Beauty

She was a dancing sculpture: Alabaster skin peeking out from chiffon, china-prints of flowers under fading sunsets. When she twisted her arm she looked like a tea-pot. Her feet were not dainty; they were set with the heaviness of stone. Her hair, falling in brown waves to her shoulders, did not quite conceal a water-stain on her marble cheek.

At night, cracked and broken, she went back to her cupboard. In the morning, she draped silk over her shoulders, pulled her hair into a chignon, and danced arabesques in the sunlight. The only traces of her fissures were slight slips at the end of twirls, and a crystalline line through the place where, in another world, she might have had a heart.