silent. The man above no longer cried. The rain slipping through the cracks stopped. Even the dust lifting up around Alan ceased.

It hung in the middle of the air, frozen.

Everything stopped.

Everything was stopped.

The slate eyes widened as the thick brows went up in the middle with worry. He couldn't move his legs. The elegance in his posture yearned for the dance but his legs would not move and the music was no balm but a curse. A memory, looping, looping, looping until the bitter end.

Who were the ghosts above him? Who banged on that floor? Who fell into the haunted melody of the saxophone echoing down the hallways of this house?

A lone, desperate wail cut through the house.

Water poured through the ceiling again, drenching the man sitting crosslegged with such force that the careful bun in his hair unwound. Long, curly hair unravelled. Slowly, then quickly. It stuck to his neck as the ballet dancer wept and screamed and died.

It was a slow death.

A painful death.

It broke the glass heart in Alan's chest. Took a mallet to the china of his soul. Breath kept coming to him. Despite the waterfall cascading down his back, saturating his hair and making his mustard sweater heavy, he breathed.

The death of elegance was an ugly thing. It was a cruel, unforgivable thing. From leaping, from flying through the air to crawling. From intimately knowing every centimeter of the floor to curling up in the fetal position, staring at the bumps once memorized. Grieving.

It was his mouth that was open.

His mouth that wrinkled the sides of his face with pain. His teeth glinting in the fluorescent light. He was screaming. Fists balled up in his wet hair, tears pouring down his cheeks. His legs that would not function in that elegant way ever again.

It kept raining in the mirror.

The water was green like the sick light flooded in the room but there were no ghosts to haunt him. There were no broken paths, no walking shadows of his old dreams.

Alan moved then, overcome with the urge to touch this abyss in front of him.

A strong hand, vascular and soft, reached out, floated through the air like a ballet dancer slipping into the myth of oil paintings and classical music. The feeling of elegance remained. His hand hung in front of the glass, hung in his eyes, hung in the air.

Two heartbeats. Then three. A deep breath and a fallen tear.

Escape was no option for the hunger burning through his chest, the nightmarish want of knowledge in his blood.

His fingertips brushed the glass. There was no resistance.

Where did the beauty of reality go?

It perished but there was no tombstone to mark its passing.

There were no flowers at the end of this ballet. No bows to the crowd, no bouquets, or cigarettes in the back. There were no warm embraces. No cologne of the other dancers to keep him company on late nights. Cold nights. There was nothing but the empty green light and legs that would not work right.

The others left.

Gravity failed.

Alan's lithe, long body lifted horizontally, toes pointed and arm extended. The sweater and the jeans were replaced by a loose black blouse and tight pants of the same color. Bare feet instead of ballet slippers. He was the breeze, the elegant thing floating between the raindrops. Makeup dramatized the expression of longing on his face, dark contrasting light. Slate eyes glittered brightly beneath darkened brows and lined eyelids.

The fluorescent light flickered and failed. A heart that could not beat any longer.

A spotlight thumped on.

Alan continued his flight.

Pale lips covered in a thin layer of rouge parted. There he was in the glass. A flying beacon of what was. What could never be. The widow's peak of his now dyed dark hairline drew his own gaze to the sorrow lifting his brows.

The reflection couldn't lie.

And he was there in the glass, caught between the falling drops of rain, flying through the black nightmare of impossibilities. He hung there, frozen in the spotlight. Frozen in a moment that would never come again.

Reality didn't deserve his heartbeat.

The elegant hand, smoothed out by years of practice, slid through the silver glass and he was gone.

Inch by inch he slipped through the silver veil. It clung to his skin, the sticky glass, wrapping his long lines in a film of iridescence. It contoured his pain, his muscles, the perfectly carved angles of his flesh and turned him into a painting. An oil painting that could never fade. A mark that he had known the stage floor, made love to it, and borne something beautiful from that tryst.

It swallowed him up to the navel.

A shocked gasp filled his lungs.

It was black on this side of the reflection. Black like the night stage before the lights flicked on. Black like the silence of hundreds of souls waiting, waiting, watching. The sticky glass clung to him like the glue of his wigs, the dye in his hair, the attire on his flesh.

And it was a euphoric feeling.

This was the stage.

The mirror pulled him through further. It enveloped his slender hips, crept down along his muscled thighs. He was diving through water, leaving the pool for the ocean's abyss.

It pulled and pulled and pulled until he was glided through to the other side becoming a comet of white skin and black cloth under the roaming eye of the stage lights.

White skin flashed and he was grabbing another man, hand on his jaw. It was a fight. A war. Twisting hips and arched backs, pointed kicks and sharp turns, it was a sophisticated brawl. And it was wrapped in darkness.

The black devolved into something cosmic. The dark was a creeping thing, a hungry thing. The world fell away as the pair crossed the stage and stomped their story into the scratched wood.

The lights dimmed. Went blue. Then grey. Then blue again. Fear raced across the features of the other as his hands splayed. White splashed against black. A suit to a blouse. Fury to logic.

Hands lifted in front of his face, a faux mark of terror as he approached, one step, two steps, three. The man in white with his tight blue vest collapsed and squirmed on the floor as Alan stepped and danced around him. Perfectly choreographed terror morphed into something real. Something tangible. Something he could taste in his mouth.

The saxophone, mourning and hopeless, had been replaced by the full-throated scream of an orchestra.

It was a powerful piece. A victory of dark over light. The horns blared as the violins faded, terrified. He could not be stopped. The score promised satiation to the hunger ripping apart his abdomen. It promised victory.

The dance continued. Angry. Seductive. Lights dimmed and the mirror flashed. This was the crescendo, the gallop across the floor of two men entangled in their terror and their hidden lust, ready to bleed for the warpath. Heat flashed across his skin as a bomb went off within. There was no outplaying the script.

He leapt, strong legs lifting his lithe body into the air but the sticky glass held him to the floor.

The music cut in time to hear the snap.

He was a vase, falling through the air heading toward demise.

The crack of his future echoed through the stage as he crashed. It echoed through the hall. Through every mind of every person crammed shoulder to shoulder in that dark space.

He collapsed.

A dark, unmoving heap in the middle of the stage. Weeping.

Unchoreographed destruction.

His tears slid through the cracks and rained through the stage to the pits of hell below. The stage lights died. Only the green fluorescent light of the exit signs illuminated him. They cast a weak spotlight on his agony, on the undeniable truth that it was over.

Long legs curled underneath him and dyed black hair draped over his shoulders. Still, the exposed plane of his face was broken. So full of despair that it became empty. Wide hands more used to delicate gentility than stopping a fall splayed across the black floor.

He could not move.

Warm hands fell to his shoulder and the world was on him in whispers. The enemy, the dancer, the dream, crouched in front of him speaking in riddles and rhymes and questions he could not understand.

Where was his victory now?

He was a butterfly with glass wings and they had finally shattered.

Slate eyes, red now with tears, lifted to the elegant figure floating out of the mirror above. It caught the light of the exit signs and glowed. What a lovely form he made, swimming through the air with effortless ease. Each molecule of his being arranged themselves into that neat line of controlled expression, of passion without force.

His lips parted, wet with tears and clear snot. The elegance was gone and the truth cracked like a whip.

"I...am finished."

Whispered across the stage floor with all the despair of a realized death.

Alan blinked and he was back in the room, crosslegged in front of the mirror.

The image of the dance rippled and faded to black again.

He was left in the jade-lit room, listening to the dancer above him slide and tap and land as the sad sax began again. He was alone. Alone with his ghosts. Waiting to experience the brief joy of weightlessness again. Waiting to dream that this time would be different. This time he would fly.

To repeat ad infinitum.