Rhythm Lost

When she was a young girl Rosie Carter loved to dance. Her small body would sway to the slightest hint of music – a bird’s song, or the tinkling of wind chimes on a summer’s evening. And when she heard the notes her body would respond, sometimes in spite of itself. Rosie had no choice but to follow, and her arms would rise and circle, her back would arch and her legs come alive in spirals and steps and swirls that emanated from her heart’s embrace of the sounds around her.

And there would be times when she needed not even a hint of a song to begin her dance. She might be with her mother at a supermarket, sniffing down an aisle of canned goods, when the urge would overwhelm her, and there in the clanking and chatter of a place of commerce, dance as if she were alone on a western beach, her movements echoing the clouds that drifted over her mind’s landscape.

In all, it was the dance. Always the inner rhythms that only Rosie could hear pushed her soul to movement, to freedom, to joy.

Her parents found it all both delightful and embarrassing in turns. Rosie’s mother had too often been startled by the young girl’s spontaneity, and had more than once pulled her away in the public places where people might stop and stare. Still, she saw it all for what it was, and treasured her daughter’s innocence. Rosie’s father in particular marveled at his daughter’s supple movements, but more at the joy that those movements inferred. For there was release in Rosie’s dance, an unburdening of care and worry and thought itself, an intuitive response to the unseen rhythms of an unknowable universe that in those moments only Rosie could hear. After a day’s toil in a dank office, George Carter could look forward to his daughter’s welcoming hug, her tinkling laughter, and, on the most special of nights, the celebration of her dance.

When she was nine Rosie saw an advertisement for a dance studio where young girls could learn to do it all the right way, to learn the dances with names and particular steps. She thought of it a while, but when she brought the ad to her mother, Carla Carter dismissed it offhand. “Oh, Rosie, why would you want to do that? Dancing is free, little girl. No need to pay for it”, and neither ever mentioned it again.

Now, twenty-five years on, Rosie Carter came across a similar ad. “Silver Spring School of Dance – Feel the Freedom Of Movement, the Joy of It All.” For some reason it had hit her inbox. Rosie read the ad, then hit a quick delete. She leaned back in her chair and looked out the window across from her cubicle.

There was no privacy in this space, she thought. Nothing that marks off the individual. ‘We’re all just lab rats, and these cubicles are our maze. We chase among ourselves until we reach the other side.’

But then a siren wailed in from the street – a fire truck or an ambulance, she could not tell – and its lament did not sound at all like an alarm or a screech. Rosie closed her eyes and she saw birds looping above her, screaming in the joy of the day, bright spots of color and song above an empty beach. For a moment, she felt the urge, the obsession, to rise from her chair and join them, to spread her arms and jump her legs and sing their song, whirling in the shared bliss of movement and light and life itself.

“Rosie.” Her editor’s flat tone brought her back to the moment. She opened her eyes to see him standing at the edge of her desk. She looked up at him blankly.

“This story needs a sharper lead. Takes too long to get to the heart of it. Kid gets shot in the first paragraph, and you don’t identify him until the fourth, or tell why the cop took him down until the fifth. Tighten it up, girl.”

“Okay, Jim,” she said softly. “Give me half an hour or so. I’ll have it back to you.”

Rosie pulled up the draft on her screen but she did not look at it right away. She heard a bird chirp outside the far window, and, for a few precious seconds, she closed her eyes again. There once more she danced, and felt the wash of the waters that might purify a soul in danger of growing old too soon.