Fractures

by Amy DeBellis

Before leaving for the show, I apply lipstick. The product is stumpy from overuse, the tube scarred from rubbing against the keys in my purse. The lipstick slides across my lower lip, because that lip is greasy with Vaseline, because my lips are always dry now. As though the accident has turned my body into a crumbling statue, something bleeding moisture, desiccating without end.  
          The theatre is full of people, but none of them look at me as I walk past to my seat, which is right in the front. A special favor, from Eli. It was the least he could do. 
          Finally the music begins, and the dancers, one by one, enter the stage. The entire cast is lean and sinewed, skin shining beneath the stage lights, but I can’t look at anyone besides the prima ballerina for very long. Julia, I think her name is. Who am I kidding, I know it is. I know her first name and her last name and her favorite drink and her astrology sign. I know the menu of the French bistro where she and Eli went on their last lunch date. I know the location of every callus and taped-up toe on her right foot, because those are what she showed off in her latest social media reel, and I—a heavy lump in my bed, the mattress imprinted with the mold of my body, my body itself feeling like it was growing mold—devoured it all. 
          I watch her extend her arms: first to the male principal dancer, then to the ballerina who plays her mother. And now, and now…
          Her pirouettes are precise. Quick snapping of the head with each turn, leg pulled up smartly to her other knee, arms steady. Her little jumps—only sautés, for the moment—are as easy and weightless as the leaping of an insect, a tiny bright invertebrate glinting and flashing across the stage. The jewels in her costume glitter like a carapace. Her bun is black and solid at the top of her head and doesn’t wobble at all, even as she performs a grand jeté. I can almost see the blood pearling on her forehead from how tightly her hair is scraped back. Or maybe that’s just a memory. It always felt like my hairs were being ripped out by the roots, although no blood ever showed. 
          But memories are milk-teeth, and in their place grow the fangs of the present. Julia lands lightly after each jump, as though she is not wearing heavy, boxy pointe shoes at all, their silk already soaked with sweat, but rather soft slippers made of rose petals. She stretches into an arabesque, balancing en pointe on one foot, the other leg lifted effortlessly behind her at a 120-degree angle. Her arms are spread, and her upper ribs jut out; they look almost like I could hook my fingers on them. 
          But hers is no weak, mutilated body, stinking of shit and disinfectant and every other pervasive hospital smell. No; despite her leanness, her strength is undeniable: the whole one hundred pounds of her balanced on the tiny square toe-box of her pointe shoe, and her arms like feather-plucked wings, and the arch of her back like the curve of a breaking wave.
          I put a hand on my skirt. It’s a long, bohemian-style skirt, the type I never wore before the accident. The fabric covers most of my legs, conceals the twisted keloid scars that mark almost every inch of my calves. Below its hem are my boots. Special boots. Boots that help me walk. I’ve got my cane, too. It became necessary after the first time I went out on my own following the accident—I found myself stranded half a block from home and with no way to continue walking. The pain was unbelievable. It felt like my legs were coming apart from the inside. So I sat against a wall and called Eli in tears, but he was busy, always busy with rehearsal now, You know I love you babe but I can’t just put my life on pause, so I had to call my mother and she arrived with the hospital-issued wheelchair that she had refused to throw away because What if you need it and she was right and she came like an angel of mercy and wheeled me back home.  
          People sometimes glance at a mid-twenties woman walking with a cane, but most of the time they look away. They look away deliberately. Like they so badly want me to know that they’re not staring. I could probably rob a jewelry store in broad daylight and no one would notice. Everyone too busy not looking. Everyone too busy congratulating themselves on being polite. 
          But me, I can’t stop looking. Julia lifts her leg in a developpé, raising it so far that it almost brushes her ear. Her sweat glistens under the lights. Her calf muscles flex with every relevé, thick blocks of muscle that I know she’ll ice and stretch after tonight’s performance. She’ll get a massage; she’ll grit her teeth. But right now she’s smiling, and even though the smile is fake—she’s performing a happy princess, and ballerinas must always bare their teeth in a huge grin, unless they’re doing the mad scene from Giselle or the death scene from Romeo and Juliet—the happiness in her eyes is real. How could it not be? She is doing what she was born to do, and her heart is pounding with the thrill of it. The audience, most of them a sea of black rendered invisible by the stage lights, is drinking in every one of her movements. Gulping them down like they’re starving. And it’s the woman onstage who is nourished, right now—heart, soul, and spirit—she is fed. 
          She is more than a dancer, now. She is the music itself. She is luminous, spectral, elemental. She is a lick of fire as she moves across the stage.
          My mind swarms, honeycombed. A fractal, a spiral of memories.
        It was a clear summer day two years ago when Eli crashed his McLaren into a concrete barrier. The driver’s side was fine. The passenger’s side, where I was, was half-crushed. So were my legs. They were broken in six places, smashed into a mess of fractures like shattered twigs, and the doctors said I was lucky to avoid amputation. But sometimes I felt that that would have been preferable to the pain. To the screws and plates, the knee replacement, the grueling physical therapy. At the hospital, a well-meaning woman (idiot smile, huge bleached horse teeth) said, You’re a ballerina, so you must be used to pain! Physical therapy should be a breeze! 
          I wanted to tell her so many things. I wanted to tell her that even the most exhausting, painful rehearsal was better than what I was about to undergo, because in the former the goal was to achieve a beautiful ideal of human movement, and in the latter the goal was to re-learn how to do something that most humans had achieved at the age of eighteen months. I wanted to tell her that I had fallen from the summit of human artistry and physical potential to the rank of a helpless baby. I wanted to tell her that she needed to stop smiling like that or the world was going to think she was slow-witted. 
          But mostly, I wanted to tell her that I was not a ballerina anymore. 
          I watch Julia’s movements onstage until my eyes blur with tears because I have forgotten to blink. I blink, and blink, and blink some more, but the blurriness doesn’t stop. So I let the tears paint salt down my face—Julia can’t see me, none of the dancers can see anything but dust and black beyond the stage lights—and anyway, I am simply crying from the beauty of the performance.  
          When it’s over, I clap along with everyone else as the dancers take their bows. The house lights in the audience brighten. 
          “And now, we want to thank our choreographer!” Julia cries, turning towards the edge of the stage.
          My heart does its own little relevé into my throat. I almost rise, but there’s nowhere to go—the seats are full on both sides of me, and in order to get out I’d have to fight my way through, wielding my cane in front of me. I’d make a spectacle out of myself, especially now that it’s no longer dark in the audience.
          Eli’s name is all over my program. So is the fact that this is essentially his farewell dirge. It’s the last show he’ll ever put on, due to vague, age-related health issues—always hinted at but never fully explained—as well as a more general slide towards a slower, easier life. Balanchine he is not. 
          I wanted to see his ending. But I didn’t know that they would drag him out onto the stage afterwards. I didn’t know that he would get to see mine. 
          Julia and her fellow dancers are all grinning, expectant and eager. I can almost see the love on their faces. 
          My own smile is paper. My hand, which a moment ago was on my armrest, about to push me to my feet, is shoved into the pocket of my jacket. Clenching around the edge of my ticket, wishing it was sharp enough to cut into my skin. 
          And as Eli walks onto the stage, I turn fragmented at the sight of him. Even at the age of sixty he moves more easily than I do, straight-backed and sure, his eyes flashing darkness, face all bones and planes and hollows, hands large and veined, and he reaches out to accept the bunch of roses Gillian is holding. 
          White roses symbolize eternity: eternal love, eternal devotion, eternal disability. Take your pick.
          His hand brushes against Julia’s as he takes the roses, and I think I see her flinch. Shudder, even. As though she accidentally touched something with too many legs. Her smile shivers, and a moment later she pastes it back on again, but it’s not genuine anymore. It’s the same fake smile she wore when she was dancing, except there is no longer any happiness in her eyes.
          Oh, Gillian, I think, what did he do to you? For the first time, I am sad for her. 
          At least you don’t have to walk with a cane. At least you can still dance.
          But there are so many other ways a person can be wounded. 
          Eli looks out into the audience. He scans the front row. And when his black-hole eyes meet mine, there’s a rush in my head, a feeling of sudden emptiness. Like all the blood in my brain has evaporated, turned to poison gas. 
          In the hospital, I asked him: Why did you have to go so fast? The drugs had worn off enough so that I was no longer slurring. But I was still crying. Why couldn’t you have gone slower? I was scared. I was telling you to stop. I was beg-g—I swallowed a gob of phlegm—I was begging you to stop.  
        He spoke without commas, without pause, without intonation. Yeah you were fucking bitching at me and complaining and distracting me and there was nothing but this shrill whine in my ear like a huge fucking mosquito, and to demonstrate he shook one hand next to his ear, vibrating it as his eyes pinned me to the hospital bed, just as his actions had pinned me there, his actions that he would not apologize for. His pupils swelling as he stared at me. 
          You should be here, not me, I told him. The words felt like ash in my throat. You’re the old one, not me. You’re not a—not a—
          I could no longer say the word dancer. Could no longer even think it. Because even then, before my doctors had given me a real prognosis, I could feel how broken my legs were. How shattered the bones, how mangled the muscles. Nothing more than mutilated clumps of driftwood. 
         Now, as Eli stares down at me from the stage, something strange flashes across his face: fear. His arm jerks up to shield his chest, and then he looks over to his dancers, laughs, tries to brush it off. But within seconds his gaze snaps back onto mine, as precise as Julia’s head when she was doing her turns, and yes, that is fear in his eyes, that is unmistakably fear—but why should he be afraid of a crippled girl? Does he think I’m going to whack him with my cane? Does he think I’ll—
          And then it hits me. How I must look: my face tight, jaw clenched, and one hand shoved deep in the pocket of my jacket, as though I’m holding a secret. Or a gun. 
          I smile with teeth and watch the fear spread across his face like an oil spill. He is regretting his generosity now, that’s for sure. A front row seat would only give me a clear shot at him. 
          But that would be too easy, I think. Killing you at the climax of your career, spattering your fame across the stage like blood—that would guarantee notoriety. And that won’t do, because I want you to fade. I want you to end your life as a lonely old man, fading into obscurity, clutching a warm beer in front of a fuzzy TV. Watching younger and more dedicated choreographers take your place. I want you to gutter like a candle. 
          Just as I did. 
          The audience files out, and I walk out with them. I keep smiling: a small smile, just for myself. I keep thinking: He saw me. He didn’t look away. He saw me, and he was afraid. 
          My cane helps steady me. My boots ground me to the earth. The pieces of my identity I lost in the accident are drifting invisible into the air behind me. Untethered, floating silently away. But I keep walking, even though each step is an effort. I keep walking. I don’t look back.

Amy DeBellis is the author of the novel All Our Tomorrows (CLASH Books, 2025) and the novella The Widening Gyre (Lanternfish Press, 2026). Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist, and can be found in X-R-A-Y, Uncharted, Write or Die, Trampset, Pithead Chapel, Monkeybicycle, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere.