For everyone knows, no matter the visceral joy of laughing and story-telling, the great charm of a ball is its perfect accord and harmony — all altercations, loud talking, et cetera, are doubly ill-mannered in a ballroom. Very little suffices to disturb the peaces of the whole company.
As this party waged on, only the hissing and hushing S’s of words were audible, as if all of the guests were telling each other to get quieter still.
The guests’ mouths stretched around vowels that made no sound.
Everyone had returned inside from the chill of the night air.
They spoke through the dart and blink of their eyes.
One woman began to bend herself in a slow two-minute curtsy until the puddle of her dress stood higher than she.
All the women followed suit, curving, crooking, sliding into curtsies of their own.
The men matched the women before them with noble forty-five-degree bows.
The marble stones beneath the guests were spotless and sparkling as if a foot had yet to be set upon them.
For several minutes all anyone heard was the shallow, uneven breath, the push of rib cages against the whalebone stays of women’s gowns as gravity seemed to work its slow pressure.
And soon silence, as everyone reached the nadir of their descent, pausing there.
One woman, hanging on the arm of an already silent man, pushed a French door open, her voice, sharp as a spoon chiming the rim of a wine glass, the last canary in the coal mine.
She looked around her and, finding everyone sunken, began to wind herself down as well. Her companion bent towards her.
Once they too had arrived at the depth of their poses, the silence was so exquisite that the crickets outside, too, must have laid down their heads for just the flicker of a moment.
Then all at once, the muscles eased into motion again, began the two-minute climb to cultivated posture.
Breath built to steady sighs of bliss. Words formed gracefully, careful not to crack the delicate crystal that hung in the air.
The energy built, pushed the ceiling higher, and what twinkled in everyone’s eyes was the knowledge of why they attended balls in the first place: not to eat, or to dance, or to see their neighbors, but to remember and say that they had been there.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the publications where these stories have previously appeared (sometimes under different names, in different forms): A La Carte: Short Stories that Stir the Foodie in All of Us “Recipe for Her Absence,” Another Chicago Magazine “Twins, or Ambivalence,” bearcreekfeed “The Tackiness of Souls,” Bodega “Hammer, Damper,” Caketrain “Like Lightning,” The Collagist “The Grifted,” Dark Sky “Engrossed” and “Entered,” Dewclaw “Tangle,” Dogzplot “Let Me Be Your Tugboat King,” Featherproof as a mini-book and then Cell Stories “Hospitable Madness,” Frigg “Madness is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over and Expecting Different Results,” Hotel St. George “The Hush of the Party,” JMWW “The Crickets Are Trying to Organize Themselves Into Some Raucous Pentameter,” Joyland “The Chamber of the Enigma,” Juked and Best of the Web 2010 “Women in Wells,” Knee-Jerk “Before We Pass This Way Again,” Lamination Colony “A Willingness and a Warning,” Make Magazine “Somebody Else’s,” Midwestern Gothic “More Mysteries,” MLP as a mini-book “A Heaven Gone,” Nano Fiction “Roundabout the Bottom,” Necessary Fiction “Prowlers,” Pank “The Things “Which Blind Us,” Pear Noir “Judgment Day,” Ping Pong “The Direction of Forgetting,” Requited “The Dark Spot,” Robot Melon “Staying Alive During that Old War,” Six Sentences “The Effects of Rotation,” Sleeping-fish “Felted,” SmokeLong “Marbles Loosed,” Spork “Unaccounted,” trnsfr “Ratman,” Wag’s Revue “Filth and Rot,” Why Vandalism “The Colleens,” Word Riot “Half.”
My greatest thanks go to Dan Wickett and Steven Gillis for giving these stories a second life and home. To Guy Intoci and Jeffery Gleaves for their incredible partnership and efforts, Michelle Dotter for the close eye, and Steven Seighman for the terrific design work. All gratitude to the hosts of the Chicago reading series, where many of these stories premiered, and the good old Dollar Store tour gang, for giving me reasons to write and the drive to write more and better, especially Aaron Burch, for reading this collection and talking to me about it. To all my professors and classmates at SAIC for making me think differently and better. Cheers to Claudia and what I hope will be a long collaboration. To all my family and friends for their understanding and support, especially my parents and sister for being models of dedication and love. And to Jared for always telling me to write instead.