Dancing

Dancing

Alan’s in the room with Degas’s ballerinas when the earthquake hits, not a huge one, just a jolt that makes him stumble into the woman next to him. She’s sporting a side braid and smells a little of some kind of floral perfume. She must be a native Californian too because she laughs and puts her hand on his shoulder to steady him.

He imagines saying, “You know when our kids ask us how we met, we’re going to say the earth made us dance with Degas’s ballerinas.”

She’ll laugh at the clumsiness of his delivery, and he’ll buy her a coffee in the museum’s restaurant, and they’ll talk about art, all that he knows, which isn’t much, but she’ll pretend to be impressed. She’ll ask him what he does, and he’ll say that he’s in school studying art history, and she’ll tell him she’s an engineering major, and secretly he’ll think that’s kind of dull, but then on their next date she’ll open him up to how beautiful it can be to design a road that people use every day. On their fifteenth date, he’ll take her to a bridge she loves in Pasadena because it is so beautifully designed and ask her to marry him even though it’s a little early in the relationship, and she’ll say yes, and that impulsivity in both of them is what will lead eventually to her cheating on him and the inevitable divorce, and their children will grow up without a stable concept of love.

So instead of giving her a line, Alan, says, “Gosh, I’m sorry.”

She pats his shoulder and says, “That’s all right, Champ,” and she goes off with her friends. He turns back to his fiance, Kelly, and takes her hand.

John Brantingham writes: 

I am the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, and my work has been featured in hundreds of magazines and in Writer’s Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016. I have eleven books of poetry and fiction including Crossing the High Sierra and California Continuum: Volume One. I teach at Mt. San Antonio College.