Dancing With You

By: Shalom Aranas

The wind was silent behind her as she ran the strip of sand beside the shore that seemed to want to move more towards the higher slope. The water soaked her running shoes but it didn’t matter. She needed to outrun the wind. The shore brought tales of brine and seaweeds. She was in love with the fragrance of the sea. There was the sand and there was the sea. She thought, maybe a swim afterwards. The black beach was empty. Soon there will be people. But not yet, this morning.
She was a visiting student to the seaside university town. They were philosophical treatises on love and the sea, the sand and the ocean, the horizon and how the sea seemed to meld with the sky. How many permutations could one writer write about loving and the sea. It was like two fishes in a small, blue porcelain bowl, each one tugging the other in a dance.
She was catching her breath when she noticed a pretty hut. She entered and found it empty. There was a barre for ballerinas and soft cushions at a corner. A wall was a mirror and on the other side, naive paintings of the sea, the seeking sea so still, as though with the frothing edge it was a conch shell, lying on its side or it was the other way around, the sand refused to be engulfed.
She danced like a marionette and felt an inward laughter.
A man in a black trench coat appeared, as though slipping in from the cracks of time. He went to her, borrowed an earbud, placed it to his ear and danced with her. She wanted to pull away. He was a stranger and she was dancing with him. She had seen him in town, riding a ferocious big, black motorbike. She felt as though he looked at her alone, apart from everyone else when she walked each morning for her morning aerobics class.
Now, he was dancing with her. He nudged her to step on his shoes and swayed. He smelled of aftershave. She could smell mint and brine.
She could feel a duality inside her as though she had split, a part of her danced with him and felt less alone. At the same time she felt alone. He made her feel such things.
He slipped behind the platform wall and was gone.
Walking to poetry class at the edge of town where her teacher lived, she carried a basket of red roses to replace the ones she brought last week. She stopped after seeing him again on his bike. She felt disturbed as though he owed her an introduction at least. He pressed his pedal to stop before her too.
Soon she was behind him on the bike running down the street of the university town lined with acacia trees in bloom with fiery flowers and petals of roses strewn behind them from her basket. He slipped through a side street and so they were at the beach again. His bike powerfully prodded against the sand and she clung to him embracing his back. It was all about speed, backriding together, not minding where he would bring her.
The sun beat against her skin and the wind whipped her hair about her face. He stopped beside the dance studio. A class of children was going on.
She chose to go with him. And yet, from now on, she would ride with him to the beach, where there was no one to see her dance, alone with him.