by Ava T.
By the time her feet left the ground, Mara’s legs were already burning. She leapt again, arms cutting through the air, landing hard, then rising once more, higher this time, sharper, like something inside her had finally caught fire.
In the rehearsal studio, the music stopped suddenly.
“Stop!” the director’s voice cracked through the white room.
Silence fell. The track cut. Mara stood panting, eyes fixed on her reflection in the mirror, unsure where the movement ended and she began.
“You’re dragging it,” said Elias Venn, circling her slowly. Even now, age had not taken the weight from his presence. “The dance is precise. You’re letting it dissolve.”
Mara swallowed. She hated that she believed him.
This was No-Place, his legendary work. The piece dancers broke themselves trying to master. And somehow, she had been chosen.
Luck, she told herself. Or mistake.
But she had seen it before anyone ever gave it to her. Late at night, a recording on an old screen: a lone figure moving like he was being pulled apart by invisible hands. She had copied it as a child in her bedroom, long before she understood what it meant to want something that badly.
“Again,” Elias said.
The music restarted.
Mara moved.
At first, it was only her body and breath and count. One, two, three. Jump. Turn. Fall. But then, something shifted in the mirror.
A second version of her moved there. Wrong, stretched, too alive. It bent in ways her bones should not allow. It followed her a half-second behind, like a shadow learning to hate her.
She didn’t stop.
Not until the final leap.
When she landed, the music collapsed into silence. There was no reflection left. Only darkness in the mirror.
Elias stepped beside her, almost smiling. “You felt it, didn’t you?”
Mara’s voice barely worked. “What was that?”
“Inspiration,” he said softly. “It always arrives when the body finally stops pretending.”
He looked at her like she had been waiting her whole life for this moment.
And maybe she had.
Mara turned back toward the black glass.
And stepped forward again.
Art by Studio XY, “Self-expression, (2015)”
About the Author
Ava is a fiction writer and dancer who loves everything fiction, books, stories, movies. She is especially drawn to characters who feel real enough to exist outside the page and enjoys writing stories that blur the line between imagination and everyday life.