First Position by Melanie Hamrick EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Melanie Hamrick
- Language: English
- Genre: Contemporary Women Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
WASHINGTON, D.C.
NOW
Sylvie
I used to love the word encore. It meant everything. It meant I want more.
It meant they wanted more, more of what only I was able to give. It
meant I was good. Too good to stop.
Encore meant, I don’t want you to say goodbye—not just yet.
Once upon a time I yearned to hear it. Now the word fills me with dread.
I’m a weary traveler under the hot sun, exhausted, desperately thirsty, and
achingly hungry; and I’m being told that the end is only a mirage—there are
more miles yet to go.
“Encore!” Diana’s voice screams the word. “Again!”
I take my position and repeat the phrase for the hundredth time. Sweat is
running down my forehead from the exertion under the hot stage lights. I
can feel a blister beginning to swell and bloom on my heel. I know that’s
going to mean pain, and that the more I ignore it—and I will ignore it—the
longer it will take to heal.
I smile. Not because it’s all worth it or anything like that. I smile
because I must, and if I don’t—and if I don’t convince Diana that the smile
is effortless—I’ll just have to do it again.
Again.
Again.
Encore.
Diana is the ballet mistress, which means she is basically like the coach,
and we’re her players to prep for the big game. She begs more of every
position, straightening every line in our physique, making us bend until we
nearly break—all while managing to look as peaceful and easy and
effortless as a weeping willow.
Diana is who yells encore until the word starts to feel like a whip
through flesh.
Last rehearsal, Diana’s command of encore meant doing a piqué
arabesque fifty-seven times in a row. My feet bled at the end. No one cares
when your feet bleed here. Honestly, to see a track of bloody footprints
down the glossy floors of the halls is no more suspicious than grass and dirt
in the locker room after a football game.
The week before that, encore meant doing échappés until the entire
bottom half of my body went numb.
If beauty is pain, then becoming art is torture.
Never-ending torture too. It has taken me twenty years and counting to
hold my hands correctly, and every single day I am still told that a finger is
out of place. Usually it’s my thumb, jutting out just a bit too much.
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