Twenty Women Falling

"The studio was the one place my body always knew what to do. I didn't know what it meant when even that stopped being true."

The back door opened onto cold.

Not the gentle chill of a winter morning—this was something with teeth, something that found the gaps in my clothing and pressed through, sliding beneath the thin fabric of the shirt I'd been wearing for how long now, two days, three, I couldn't remember when I'd last changed or showered or done any of the things that normal people did to maintain the boundary between themselves and the world. The cold didn't care about boundaries. It pressed against my skin like hands trying to hold me back, like a warning I was choosing to ignore.

I stepped outside.

The grass was silver with frost, each blade distinct in the grey predawn light, and I knew before I looked that my feet were bare. I could feel the cold seeping up through my soles, into my ankles, climbing toward my knees with a patience that suggested it had all the time in the world. The wet. The ache. The particular shock of skin meeting frozen ground without protection. Had I put shoes on? I must have decided not to, must have made some choice about footwear before walking out here, but if I had I couldn't remember it. Couldn't remember anything between the bathroom and this moment, between swallowing the pills and standing here with frost melting between my toes.

The yard stretched ahead of me like a held breath.

I'd crossed this space a thousand times—walking to the studio, walking back, carrying props for recitals, chasing children who'd escaped the confines of the house. I knew every dip in the ground, every patch where the grass grew thin, every angle of the path that my feet had worn through years of repetition. But tonight the yard looked different. Larger. The studio at the far end seemed miles away rather than metres, a destination I might never reach no matter how long I walked toward it.

I started walking anyway.

The frost crunched beneath me. Gave way. The cold shot up through my feet with each step, a jolt that should have sent me back inside, should have triggered some basic instinct for self-preservation, but my legs kept moving. Kept carrying me forward across the silver grass while my breath came out in pale clouds and my body registered complaints I had no intention of addressing.

Halfway across the yard, I became aware of Charlie.

She was a shape near the fence—darker than the darkness, motionless except for the faint gleam of her eyes catching whatever light leaked from the neighbour's window. She wasn't barking. Wasn't whimpering. Wasn't doing any of the things a dog should do when its owner emerged into the freezing dawn without explanation, without coat, without shoes, without any of the markers of rational behaviour. She was just watching. Sitting there in the shadows with her head slightly tilted, her attention fixed on me with an intensity that made something crawl along my spine.

She knows.

The thought came from nowhere and wouldn't leave. Absurd—dogs didn't know things, not the way humans knew them, not with understanding or judgment—but Charlie's eyes followed me as I crossed the yard, tracked my unsteady progress across the frosted grass, and I couldn't shake the feeling that she was waiting. That she'd been waiting all night. That she understood something was happening that I hadn't yet allowed myself to see, and she was bearing witness to it, recording it in whatever way dogs recorded the things their humans did in the dark hours when no one else was watching.

I looked away from her. Looked toward the studio instead. The building was a dark shape against the slightly lighter sky, solid and real, the only thing in the world that still made sense. Inside that building was order. Inside was the barre and the mirror and the music, the ritual that had saved me more times than I could count, the place where my body knew exactly what to do even when my mind had forgotten everything else.

I just had to get there.

The key was in my pocket—I didn't remember putting it there, didn't remember the decision or the motion or any of the planning that would have been required, but when my hand went to my hip my fingers found the familiar shape of metal. Cold. Hard. The teeth pressing into my palm as I drew it out, as I approached the studio door, as I tried to make my shaking hands perform this simple, ordinary task that I'd performed a thousand times before.

The lock resisted.

Not really—it was the same lock it had always been, the same mechanism that had opened for me every morning and every evening for years—but my hands were wrong. Trembling in a way that went deeper than cold, deeper than exhaustion, trembling with something that had taken up residence in my nervous system and refused to leave. The key scraped against metal, missed the opening, scraped again. I couldn't make the angles line up. Couldn't translate the intention in my brain into the movement required of my fingers. The distance between wanting and doing had become vast, unbridgeable, a chasm I kept falling into.

I pressed my forehead against the door.

The wood was cold and rough, smelling of age and weather and all the years it had stood here guarding this space that was mine. My studio. My sanctuary. The place I'd built with Paul's money and my vision, the place where I'd taught hundreds of students, the place where I went when I needed to remember who I was. I closed my eyes and breathed the smell of it—timber and old paint and something fainter underneath, something that might have been hope or might have been desperation, I couldn't tell the difference anymore.

The key slid home.

The lock turned.

The door swung inward on hinges that needed oiling—I'd been meaning to fix that for months, had kept forgetting, kept getting distracted by children and classes and the endless small emergencies that made up a life—and the smell of the studio hit me. Rosin and timber and old sweat, the accumulated evidence of countless hours of work, of bodies moving through space, of music and effort and the particular exertion that leaves its mark on a room. I knew this smell. Had loved this smell. Had breathed it in so many times that it had become part of me, as familiar as my own skin.

But tonight it was wrong.

Something underneath it. Something sour, something chemical, something that reminded me of corridors I didn't want to remember and rooms where people were kept when they couldn't be trusted to keep themselves. I stood in the doorway, not moving, not breathing, trying to identify the wrongness while my heart beat too fast and my skin crawled with something that might have been cold or might have been fear or might have been the first tremors of the medication working its way deeper into my system.

The smell isn't real.

I made myself think the words. Made myself believe them. It's the pills. It's exhaustion. It's two days without proper sleep and a night spent calling a number that no longer exists. The smell is rosin and timber and sweat, the same as always, and anything else is just my brain misfiring, my senses lying, my body betraying me in yet another way.

I reached for the light switch.

The fluorescents flickered—that stutter they always did, that brief uncertain moment before the tubes fully caught—and the studio leapt into existence around me. Mirrors along one wall, multiplying the space into infinity, showing me twenty versions of the room and twenty versions of myself standing in the doorway. The barre running the length of the opposite wall, worn smooth by decades of hands, by my hands, by the hands of every student who'd ever gripped it while learning to balance. The scuffed floor with its mysterious geography of marks and scratches. The small speaker in the corner. The windows that showed nothing but darkness now but would fill with morning light soon, would announce the arrival of a day I wasn't ready to face.

I stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind me.

The sound of it closing was louder than it should have been. Final. The kind of sound that meant something, that marked a transition from one state to another. I was in the studio now. I was where I belonged. Everything was going to be fine.

I walked toward the centre of the room, my bare feet leaving damp prints on the floor, and my body began to remember. This was the space where I knew what to do. This was the place where thought became motion, where chaos became choreography, where I could transform myself into something graceful and controlled no matter how badly everything else was falling apart. I just had to follow the ritual. Start with the familiar. Let muscle memory take over where conscious thought had failed.

Shoes first.

I needed my dance shoes. They were—where were they? By the door, where I always left them, except I was looking at the door and they weren't there. I turned. Scanned the room. Found them near the barre, placed neatly side by side, though I had no memory of putting them there. Had I worn them last time? Had someone else moved them? The questions multiplied without answers, and I pushed them aside because the questions didn't matter, only the shoes mattered, only getting them on my feet and beginning the ritual that would save me.

I crossed to the barre and sat down on the floor.

The wood was cold through my thin clothing, hard and unforgiving, and I welcomed it. The solidity. The realness. Something my body could trust even as my mind kept sliding sideways. I picked up the first shoe—left foot, always left foot first, that was the rule, that was how it was done—and tried to slide it on.

My foot was wrong.

Swollen maybe, or shaped differently than it had been before, or maybe the shoe had shrunk in the hours since I'd last worn it. The leather resisted. Bunched. Refused to accommodate the flesh I was trying to force into it. I pushed harder, felt my toes compress, felt something that might have been pain if I'd been paying enough attention to categorise it.

The shoe went on.

I reached for the strap, that simple buckle I'd fastened a million times, and my fingers fumbled. Slipped. Couldn't find the hole, couldn't align the metal with the leather, couldn't perform this basic task that children mastered in their first weeks of class. I tried again. And again. The strap kept sliding away from me, kept refusing to cooperate, and I could feel something building in my chest—frustration or panic or the first stirrings of the scream I'd been holding back for two days.

Just breathe.

The words arrived in my mother's voice, which was strange because my mother wasn't here and I didn't want to think about her, didn't want to think about anyone outside this room, this moment, this struggle with a buckle that shouldn't have been a struggle at all. Just breathe. You know how to do this. You've been doing this your whole life.

The strap finally caught.

I reached for the other shoe, the right one, and this time it went easier—or maybe I'd simply stopped registering the difficulty, stopped paying attention to the messages my hands were sending, stopped caring whether the process was smooth or ragged as long as the result was achieved. Both shoes on. Both straps fastened. I could stand up now. I could begin.

The mirrors watched me as I rose.

Twenty Claires, all of them struggling to their feet, all of them pale and hollow-eyed and moving with a stiffness that had nothing to do with lack of warming up. The woman in the mirror looked like someone I'd seen before, someone I'd known briefly and then lost touch with, but she didn't look like me. Her hair was matted on one side, pressed flat by hours on a pillow or a couch or whatever surface she'd collapsed onto. Her eyes were wrong—too wide, the pupils blown out until there was almost no colour left, dark holes where a person used to be. Her skin had taken on a greyish cast, waxy and dull, like something that had been left too long in a place without light.

I looked away from her.

Looked at the floor instead, at my feet in their dance shoes, at the familiar position I was trying to find. First position. Heels together, toes turned out, weight distributed evenly. The foundation of everything. The first thing any dancer learned, the position you returned to again and again no matter how far you'd travelled from it.

My feet wouldn't cooperate.

The turnout was wrong—too forced, the knees pulling inward instead of tracking over the toes. I adjusted. Overcorrected. Found myself standing in something that was almost first position but not quite, a approximation of the shape without the substance. Close enough. It would have to be close enough.

Music.

I needed music.

The thought arrived with sudden urgency, and I was moving toward the speaker before I'd consciously decided to, my body responding to its own imperatives while my mind lagged behind. My phone was in my hand—when had I picked it up? It was always in my hand now, an extension of myself I couldn't seem to put down—and I was connecting to the Bluetooth, scrolling through playlists, looking for something that would anchor me.

The phone buzzed.

Not a call—just the vibration of the connection being established, the speaker accepting the signal—but for a moment my heart stopped, my breath caught, my whole body suspended in the impossible hope that it was him, that Paul had finally called, that the nightmare was over and everything could go back to normal.

It wasn't him.

Of course it wasn't. The number you have called cannot be connected. The voice played in my head even though I hadn't made a call, even though the phone was just sitting there waiting for me to choose a song. Cannot be connected. Please check the number. The words had taken up residence in my brain and they weren't leaving, weren't fading, were just going to keep playing on a loop until I found some way to drown them out.

I pressed play on something—I didn't even see what, just jabbed at the screen and let the algorithm decide—and music filled the studio. Piano. Something classical, something slow and melancholy that felt like it was reaching inside my chest and squeezing. Not what I would have chosen. Not what I needed. But the silence had been worse, and at least now there was sound, at least now there was something other than the voice in my head telling me that the number I had called could not be connected.

I walked back to the centre of the room.

Stood in something like first position.

Raised my arms to begin.

Port de bras. Start simple. Start with what you know. The arms moving through positions—first, second, fifth, back to first—the most basic exercise, the thing I'd been doing since I was four years old, the movement that should have been as natural as breathing. I lifted my right arm, curved it in front of my chest, and tried to find the line.

My arm shook.

Not a tremor exactly—something deeper, something that came from the muscles themselves as they tried to execute commands that weren't arriving properly. The signal from brain to limb was degraded somehow, full of static, and my arm stuttered through positions it should have flowed through, jerking from one shape to the next like a film missing frames.

I tried again.

Brought the arm down. Started over. First position. The arm rising slowly, tracing an arc through the air that should have been smooth and instead was ragged, interrupted, wrong. The mirror showed me what I didn't want to see—twenty women with shaking arms, twenty faces tight with concentration, twenty bodies that couldn't remember how to do the thing they'd been trained to do.

Just keep going.

I moved to the barre. Placed my left hand on the wood, felt the grain pressing into my palm, and began the exercises I'd done every day for thirty years. Pliés first—bending the knees, keeping the back straight, sinking down and rising up in a rhythm that should have been meditative, should have been calming, should have activated some deep well of muscle memory that would carry me through.

My knees wouldn't bend properly.

They moved in jerks, in increments, lowering me toward the floor in a motion that was more like mechanical failure than dance. I could feel the joints grinding, feel the muscles fighting against some invisible resistance, feel my body rebelling against instructions it had followed a million times before. The plié was supposed to be soft. Continuous. A single unbroken descent and ascent, the breath coordinating with the movement, the whole thing as natural as a wave rolling in and out.

What I was doing wasn't a plié. It was a woman trying to sit down and failing.

I pushed through anyway.

Tendus next. Brushing the working foot along the floor, extending to a full point, drawing it back to position. The most basic transfer of weight, the foundation of every step that followed. My right foot slid outward, searching for the floor, and caught. Dragged. The point I was reaching for kept moving, kept evading me, and when I finally arrived somewhere near it my ankle was wobbling, my arch refusing to engage, my toes gripping the floor instead of lengthening through it.

Wrong. Wrong. All of it wrong.

The music kept playing. That melancholy piano, those slow cascading notes that sounded less like accompaniment and more like mourning. I moved through the exercises—tendu front, tendu side, tendu back—but none of them were right, none of them were what they should have been, and the mirror kept showing me the evidence of my failure, kept reflecting back the image of a woman who had forgotten how to dance.

The phone was in my hand.

I stopped mid-tendu. Stared at it. I didn't remember picking it up, didn't remember leaving the barre or crossing to where I'd left it by the speaker, but here I was in the centre of the room with the phone pressed to my ear and the ringing already in progress.

Once.

Twice.

Click.

"The number you have called cannot be connected. Please check the number and try again."

The words hit like they hit every time—a blade finding the same wound, opening it fresh. I hung up. Stared at the screen. The call log showed another entry I didn't remember making, another timestamp that didn't align with my experience of time, another piece of evidence that I was losing chunks of myself without knowing they were gone.

I put the phone down.

Picked it up again.

Put it down.

The ritual was supposed to be dancing. The ritual was supposed to save me. But there was another ritual now, a darker one, and it kept interfering—my thumb finding Paul's name before my brain could intervene, my ear pressing against the phone before I'd made a decision to call, my whole body oriented toward this hopeless reaching even as it destroyed any chance of the peace I'd come here to find.

I forced myself back to the barre.

Placed my hand on the wood. Found something like first position. And began again, from the beginning, as if starting over could somehow produce a different result. Pliés. Tendus. The building blocks of everything, the vocabulary I'd spent my life learning to speak. My body moved through the shapes and I watched it in the mirror, watched this stranger who looked like me executing movements that looked like dance but felt like drowning.

The mistakes accumulated.

A stumble in relevé, my balance deserting me mid-rise. A missed count, my body arriving somewhere the music had already left. A turn that didn't turn, that rotated halfway and stopped, leaving me facing the wrong direction with no memory of how I'd gotten there. Each error was small on its own—the kind of thing that happened in class sometimes, the kind of thing I corrected in students every day—but they were adding up, compounding, building toward something I couldn't see but could feel approaching.

My reflection fractured.

Not literally—the mirrors were intact, the glass unbroken—but the image kept splitting, multiplying, showing me versions of myself that didn't quite align. Twenty Claires, then forty, then more, each one slightly out of sync with the others, each one making different mistakes at different moments, a crowd of failing dancers where there should have been just one.

I closed my eyes.

Tried to dance without looking, without the mirror's judgment, without the constant reminder of how far I'd fallen from what I used to be. The music was still playing—something different now, when had it changed?—and I let it move through me, let my arms rise and fall without trying to control them, let my legs carry me wherever they wanted to go.

The phone was at my ear.

"The number you have called cannot be connected. Please check the number and try again."

I was crying.

I hadn't noticed it starting—the tears were just there, sliding down my cheeks, dripping off my chin, falling onto the floor of the studio where they had no right to be. Dancers didn't cry in the studio. The studio was for discipline, for control, for the transformation of chaos into beauty. The studio was sacred. And I was defiling it with my tears and my stumbling and my inability to do the one thing I'd always been able to do.

I hung up the phone.

Threw it.

No—I stopped myself. Caught the motion before it completed, before my arm could swing, before the phone could leave my hand and sail through the air toward the mirror. I couldn't throw it. Not yet. Not until I'd tried everything else, not until I was certain there was nothing left to try. I set the phone down on the floor by the speaker—gently, carefully, as if it were something precious rather than the instrument of my torture—and walked back to the centre of the room.

I was going to dance.

I was going to dance if it killed me.

I took first position. Raised my arms. And began a combination I'd taught a hundred times—tombé, pas de bourrée, glissade, assemblé. Simple movements linked together, a phrase any intermediate student could execute, something so deeply embedded in my body that it should have emerged automatically, effortlessly, like breathing.

Tombé. The fall forward onto one foot, the transfer of weight that began everything. I stepped and my ankle rolled, not enough to fall but enough to throw off what came next.

Pas de bourrée. Three quick steps, behind-side-front, the feet weaving a pattern I knew by heart. Except I didn't know it anymore—my feet went behind-behind-side, the wrong rhythm, the wrong shape, and I had to stop and start again.

I didn't start again.

I stood there in the middle of the room, feet in some approximation of fourth position, arms hanging at my sides, and let myself feel it. The truth I'd been running from all night, all week, all my life. I couldn't do this. I couldn't dance my way out of what was happening. The ritual wasn't going to save me because I'd already gone somewhere the ritual couldn't reach.

The mirror showed me a woman standing alone in a dance studio at dawn.

She didn't look like a dancer.

She looked like a wreck. Like something that had washed up after a storm—battered, disoriented, unsure which way led back to shore. Her hair had escaped whatever style it had started in and now hung around her face in tangles. Her shirt was damp with sweat despite the cold. Her eyes were red-rimmed and wild, the eyes of an animal that has been cornered and doesn't understand why.

I walked toward her.

The woman in the mirror walked toward me.

We met at the glass, face to face, close enough that I could see every flaw, every sign of the damage I'd done to myself over the past two days. The skin around my eyes was puffy. My lips were cracked. There was something crusted at the corner of my mouth—drool, maybe, from the hours I'd spent semi-conscious on the couch—and I hadn't even noticed it, hadn't thought to check, had just walked around with evidence of my dissolution visible to anyone who looked.

I raised my hand to the mirror.

The woman raised her hand to meet mine.

Our palms pressed against the glass, separated by nothing but a millimetre of cold smoothness, and for a moment I thought I could feel her—the other Claire, the one in the mirror, the one who was watching all of this happen and couldn't do anything to stop it. She was scared. I could see it in her eyes, in the tension around her mouth, in the way her hand pressed harder against the glass as if she could push through it, could reach me, could pull me back from wherever I was going.

I couldn't help her.

I couldn't help anyone.

The phone was in my hand again.

I didn't fight it this time. Didn't pretend I had any control over what my body was doing. I just watched, almost curious, as my thumb found Paul's name and pressed call and lifted the device to my ear.

"The number you have called cannot be connected."

I kept the phone at my ear even after the message ended. Listened to the silence that followed. Tried to hear something in it—a breath, a hesitation, any sign that there was a human being on the other end of this void instead of just automated systems and dead circuits.

There was nothing.

I called again.

"The number you have called cannot be connected. Please check the number and try again."

And again.

"The number you have called—"

I was dancing.

I didn't remember starting, but I was moving now—the phone still at my ear, the message still playing, and my body executing movements I hadn't asked it to make. Piqué turn, one arm raised while the other held the phone. Arabesque, leg extended behind me while the automated voice told me what I already knew. Chassé across the floor, travelling and calling and crying and dancing all at once.

"—cannot be connected."

The two rituals had merged.

I couldn't separate them anymore—the dancing and the calling, the movement and the reaching, the desperate need to find grace and the desperate need to find Paul. They had become the same thing, had wound around each other until I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. My body turned and my thumb pressed call. My arm extended and my ear pressed against the phone. Every step was a message, every message was a step, and none of it was getting me anywhere, none of it was working, none of it was going to save me.

The mirror showed me what I was becoming.

Twenty women, turning and calling and falling apart. Twenty phones pressed to twenty ears. Twenty mouths moving, saying things I couldn't hear, words that might have been Paul's name or might have been prayers or might have been nothing at all, just sound without meaning, noise to fill the silence that kept rushing back no matter how hard I tried to push it away.

I stopped.

Stood in the centre of the room, breathing hard, phone still clutched in my hand. The music had stopped at some point—I didn't know when—and the studio was quiet except for my ragged breath and the buzz of the fluorescent lights and the small mechanical sound of the phone in my palm, still connected, still waiting.

I hung up.

The silence was absolute.

I looked around the room—this place I'd loved, this sanctuary I'd built, this last refuge where I'd thought I could hide from what was happening—and I didn't recognise it. The mirrors were hostile now, showing me things I didn't want to see. The barre was useless, just a piece of wood attached to a wall. The floor was marked with the evidence of my passage—scuff marks and sweat stains and the damp footprints I'd tracked in from outside—but it wasn't my floor anymore. It belonged to someone else, someone who could actually dance, someone who deserved to be here.

I was done.

The thought arrived with the force of certainty. Whatever I'd been trying to do here, it wasn't working. Whatever salvation the studio had offered in the past, it wasn't available tonight. I'd come here to find myself and instead I'd lost the last thing I thought I could hold onto.

The pills were in my hand.

I stared at the bottle, not remembering picking it up, not remembering crossing to wherever I'd left it. The Seroquel from 2010, the prescription that had been waiting in my bathroom cabinet for eight years, the medication that was supposed to quiet the thing inside me that couldn't be quieted. I'd taken some already—in the house, after the phone message changed, after Paul disappeared not just from my life but from the entire telecommunications network. How many? Two? Three?

I shook the bottle.

The pills inside rattled, loose and numerous. There were a lot left. More than I'd thought. The label said take one tablet at bedtime but the label had been written by a doctor who didn't know what this felt like, who couldn't imagine standing in a dance studio at dawn with your husband's voice erased from existence and your body refusing to do the one thing it had always known how to do.

I opened the bottle.

Shook two pills into my palm.

I swallowed the pills.

They went down without water, scraping against my throat, catching briefly before sliding past. I waited for something to happen—for the world to change, for the edge to come off, for the unbearable noise in my head to quiet even slightly.

Nothing happened.

Not yet. The pills needed time to dissolve, to enter my bloodstream, to find their way to whatever receptors they were supposed to bind to. But time had become unreliable, had started doing strange things I couldn't predict, and I didn't know how long I could wait. Didn't know if I could wait at all.

I needed to keep moving.

The thought came with urgency—if I stopped, something would catch me. Something that had been chasing me all night, all week, all my life. The thing I'd been running from since I was old enough to understand that there was something wrong with me, something that other people didn't have, something that made me different in ways I could never explain. If I stopped moving, it would have me. If I stopped dancing, even this broken approximation of dancing, I would have to feel what I'd been trying so hard not to feel.

I took first position.

Raised my arms.

And began.

Not the combinations I'd been trying before—not the choreographed phrases or the barre exercises or any of the structured movements I'd learned in thirty years of training. Something else. Something that came from somewhere deeper, somewhere older, somewhere that existed before ballet had given names to positions and steps. My body began to tell a story it had been holding for a long time.

My arms rose and fell like things with their own will.

My legs traced patterns I'd never learned, shapes that emerged from some deep grammar of the body, some vocabulary written in muscle and bone rather than thought. I wasn't in control of this. I was just a conduit, a channel, a thing through which movement passed without stopping to ask permission.

The medication was starting to hit.

I could feel it now—a softening at the edges, a blurring of the boundaries between myself and the room. My limbs felt heavy, moving through resistance, as if the air had thickened into something I had to push through. But I kept moving. Kept letting my body do whatever it was doing, kept surrendering to the motion even as the motion became stranger, more desperate, more like flailing and less like dance.

The phone was in my hand.

I was calling.

"The number you have called cannot be connected."

I hung up and kept dancing.

Called again.

"The number you have called—"

My feet were doing something without me. Travelling across the floor in a pattern I wasn't choosing, carrying me toward the mirror and then away from it, tracing a path that might have been choreography in some language I didn't speak. I let them go. Let my body take over completely, let my mind recede to somewhere in the back of my skull where it could watch without interfering.

"—cannot be connected."

The voice was inside me now. Not coming from the phone—the phone was somewhere, I didn't know where, maybe still in my hand or maybe on the floor or maybe thrown against the wall though I didn't think I'd thrown it yet—but I could hear the words anyway. Cannot be connected. Cannot be connected. A mantra, a curse, a truth I couldn't escape no matter how fast I moved, how desperately I danced.

The edges of the room were dissolving.

The mirrors ran like water. The barre bent and straightened and bent again. The floor rose toward me and then fell away, the stable ground I'd trusted all my life becoming unstable, uncertain, a surface that might open up and swallow me at any moment.

I kept dancing.

My feet found the floor. Found it again. Found it. The impact of each step sending shockwaves up through my legs, into my hips, along my spine. I was stamping now, or running, or something in between—movement that had nothing to do with grace and everything to do with survival, with keeping the body in motion so the thing chasing me couldn't catch up.

The phone was at my ear.

"The number you have called cannot be connected. Please check the number and try again."

I was going to throw it.

The knowledge arrived before the action, a certainty that rose up from somewhere below conscious thought. I was going to throw this phone, this device that connected me to nothing, this instrument of torture that kept promising connection and delivering only that flat, automated voice. I was going to throw it and I was going to watch it break and I was going to feel something that wasn't this unbearable, endless reaching.

My arm drew back.

The phone left my hand.

It sailed through the air in a trajectory I watched but didn't control, spinning slightly, catching the fluorescent light, beautiful in its way—a small dark rectangle turning end over end toward the mirror, toward the wall of glass where twenty versions of myself stood with their arms extended, twenty women who had all just thrown something they couldn't take back.

The impact.

The sound.

CRACK.

The phone hit the glass and the glass didn't shatter—not immediately, not all at once—it fractured. Spider-webbed. A thousand tiny lines racing outward from the point of impact, spreading across the surface in patterns that looked almost intentional, almost designed, as if the mirror had been waiting for this moment, had been preparing all along to show me what destruction looked like.

For a moment, everything held.

The glass stayed in its frame, held together by nothing but inertia and the reluctance of broken things to admit they were broken. I could see the fractures spreading, could hear the small sounds of stress, the creak of material being pushed past its limits. The mirror showed me a version of myself that was cracked now too, divided into sections by lines of damage, a woman in pieces.

Then it fell.

The glass let go of itself.

Pieces separating, sliding, cascading down the wall in a glittering waterfall of reflection. The sound was enormous—each shard adding its voice to the chorus, glass striking glass striking floor, a percussion section for the silence that had replaced the music, for the emptiness that had replaced everything. The crash went on longer than seemed possible, the fragments finding new ways to break, to shatter, to multiply their destruction.

I stood in the middle of the studio and watched it happen.

The glass spread across the floor like a frozen explosion, shards catching the fluorescent light and throwing it back in fractured rainbows. Some pieces were large—palm-sized sections that had held together through the initial impact—and some were tiny, dust almost, glittering powder that would embed itself in skin and fabric and the cracks between floorboards. All of it sharp. All of it beautiful. The most beautiful destruction I had ever seen.

My phone was somewhere in the debris.

I could see the edge of it—the corner of the case protruding from beneath a larger shard, the screen probably shattered now, the device finally matching the thing it had been used to pursue. The number you have called cannot be connected. The phone couldn't connect either. We were the same now, both of us broken, both of us incapable of reaching the person we'd been trying to reach.

I took a step.

Glass beneath my feet.

I felt it before I understood it—the pressure, the sharpness, the places where edges found their way through the thin sole of my dance shoe and began to communicate with the flesh beneath. The shoes offered some protection but not enough. Not nearly enough. I could feel pieces pressing in, could feel the moment when pressure became pain became something warmer, something wetter.

I kept walking.

Across the debris field. Through the scattered remains of the mirror. My feet finding spaces between the shards, or not finding them, or finding them and then losing them again. The blood came slowly at first—I couldn't see it, could only feel the warmth spreading, could only sense the places where my skin had opened and begun to leak. Then faster. More. Dark spots appearing on the floor behind me, marking my path like breadcrumbs.

I was still dancing.

Or something like dancing. My body still moving in patterns that came from somewhere I couldn't name, arms rising and falling, legs carrying me forward and back across the glass-strewn floor. Each step cost something. Each movement left a mark. But I couldn't stop—didn't want to stop—because stopping meant feeling and feeling meant dying and I wasn't ready to die, not yet, not until I'd finished whatever story my body was trying to tell.

The mirror was gone but I could still see myself.

Reflected in the shards on the floor. Multiplied in the fragments that caught the light. A hundred versions of Claire, a thousand, each one frozen in a different moment of the dance, each one bleeding from the feet, each one crying without sound. We moved together, the infinite army of broken women, and our blood painted patterns on the studio floor.

The medication pulled me down.

I could feel it—a weight in my limbs, a drag in my thoughts, a gravitational force that wanted me horizontal. The pills I'd taken were adding up, were combining and compounding, were turning my body into something that moved through honey, through glass, through a medium that resisted every effort. Each gesture required more strength than the last. Each step was harder than the one before.

But the terror pushed me forward.

The thing that had been chasing me all night—it was closer now. I could feel it at my back, could sense it in the spaces between movements, could hear it in the silence that kept trying to swallow the sound of my bleeding feet on the broken glass. If I stopped, it would have me. If I surrendered to the medication's pull, to the exhaustion's weight, to the simple appeal of lying down and letting everything end—it would catch up. It would consume me. It would win.

I couldn't let it win.

My arms rose above my head—or tried to, reaching about three-quarters of the way before the muscles failed and they began to fall. I caught them at shoulder height, held them there trembling, and turned. A turn that was meant to be a fouetté but was really just rotation, my body spinning on an axis I could barely find, my head not spotting because spotting required a control I'd lost somewhere in the past hour or the past day or the past lifetime.

The room blurred around me.

The remaining mirrors—still intact, still watching—smeared into bands of light and reflection. The glass on the floor became a continuous surface, a glittering lake I was dancing across, was bleeding into, was becoming part of. I was the studio now. The studio was me. We had merged somewhere in the past few minutes, had lost the boundary that separated dancer from space.

I stopped spinning.

Stood swaying in the centre of the room, my feet sending up small signals of damage that I registered without acting on, my arms hanging at my sides because holding them up had become impossible. The terror was still there. The medication was still pulling. The two forces grinding against each other inside me, tearing at the places where they met.

One more dance.

The thought surfaced from somewhere that still had thoughts. One more. The final dance, the last movement, the thing I'd been building toward all night without knowing it. Not choreography—nothing with names or positions or counts. Just movement. Just the body saying what the mouth couldn't say.

I began.

It wasn't anything I'd ever done before. Wasn't anything anyone had ever done, as far as I knew. The movements came from a place before training, before technique, before the careful grammar of classical dance had imposed its rules on human motion. My arms swept through the air like they were clearing away cobwebs. My legs carried me in circles that spiralled inward, tighter and tighter, the glass crunching beneath my feet. My spine curved and straightened and curved again, fluid as water, as boneless as something that had never had a skeleton.

I was dancing the story of my life.

All of it. Everything I'd never said, never shown, never let anyone see. The fear that lived at the centre of me, the conviction that I was wrong somehow, broken in a way no one could fix. The desperate need to be loved and the certainty that I was unlovable. The children I'd failed and the husband who'd left and the mother who looked at me with worry she tried to disguise as something else. The studio where I'd spent my life teaching other people how to be graceful while I shattered inside.

It all came out.

Poured out of me in movement that had no name, that followed no rules, that was ugly and beautiful and true in a way nothing I'd ever done had been true. I danced my rage—at Paul, at myself, at the world that had made me this way. I danced my grief—for the marriage that was over, for the dancer I'd wanted to be, for the person I might have been if everything had gone differently. I danced my terror—the thing chasing me, the thing that had always been chasing me, the thing I'd been running from since before I could remember.

The pills pulled harder.

My legs were giving up. I could feel them—the muscles refusing signals, the joints losing their ability to bear weight. The dance was becoming smaller, was contracting toward the floor, was bringing me closer and closer to the glass-strewn surface I'd been moving across. My feet left smears of red with every step now. My arms felt like they belonged to someone else, attached to my shoulders but not controlled by my brain.

The terror pushed.

Don't stop. Don't stop. If you stop—

But I was stopping.

Not by choice. Not by decision. My body was simply reaching its limit, hitting the wall that even the most desperate will couldn't push past. I'd danced through exhaustion before, had performed on injured feet, had forced my body to obey when it wanted to quit. But this was different. This was chemical. The medication had accumulated past the point where determination mattered.

My knees buckled.

Not all at once—first the right one, then the left, a progressive failure that gave me time to understand what was happening but not time to prevent it. I was falling. The floor was rising. The glass was coming to meet me and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I reached out.

My hands searching for something to hold, finding only air. The barre was too far away. The walls were too far away. Everything was too far away and I was falling through empty space, through the infinite distance between standing and lying down, through the gap that had opened up in the middle of my life and was swallowing me whole.

I hit the floor.

Shoulder first—the impact sending shockwaves through my body, rattling my teeth, jarring something loose in my chest that might have been a rib or might have been a sob. Then hip. Then the side of my face, pressing against wood that was cold, so cold, colder than anything should be, colder than the grave.

Glass.

I could feel it near my hand, could see it glittering at the edge of my vision. Some of the shards were pressed against my skin—my arm, my cheek, the places where I'd landed—and they were cutting, they were opening small doors in my flesh, they were letting out the things I'd tried so hard to keep in.

The lights were still on.

Blazing down from the ceiling, fluorescent and harsh, illuminating everything with the same clinical indifference they'd bring to any scene. A dance class. A rehearsal. A woman lying motionless on a blood-streaked floor surrounded by broken glass. The lights didn't care. The lights would keep burning until someone came to turn them off.

I tried to move.

My body didn't respond. The signals left my brain and disappeared somewhere along the way, lost in the chemical fog that had descended over everything. I could feel my limbs—could feel the cold floor beneath me, the glass against my skin, the wetness spreading from my feet—but I couldn't make them move. Couldn't make anything move. Could only lie there and breathe and wait.

The ceiling was very far away.

The fluorescent tubes stretched across it in parallel lines, their light diffusing into a general brightness that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. I stared at them because there was nothing else to stare at, because turning my head would have required strength I didn't have, because the lights were there and I was here and the distance between us was the whole rest of my life.

My phone was somewhere.

In the debris, under the glass, wherever it had landed when I'd thrown it. It was broken now, probably. Couldn't connect. Couldn't reach Paul. Couldn't reach anyone. We were the same, the phone and I—shattered things that had been whole once, that had had purposes once, that were now just wreckage waiting to be cleaned up.

The silence was absolute.

No music. No automated voice. No sound at all except my breathing, which was becoming slower, shallower, the rhythm evening out as my body surrendered to whatever was happening to it. I could feel myself sinking—not physically, the floor was solid beneath me—but in some other way. Dropping down through layers of consciousness, through strata of awareness, toward a darkness that waited at the bottom like a promise.

Charlie.

The thought surfaced from somewhere—Charlie was outside, still, had been outside all night, was waiting by the fence in the cold while I danced myself into destruction. Poor Charlie. Poor forgotten dog. Paul had always loved her. Paul had always made sure she was fed and warm and safe.

Paul.

His name hurt in a way nothing else did. A bright, specific pain in the midst of the general fading. Paul, who wasn't coming. Paul, who couldn't be connected. Paul, who had climbed out a window and driven away and disconnected his phone and left me here alone to shatter against my own reflection.

The darkness was close now.

Rising up to meet me, warm and soft and promising nothing at all—no pain, no thought, no endless reaching for something that couldn't be reached. I could feel myself letting go. Feel myself surrendering the last thin hold I had on consciousness.

The lights blazed on.

The glass glittered.

The blood pooled.

And then—nothing.