| this is oh so blue A MAGAZINE OF FICTION, POETRY & MORE! |
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| ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM |
| ISSUE #34 $O.OO |
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| March 2005 |
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| ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM |
| ***BIO*** Stephen Ausherman also wrote the award-winning novel, Typical Pigs. His next novel, Fountains of Youth, is slated for publication in 2005. Visit his website: www.restlesstribes.com |
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| © 2005 zygoteinmycoffee Ink. |
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| Dance Craze
from Restless Tribes |
| travel stories by Stephen Ausherman |
| If you have lived, you have danced a square dance, slam dance, break dance, belly dance or tango. But few remember the sad dances, in particular that one expression of soul-crushing misery, the Dance of a Thousand Tears.
It began, I recall, in a dark tavern back east, on the south side of town, that place where the workers went to drink when the factories shut down, where the coal miners would mourn the friends they lost in a collapsed shaft, where gathered the widows of sailors after a deadly storm. And the mothers who lost sons in the War, they would come, too. They would come to drink and sigh. That was all. Until that one bleak night, deep in a February freeze, a Frenchman arrived. He was missing a leg, but he had an accordion and the saddest song anyone had ever heard, a dirge about a lonely Frenchman who had lost his leg, and now wandered the coldest nights, playing sad songs on his accordion. Despite his missing leg, he could dance. He had choreographed steps, something between a funeral march and a solo waltz. And the people learned to dance this way. The unemployed factory workers, the surviving coal miners, the widows and grieving mothers, they all danced. They twirled in small circles, as though slowly drowning in a whirlpool, and they seemed to levitate as though dangling from a rope, bodies twitching. And then they dropped to the floor and writhed, all moaning and gnashing their teeth. They danced with tears, and their cries amplified their sadness a thousand times, and even those with cold, callused hearts could feel their pain--pain like the blinding sadness you feel when you have to shoot a pony, or when you find kindergartners caught in your bear traps and they're gnawing on their little ankles trying to get out. You might mistake it for the despair you see in an orphan's eyes when you tell him that his parents traded him for an old hairbrush and an ashtray, and that to this day they still believe it was the best deal they ever made. But no, the dance was much more dismal than that. It was the sadness of betrayal like you haven't felt since the first time your mother punched you in the mouth or when the woman you've been stalking for seven years falls in love with the man who's been stalking her for six days. It was the heartbreak you suffer when you return to your secret and safe childhood place and find it shut down and boarded up, the liquor license revoked and the girls long gone. And you realize then they're probably to old now to go on stripping, which is also sad in its own way, all those years slipping by, your childhood lost and irretrievable. It was the sorrows of the Troubles and the Plague and the Depression all bound in convulsive motions. This was the Dance of a Thousand Tears, and to witness it filled you with such gothic melancholy that your heart might break and your soul could snap like the bones of an old dog under a great rolling rock, and you might leap out a window or rub salt in your eyes to relieve you of the miserable sight. And yet the dance spread to dance halls, even to upscale clubs, where rich folk with nothing to mourn succumbed to this tragic ballet. Such poseurs. They ruined the sad dances. Sold them out and sucked out the marrow of emotion. Same as what happened when white folk took up singing the blues. |