Until My Dancing Days Are Done...

By Angela D. Mitchell

I am different now, a woman old and safely beyond the judgments of youth. I have the money I always wanted, and the gates around my heart and house are both equally high. No one has ever entered the one--with a single exception--and not many more the other. This fact makes me feel both jubilant and frightened. Only rarely, when I am alone, does it make me weep.

But I am not alone even when I want to be, because then she comes into the room and stares at me with gentle and reproachful eyes. A little girl of perhaps eleven, and she has the prettiest thick pale hair, soft and fine as a baby's, and her eyes are brown. Tonight as always she wears her favorite dress--red as berries--and there is a red ribbon in the fragile yellow hair, and white tights on her little legs. Her lashes are gold in the firelight.

A little girl dressed perhaps for a Christmas party, and how I should want to hug her and tease her and say sweet things to her.

But I will do none of these things even though she is my only companion here in this big beautiful house. I will do none of these things because I am not maudlin and cheap with my emotions, I cannot be bought with cuteness.

"Please," she says.

"Go away," I tell her coldly. And she does, for a little while. When I am alone again, I dance by myself around my living room, remembering an autumn day long ago, and the tears on my cheeks--and the things I did. The grey-eyed man who began to speak to me when I passed.

But--no. First things first. To understand what happened, you have to understand what it's like to be really, truly poor.

We had nothing. A few rooms, a few spare furnishings. A couch under whose aged velvet skin springs creaked malignantly like eels, sharp and pinching even through the cloth. I was afraid to sit on that couch because each time, I imagined the day when the springs would break free and seek out something hungrily to bite. I had an ugly doll that I ridiculed when alone, and a mountain of moldy books that I read--devoured. Then, with the knowledge and story safe within my mind--the books were tossed aside to be despised for their ugliness.

I especially loved the stories in which the poor hero or heroine triumphed. Not for me the riches-to-rags morality of tales like Snow White or Donkeyskin. I gloried in the idea that someday I would raise myself up, like the little Cinder-girl. Then I would show them all.

After all, I hated it--being poor. Having nothing. Being laughed at for the brown corduroy or faded denim. I wish, in looking back, and especially in telling the story now, that I hadn't despised our life as I did, but that is how I felt, and the time for me to lie is past. I am ashamed of this fact now even as I was then, but it's the truth. I hated the bad food, the worry, the hollow in the pit of my stomach when I realized we would soon need to run again, to dodge the landlord we could not pay, to change schools again, to pretend cheerfulness at our lot--again.

You might as well know now, so that you won't be surprised later, that I am not one of my pretty little fairy-tale heroines. I am not the favorite of Mother Holle or the Gretel who escaped the witch's ovens. Don't say I didn't warn you.

But I was bad at all of the things required of your average impoverished child. I found nothing noble in our sufferings, nothing graceful or sanctified in our lack of food, in our ugly and serviceable clothing. We ate our oatmeal in the mornings from mismatched dishes, oatmeal carefully cooked and served up so that there was one perfect portion for each of us--a larger bowl for my mother, two smaller bowls for my sister and I. And I begrudged my mother the larger bowl of oatmeal because I was hungry, even though I have always hated oatmeal and could barely choke the stuff down even then, when I was starving. But I did--I wanted more, I wanted my mother's bowl, lusted after it, even--my mouth watered looking at that pale greyish gelatinous glop, lusted after that gritty sliminess on my tongue--because we seemed to be always just a little too hungry.

Lust is described by religious types as a negative emotion, usually associated with sex, but always described as a bottomless craving, a gnawing at the vitals, a need that is somehow filthy. And that's how I think of all my wantings then--not simply as wants or needs, but as lusts. I wanted. And in my daydreams and my wantings there was no sense of the greater good, or of the happiness of my family or even of good and evil. I wanted what I wanted, that was all. I looked at objects and schemed for them, dreamed of them, wanted them, imagining that every object attained (and I would attain them all one day) would be one more fence between me and a life I found to be ugly, filthy, unlivable.

We did not starve. We never starved. We were the diligent poor--we worked hard to stay afloat, one step ahead of eviction or destitution. My mother worked as a maid--I babysat and got paid by a neighbor under the table for putting together thousands of direct mail pieces. Even my sister worked, and she was only seven. Jenny, she made breakfast every single morning, her small hands grasping the big black iron frying pan, her little muscles stiffening as she forced the pan up and over her chest and onto the burner. She would scramble the eggs and make the coffee for us each morning, and sometimes neighbors would pay her to mow the lawn or weed the garden.

Me, I worked too, like I said, but I was bad at it. I hated it. I never felt good inside when I worked, but bad--because I knew deep inside that all I wanted was a day when I could get out of doing the work, when I would no longer have to wipe snotty little nostrils or shitty bottoms. I was good to the children I cared for in a distant manner--I cared for their well-being because that was my job. But I felt nothing for them. I tried to feel for them, I knew this was evidence of my own potential for evil--this distance and coldness of mine--but I could feel nothing more than a distant kindness for them. I was especially kind when they left me alone, when they stopped crying, when they went to bed early so that I could watch the glory of their color TVS and dream of a future in which I had everything I had ever wanted.

The moment they went to bed my thoughts went to the only thing that made babysitting worthwhile--not the paltry five or ten bucks I would make, but the food. The glory of other people's food. I would creep into the kitchen and stare feverishly at the stuffed pantry, the amply stocked refrigerator. Ten cookies in a box? Then I would eat four. Two packages of hot dogs? I would eat one. Whatever I knew would not be missed. Then, satiated and so stuffed that the food kept trying to crawl back into my mouth, I would lie on the couch (or in the chair, or on the soft carpeting), and stare at the television set, dreaming of the future. My mind was scarcely a mind at all at this time--it was more like a catalogue of future objects to be attained, all of them talismans against poverty. In my mind I bought and stocked a thousand mansions over and over again and then wandered their silent empty hallways screaming with happiness and possession..

I was lazy. I felt no pride in a job well-done. I despised the work I did and did it shabbily because I believed that it was not worth the effort to do it well.

I was not good, then. I look back and seek excuses for myself and can find few. All I can say is that, in the end, what undid me was not the lack of food, or warmth, or companionship.

No, I lusted for different things, deeper things. I was starved for beauty.

I was twelve years old, a selfish age in a selfish child. I was rangy and thin and my calves ached with my growing pains, but even in my thinness my breasts budded out tight and hard, little lumps of flesh that fascinated me. My narrow hips had begun to widen slightly, so that even though I was still a child I gave an impression of curvaceousness. My body had begun to wake up. Then I looked in the mirror one morning and saw the traces of womanhood, the prettiness with the real possibility for later beauty--and after that, I sought my image everywhere, watching myself constantly, the way my black hair waved back from my face, my blue eyes, my red lips and cheeks. When I smiled my teeth were small and white and pointed, as if I bit things now and then. I loved the creature I saw in the mirror, saw that she was destined for--deserved--great things. I made up my mind to give them to her.

My awareness of my own prettiness made my ugly clothing even harder to bear.

But worst of all were my shoes. They were the kinds of shoes few children wear anymore--today shoes are softer, or so they seem to me. Mine seemed to be made of iron. They were a strangely ugly reddish-brown leather, like a bruise--real leather--and had originally been some unlucky child's corrective shoes, so that were blocky and scuffed and laced high; they pinched at the ankle and forced the foot to move in a rigid robotlike fashion. But the discomfort of the shoes did not bother me; their ugliness, however, festered inside of me each time I looked at them and would not go away. I hated those shoes with the hatred a murderer reserves for his victim, with the heat of a hundred suns, with a feeling like violence. The more I loved my pretty self, my pale legs and slim ankles--the more wounded I felt to see such beauty destroyed by those brown executioner's blocks. When I was alone sometimes I would hammer the shoes against the plaster corner beside the doorway, pretending to myself that I was trying to "soften them up." But what I was really after was annihilation.

While I loved my own self and its fairytale prettiness I was not kind to ugliness in others. My sister Jenny, for instance, who was going through a particularly awkward childhood. Her eyes were blue like mine, but there was no clarity or brilliance to them. Her little mouth was a child's mouth and had no special shape to it, she moved awkwardly, had an overbite, and her hair, lighter and browner than mine, frizzed up when it got misty. I teased Jenny unmercifully about her looks whenever my mother wasn't around, even going so far one day as to lock her out of the house naked so that all the neighbors saw her and laughed. Another day, I pretended that tin foil would straighten her teeth so that she wore the soft silver bad-tasting aluminum crumpled in her mouth for a whole afternoon before my mother got home and told her the truth.

My mother punished me for such things but I did not care about punishment. Nothing touched me. She might yell at me, she might speak words of anger, but they came to me across a kind of barrier so that when they reached me they were changed and foolish and not worth listening to. Sometimes I would simply watch her face when she spoke and congratulate myself secretly on how every feature in it was inferior to mine. She spanked me a few times for more serious infractions but there was never true violence in it, no abuse. If anything, the spankings might have touched me if I had paid attention--touched me in her unwillingness to cause me pain even though I was a hard, cold, ungiving and unlovable child.

But again, I could not bring myself to care. I did not feel anything for people--even my family. Only for the shining objects I saw which were possessed by others.

That was the life I knew.

But then a day came that was different. I was walking home from the bus stop when I stopped in my walk in a sudden urge to avoid both my origin and my destination. I was halfway down the block, a skinny girl on a sidewalk so overshadowed by oak trees that you could not see to the other side of the street. On my right side, near to me, was a green playground rich with short, soft grass and all the things a playground should have--monkeybars, swings, a red slide, a creaking wheel. Bordering the playground were the woods that stretched on for perhaps half a mile or so, and which separated this place from my part of town.

The swings creaked, the children laughed. For some reason the playground made me sad. There were two red-headed children on it--Erica and Randy, two kids I'd actually babysat before--and they laughed as they dug in the sandbox and dared the slide.

The despair filled my throat like a rising flood to choke me. I wished I had been less efficient, less guarded with them, so that if I said hello to the children they would run to me. But no.

Instead I would stand here, motionless, forever, and then I would not be bad. The school was still so new to me that I promptly forgot its name whenever I was away from it. On this day I had missed breakfast because I would not come out of the sweetness of dreams; I had spoken back to a teacher and been reprimanded; I had twisted my ankle running for class in the awkward shoes. I stared downwards and scuffed the leaves with my feet until the leaves covered my ugly brown shoes, and only then did I feel a loosening in my chest. I stood in the warm autumn sunshine, my face to the sky, weeping even though I did not know it. I wanted to pray to be good, like Jenny. I wanted to ask God for help, for the gift of acceptance so that in the morning I would awaken not with a sneer but with a smile. That I would do my tasks well and without being asked. That I would be kind to Jenny and make her laugh.

But I knew already I would do none of those things. I did not believe in God, or in anything good. I only wanted to stop wanting. To be safe.

So I stood there on the sidewalk and the momentary joy I had felt dried up within me so that I felt hateful and empty, even colder than usual. Even as I watched, Erica and Randy ran off toward home, their short legs speeding them along if they had no weight to carry at all.

It was at that moment that she spoke to me.

"Hello," she said.

I spun around to see a pretty girl of perhaps my own age, staring at me with a puzzled and sympathetic expression. She was still staring at adolescence where I had crossed it--her chest was flatter than mine, and there was something innocent about those big eyes and that button nose, as if she would always remain a child. She had blonde hair tied back from her face, and this too emphasized her little-girl aspect. She had dark eyes soft with something that might have been sympathy.

"You OK?"

"What?" I stammered.

"You were crying," she said simply. "Just standing there crying. Did something happen?"

"No," I said shortly, fixing her with the cold stare that usually sent people running. But she only shrugged.

"You can tell me if you want," she said quietly.

"It's nothing," I said at last, waiting out the silence. But she would not be scared away. "I forgot to eat lunch. I guess I was feeling sorry for myself."

She smiled at that. "Here, you're in luck," she cried, and went over to the foot of the slide, opening up her neat red patent leather purse and pulling out a small crumpled package. "Here," she said again, and held the package out to me. "My mother sent me to school with some peanut-butter crackers, but I wasn't so hungry. You can have them."

I reached for the package and smiled at her. In that moment, we were friends. My fingers grasped the waxy plastic, tearing at it, and seemingly all in the same instant my teeth bit into the crumbling salt-and-cream goodness of the first cracker.

Then I saw her shoes.

She was wearing the most beautiful shoes I had ever seen. They were of a deep, dark red--not the chalky too-bright red of a sign or a paintbox, but the crimson of a clear glass of my mother's wine, the red of my lips and cheeks, a red like new-turned autumn leaves before they have started to rot. They were made of some soft material I thought might be velvet (but which I now know to be suede)--little low pumps, but fashioned for a young girl, narrow and slightly pointed, and with a tiny heel and a dainty strap which stretched across the slim ankle to a clasp that was like a jewel in and of itself. They were not the shoes of a child, nor were they the shoes of a full-grown woman, but somewhere wonderfully, nebulously, in-between. Even as she was. Even as I was.

I could not breathe for a moment at the sight of those shoes. I knew that if I could only have shoes like that--someday--that then I would surely be happy. I would be content with poverty. My beauty would be complete in spite of my circumstances. No one who looked at me would be able to look away once they had seen those red shoes.

Perhaps... perhaps she would give them to me if I asked her... Perhaps she would let me try them on... just for a moment. They were so soft and beautiful.

She saw me staring and as I chewed and swallowed the last of the crackers, she stretched out her pretty legs before her and smiled. "You like my shoes?" she asked, and there was laughter in her voice. "My father gave them to me--it was my birthday yesterday. I'm thirteen now. He--he had them made especially for me." There was something strange about the way she said this, as if the shoes were beautiful fruit--perfect on the outside, rotten on the inside.

"They're OK," I said nonchalantly, "Not too good for walking home in the mud. It's supposed to rain today."

"I'm careful," she said.

"Good," I said. "They are pretty. They're about the prettiest shoes I've ever seen. Although I don't really like red all that much myself."

"I do," she said simply. "It's my favorite color."

I shrugged and laughed, but my heart was dipping low inside my gut because surely if they were a birthday present any wish I might have that she would give them to me would be a lost cause.

I dusted my jeans with dirty hands. "Thanks for the crackers." I turned away quickly to leave. Better to put temptation behind me. It was starting to rain, and the big, fat drops of chilly water splashed on my face like a premonition of guilt.

Her voice stopped me as I'd known it would, I guess. "Wait--what's the matter?"

I turned back. "Nothing," I said. "It's raining if you hadn't noticed. I've got to get home."

There was something secretive and pleading about her expression. "I don't want to go home. Why don't you stay here for awhile? It's not raining that hard."

"It will," I said. "Besides, you're rich, why you wanna stay here and get all dirty in the rain?"

"Maybe I don't want to go home yet," she said.

"Ha," I said. "Go home. You're lucky, believe me--to have a father who loves you enough to give you things like that."

She tucked her feet under the flare of her dress as if suddenly ashamed. "You don't know anything," she said flatly, and now it was her voice that was cold and hard. "Maybe he loves me too much."

"Oh sure," I scoffed. "Poor baby. I'll take your father and those shoes off your hands any day you say."

"Shut up," she said angrily. "You don't know anything."

For some reason this stopped me. I thought for a moment. "Maybe I don't," I said. "All I know is about not having things. I don't know what it's like to have problems once you have them."

Surprisingly, she laughed, and the laugh made me smile, but it also made me angry inside, as well. "I'm Sara, by the way. Sara Jenkins." She stood up, looked up at the threatening sky, and frowned. She dusted herself off carefully and efficiently, a gesture I recognized as habitual. And then she was immaculate again, so that she had never looked like a girl who had scuffed through leaves or sat on a dirty and rusty slide. Even as I watched, she carefully scraped the bottom of one crimson foot against the sharp edge of the slide so that the sole was perfect and clean again.

"I'm Karen." I was cool again, studying her. The warmth of the moment had gone for me, the brief companionship, the sharing of the food and even of the anger.

It had begun to rain in earnest. I could tell that she still didn't want to go home. And an idea had occurred to me. I made sure my face was unchanged, unruffled.

"If you don't want to go home yet," I said, "I could take you somewhere else. There's something I want to show you."

She looked undecided, but ready to be persuaded. "Where at?"

I pointed to the tree to our right, to the small wood stretching beside the playground. "It's through there."

She recoiled slightly. "It's dark in there. I don't like it."

"What are you, a baby?" I scoffed, but I made sure the teasing was light. "You won't get dirty. And you won't get rained on--the leaves are so thick up high, they keep you warm and dry below."

"Well..."

"Or you could just go home," I said. I started walking toward the trees, knowing already that she would follow me.

"Okay," she said behind me, and her voice was small and young. "Okay, if it's not far."

"It's not far."

We made our way through the forest and it pleased me that she followed, just as it pleased me secretly to hear her gasping for breath, to hear the way the small branches whipped her arms and legs. The rain, too, came down, and while it did not attack us directly as it had done in the open, I had lied when I said we would not feel it, for the raindrops did reach us just the same, slapping down from leaf to leaf so that they were grey and dirty when they finally slapped down on us. But she did not complain, and the sneaking liking I had felt for her began to return.

Maybe it would not be necessary to steal them. Maybe she would...give them to me.

When we had walked for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, the woods began to lighten up around us in that way that means the end of the forest is very near.

Behind me I heard her stop, which was just as well, because I would have stopped anyway. I turned to face her.

"My side hurts," she said. "Wait a minute."

"I need you to do something for me," I said. My voice was frightened, unnaturally loud.

"What?" She looked at me, eyes narrowed, breathing heavily, her left hand creeping to her side and pressing there to lessen the pain of the stitch.

"I need you to give me your shoes." My voice sounded pleading. I was talking too fast, as breathless as she and suddenly scared to death.

She was confused at first. "What?"

"I need you to give me your shoes...or...let me borrow them, maybe..." I trailed off. Her face went hard just like that, so that I was looking at a little-girl mask and not the girl who had given me the crackers a little while before. "No," she said.

"Please," I said. There were other things I wanted to add but I could not think of how to say them. My thoughts were like little disconnected stones.

"No," she said again. "I can't. They're my birthday present."

"I could pay you for them," I managed. "Anything you want."

"No." She shook her head, but this time there was sympathy in her face again, and pain too. "I can't--you don't know--I can't." Then her voice went very soft. "I...earned them. They're mine."

My mind was empty, terrifyingly empty--but then the smile was stretching across my face, friendly and apologetic. I knew what to do now. "It's OK," I said. "I'm sorry. I was kidding. It wasn't funny, I guess."

"I just can't give them to you," she cried.

"It's OK," I said. "Like I said, it was a joke. A bad joke. I was trying to figure out how much they cost."

"It's not a very good joke," she said. I could see that she was still undecided.

"I wasn't sure you liked them very much," I said as if in explanation. "I just wanted to see what you would do. It wasn't funny--I'm sorry."

"It wasn't funny," she said. "But it's OK, I guess." She looked around us and smiled, then took a deep breath. "We're getting soaked! We should go. Where's this thing you wanted to show me?"

I smiled. "Just ahead--just a few more steps." She turned her head to look and as she did so I looked down at my feet in their ugly shoes. Right next to my left foot was a big stone, glistening black in the mud. I picked it up.

"Go ahead," I said. "I'm right behind you." She shrugged and began to walk again, me watching the wet yellow curls that fell down her back and wondering what I was doing here, anyway. There was still time to turn, to go home, to...stop.

She paused again, and I knew she was afraid of the wet dark forest around us. But it was not the forest she should be afraid of.

"Look!" I cried, and pointed ahead of us, to a shadow in the trees to the right.

"I can't see anything," she said. "We're close?"

"Oh yes," I said, and I heard the smile in my voice. The rock was warm now, a somehow living extension of my hand. I raised it calmly. "We're almost there."

There was no one else in the apartment when I got home, as usual. Mom was still working, and my sister spent most of her afternoons in the drugstore around the corner, giggling with her friends as they played Donkey Kong Junior and drank horrible soda combinations.

I was shaking with the aftermath of it, but I felt strangely calm in spite of it. It had not been so bad. There had been very little blood--I'd been lucky there.

I knew the import of what I had done. Back in my mind, back where I was still a little girl with the possibility for good, there was a horrified child sobbing, a child who wanted to turn back the clock and change the outcome.

But the rest of my mind accepted. I had not wanted to kill her, but it had been necessary. I had deserved the shoes. She would not give them to me. I had had to do what I did. And now it was done. I knew I had done something irrevocable, unforgivable--knew, and pretended not to care. I also knew that even if no one else ever knew about it, that I would be damned for what I had done. The thought pleased me though. I had already felt damned before--now I felt justified.

I went into the bathroom and washed my hands carefully just to be on the safe side. I washed the stone too. Then I changed clothes unhurriedly, stuffed the stone into a sock, and ran the whole pile of clothing, rock, and Buster Browns, through the wash in steaming hot water--twice. When my mother came home later that evening, the clothes were already dry and my shoes had survived the immersion with little change. But I'd already known the cursed things would survive anything I could think of to do to them.

Only when it was late, and everyone had gone to bed, did I take out the red shoes.

I had washed the soles carefully after coming home, and then wrapped them in several layers of newspaper, stuffing them deep in the back of my closet. I had already learned a valuable trick--if someone is going to search your closet (as my mother did periodically and conscientiously as we neared adolescence, just to satisfy herself that we hadn't discovered drugs yet)--if someone is going to search there, they will pull everything down from the shelf. They will be thorough because it is so easy to reach up high to do these things. But no one likes to crawl around, so anything I wanted to keep to myself--little things like dolls or my diary--I hid deep in the far back corner of the closet, under some old sneakers. The kind of corner where there might be spiders--and which my mother wouldn't touch.

I unwrapped the shoes and caught my breath. They were still beautiful. Almost, I had convinced myself that perhaps I'd done all of this for nothing, for something paltry or petty. But no--shoes were beautiful, soft and supple and still that color of something crimson and secret under the leaves. The tears slid unnoticed down my cheeks. I was happy, unbearably happy. This was worth any price. They were mine. At last I had something beautiful.

I held my breath and slid the first shoe over my left foot. And it slid like silk--and stopped.

The shoe was too small.

I stared, all the spit in my mouth drying to nothingness in less than a second. I could not breathe. Then I shoved again, as hard as I could. My foot, arched, slid home into the shoe. But it was unbearably tight, a viselike grip on the sides of my foot, pressing throbbing against my heel, bruising the ends of my toes. I would not be able to walk in this. And--another worry--a few days of this would cause the shoe to become stretched or deformed.

I felt the tears of triumph turning to frustration but I ignored them as I considered the problem. Everything is fixable. I stared at my bare feet, studying how they were made, how very long my big toes were. It was not the width, but the length. I estimated that my foot was perhaps half an inch too long.

I smiled. And went into the kitchen for a knife.

Every problem has a solution.

I limped for awhile, but hid it well, stuffing socks in the ends of my shoes to cushion the wounds slightly and pretending a twisted my ankle as an excuse for the limping. For the first time in my life, I blessed the blocky brown shoes and their stiff leather--blessed them, because they allowed me to heal without anyone being the wiser. Nothing showed through--not the blood, nor the fact that I no longer possessed the usual number of toes.

Three months passed, and still I did not wear the shoes. I knew they were there, though, and that was enough for me. I would lie awake at night and imagine them gleaming in the corner of the closet, igniting their newspaper wrappings, dancing softly against the closet floor.

Mine, I would whisper in the darkness, and the whisper would move across the floor like dust to where the shoes, secret and gleaming, whispered back. Mine.

Only one curious thing happened during those next three months. One day, as I was walking to the 7-11 to get my sister, a strange grey man turned to watch me as I passed. He stood very straight, and as I walked by, he clapped.

"Pretty," he said. "A pretty girl. And such pretty, pretty shoes."

I stopped to glare at him. I was, after all, only wearing the hated brown Oxfords. "What are you talking about?" I demanded.

"Nothing," he said, waving his hand absently in my direction. I saw that he was crazy, that the gums held no teeth and that his grey eyes could barely focus. But I was frightened just the same. I looked out for the man afterwards, but I never saw him again.

The murder had received some press, but not much. After all, it's a terrible world we live in. Children die every day. Then we moved away--to another state, another city. What did any of it matter? Only the geography had changed--the apartment, with its faint smell of urine and death, was familiar territory. We'd all been there before.

Still, I was smart. And careful. Only after a year had passed did I finally decide to wear the shoes. We were halfway across the country now, and besides, I had sacrificed enough. It was time to enjoy what I had waited so long to attain.

I slid on the first shoe. No--wait--something stopped it.

My toes. My feet had grown again. I shook my head in disbelief, pulling harder, but no--it was true. I was a growing girl and had continued to grow. Since the murder, I now had breasts and hips and a mouth boys watched while I talked. My feet were actually rather small.

But they did not fit the shoes of an eleven-year-old girl.

I looked at the shoes. Mine, I thought. My hands were shaking.

Easy-peasy-Japanesey. I went back into the kitchen for the knife.

In high school, everything changed. My earlier promise of beauty had fulfilled itself, and in spite of my slightly strange, formal way of walking, I was popular and always in demand. I dated--so many boys I cannot remember their names. I embraced them at the end of the night. I kissed them most eagerly when they were a little afraid of me, as most of them were. Sometimes I jerked them off in the car, precisely because they found it so unnerving.

Things at home, too, were better. My mother had married at last, and wonder of wonders, she had chosen a man who did not have dirt under his fingernails. He even had a substantial bank account (six digits plus) and a lovely house with central heat and air. We moved in with them and for the first time ever, my sister and I found ourselves with the kinds of clothes we'd always wanted. Our hair and our fingernails shone. We were rich.

I wish I could say that it was all enough, that the happiness I had bought with the life of another brought me some kind of satisfaction, no matter how twisted.

But it did not. I felt nothing for anyone besides myself. And even those feelings were dull and lifeless. I wondered sometimes if in killing the little girl, if she had in fact taken my own soul with me. Each night, I would dance around my room, the red shoes on the scarred remains of my feet, and I would relive the moment of murder, trying to see through the mists of memory whether I had in fact seen a wisp of smoke or some slip of grey rise up from us--the wisp that would be all that remained of my mortal soul.

I danced whenever I could. I danced at school, after school, around the house. But the more I danced, the more beautiful I seemed to become, and the more unhappy. Although I hated the company of others, I could not stand loneliness, and wept bitterly whenever I was alone. But we were not hungry. We were not poor. Sometimes I went into the kitchen in the middle of the night (wearing the shoes, of course) simply to spend hours staring into the stuffed pantry. I ate prodigiously but never became fat, because of the dancing.

I suppose I should mention that I did not always want to dance. It just seemed to happen. Sometimes it was as if the shoes were ordering me to pay some sort of mysterious penance--especially when I was alone. The door would close and my feet would begin to tremble. I would rise to my feet like a marionette and stumble until the shoes took over, until every movement was golden. I would dance like this for hours, sometimes from bedtime to dawn. The shoes always knew when I was at the breaking point, though, and just when I was on the point of screaming, they would give me a respite.

Because we were rich, I now had many, many pairs of shoes. And most of them were red. I had even had several replicas of the original pair of shoes created just for me. I never let anyone see me try on shoes, of course--I feigned shyness so that no one could see my injured feet. But although I was never compelled to dance in any other shoes but those I had stolen, I could not stand to be away from them for long, and the original pair, through some magic, remained as pristine and beautiful as they had been when I first saw them in childhood. Oh yes--if dancing was the price, then I would pay it. My mouth literally watered when I looked at the shoes. They were the cause--I was certain-- of all of our good fortune. What was a little dancing to pay the price? I would have paid a thousand times over.

A puzzling thing began to happen to me over the years. Small, but strangely frightening: In London, in Paris, in Prague, I see the man again. A man with gunmetal eyes who stops me in the street, on the corner or in a crowd, and as gently as a lover says, "Pretty, pretty. What beautiful shoes you have. What beautiful red shoes..." Whenever I whirl upon him, he is gone. It has happened many times now--perhaps as many as a dozen. At first I feared him as a witness to the murder. I thought only of plotting to kill him, of (finally) getting rid of the shoes. But at some point I realized that he was nothing more than the little girl herself--a ghost. I laugh now when I see him.

My mother's riches did not save her, and she died young. My sister married and enjoyed a life of simple happiness I could neither understand nor approve. It became easier just to forget her, and to force her to forget me. I moved through the world like a woman made of porcelain, brittle and alone. I broke the hearts of the boys who loved me and danced alone in my room and in the dormitory of my college. I graduated with the highest honors and created a business for myself--a business, oddly enough, of dance shoes. I patented a new kind of toe shoe, one which would simulate my own toelessness, offering the dancer more support across the ball of the foot and ankle.

The years passed. I danced. I spoke to a little girl's ghost. Sometimes I wept. I could not marry because I could tell no one my secret (and I was only really tempted once or twice). I remember a man I loved, and his hand in mine, his eyes as they saw through all of my pretensions and into the woman I could yet become.

And yet. At the end of that night, I went home and stared up at the walls of my mansion. The fierce pride of ownership, the knowledge that it was mine, all mine! I felt a joy at that moment that I knew no man could ever equal. I turned him down, with a compassion foreign to me, precisely because he had come so close.

It happened once or twice more in my life, if never with the same intensity. There was never again a serious rival. I would go home. I would look up. I would hear, soft as butterfly wings, the tappity-tap of the red shoes on their special shelf, waiting for me.

I guess I should explain about the ghost. Sara began to visit me a month after the murder. At first I discounted her, sure I was simply paying the consequences of murder you so often read about in fiction. I read about Raskolnikov and nodded at his visions, his guilt, his loneliness. A killer cannot afford to feel too much, I told myself. But unlike Raskolnikov they did not torture me. In those first years, I was cruel to the little girl. I laughed at her. I danced in her shoes and could not understand why I could not move her to anger. Raskolnikov was a fool to give in to them--what were a few visions?

But the years passed, and I began to understand. It was only as I became old, and alone, that the ghost began to haunt me in the true definition of the word.

I see her every night. She asks me the same question. I deny her. Often, we weep together. I have never been one to shed tears, but now her voice falls on these large empty halls, and within moments all I did not feel in my long life, all I left undone and unenjoyed, crushes me like a stone and I cry like a child. Perhaps my feelings, so long deadened in childhood, are finally coming back to me. Even in age I am still beautiful, but my beauty mocks me because it is and has always been useless to me.

She comes to me tonight after I have been dancing for a little over six hours. The shoes have been unusually violent tonight, and they have flung me from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, as if to challenge me in my age, as if to get me to beg for the ax. There are streaks of blood on the floor that will have to be cleaned up before the morning housekeeping comes in, before anyone sees them and wonders.

But the miracle of it is, whenever she appears, my feet go still. She steps gently into the room, and I can hear the soft sound of her white stockinged feet on the floor, the rustle of the red dress she was once so proud of. We have heard each other's stories a thousand times now; I have known for a long time the true story of the dress (and of the shoes) and the price she paid for them in life.

"Karen," she says. "Karen, it's enough. Please stop this."

"No it isn't," I say harshly. It's bad, tonight. I do not think I will live much longer. Perhaps six months--a year, if I'm very unlucky. But my heart and my body are very strong--what's a little blood? I could live decades, whispers some small evil voice within me. I stifle the tears and speak harshly to her, as I always do: "Why should you care for me? I am only getting what I deserve." My feet are bleeding profusely this time, and my arms and legs are trembling. I am as wet with perspiration as if I had been caught in a sudden shower.

"No one deserves this," she says quietly.

I cackle. "I don't think you would have said so way back when!"

"Yes I would," she cries. "End it. End it. Give them back and I'll go." Her voice is light and sweet--a voice that has not changed for six decades. The little girl who never grew up. "You know you want me to. Just give them back and I'll go. Please, Karen!"

I waver for an instant only. My mouth crumples in on itself and I want to encircle her little feet with my arms and beg her forgiveness. I can do it. It is only a matter of pride--a matter of giving up a little pride and my one remaining secret.

But it is the secret that strengthens me. Not the shoes or the memory of all I suffered for them--the poverty and the murder and the knife and the man with the grey eyes, the loneliness and the years since. Although--it's true that she is safely out of it--that, in a way, she should thank me. No, the shoes have lost their glow for me, and only after more than sixty years do I hate them properly as they should be hated..

It's just the one, single secret that remains which allows me to deny her. "No, Sara," I say and my voice is kind. "Sorry."

"Please stop this," she says, and her voice is something broken. "I can't stand to see you in so much pain." I never knew a ghost could cry.

"No," I say, gasping, and I even manage a laugh.

She does not leave, but she does walk away from me, over to the shelves overflowing with books, looking for something to pass the remaining hours of the night. Sometimes she will seat herself in my big red velvet chair and read stories to herself. Often, she sings to me. Many nights we while away in conversation, talking easily together as we had once talked in the playground that day, before I became her murderer. She is generous with me in spite of what I can only imagine to be a dreary time in my company. But she knows that her presence is a respite, and besides, I think she is as lonely as I.

I watch her as she settles before the fire, her eyes flickering from me to the fire to the shoes and back again. I raise myself wearily from the floor and remove the shoes from my poor deformed feet, limping into the bathroom for the bandages and oils that will soothe me for a little while. I do not even notice my own tears anymore. I have grown used to them.

I do not tell her the real truth, even in the tragic beauty of her little round face. I never tell her what it is that makes me hold onto this hell.

It is no longer the shoes. I dance for her, for the only child I will ever have, in penance and in selfishness. Even as the shoes hold me prisoner, so I bind her to me, the ghost of this murdered child. Each night, therefore, I refuse to give her the shoes and myself the peace that even I surely at last deserve. Each night, therefore, I gladly dance until I bleed, until the sweat pours from me in a torrent and I am begging for death. Each night I suffer the consequences, and each night she visits me and weeps for my pain, stroking my forehead with her cool little hand, a touch as light as that of a feather.

What I do not wonder, even to myself, is why she always comes late, why she is not merely with me constantly to spare me any agony at all. The answer is sweet and simple and as bloody as the crime I once committed: she may love me in her way, she may even beg me to put away the shoes for my own good--but she understands the nature of justice. As do I.

And so my dancing days will continue as will her imprisonment. My love for her is as silent and selfish as everything to do with me has always been, but it is the last secret I possess.

I do not tell her, but I will never let her go. She is all that I have left. It is for Sara alone that I dance, for her alone that I allow the shoes to fling me from wall to wall in a fiery silent pain that is surely worse than any murder I committed. I think that only when I am dead--and with only a ghost to keep me company in my final moments--only then will she understand what I have done and why I have suffered. Only then will she truly understand the meaning of my sacrifice.