Fingerdance

Fingerdance

Mark LaFlamme

Evan Spooner slept like the dead. No amount of poking or shaking or rattling could rouse him. Such pedestrian attempts only caused him to groan and frown and twist further in the sheets.

Barked commands and gentle pleas were likewise ineffective. Spooner slept with mouth wide open and snored himself deaf.

Streaming sunlight and the smell of mown grass meant nothing to Evan Spooner. He could sleep a morning away with thunder booming, wind howling, rain tapping against the windows like claws.

He could sleep with children wailing, dogs barking, lawn mowers roaring or traffic buzzing. Light, dark, loud, silent. Any condition was the right condition for sleeping the day away. Evan Spooner slept like the dead and the day passed along.

After an hour of trying to raise her husband, Crystal Spooner gave up. She left the lawn chairs in the garage, the cooler in the basement and the packed lunches in the refrigerator. There would be no romantic picnic today, or lazy hours spent on the beach.

Sighing, she closed the bedroom door and swallowed any sort of bitterness that wanted to rise up. Evan Spooner was a fireman who worked twelve hour shifts five nights a week. He took three days off and then started all over again. If the man wanted to sleep long today, she would not begrudge him. He was a fine man and a hard worker. He deserved his rest. He was entitled to it. Even if it was 85 degrees and the sky was so blue it almost hurt to look at. Even if August was quickly disappearing and taking the summer with it.

She fetched a pail and mop from the kitchen and stirred in an orange concoction of cleaning liquids. She put chairs on tables and rolled throw rugs into neat little bundles. She opened windows wide and invited the summer in.

It was quiet. Too quiet. The grating sound of snoring ripped through the house but that was only unnerving. It was the sound of hospital wards or nursing homes.

Crystal stepped into the bright living room, peeled off rubber gloves and rifled through compact discs littering the entertainment center. This one’s too soft, she decided. That one, too classical. She wasn’t in the mood for 60’s rock and jazz did not suit the day.

After a minute, she made her selection. Fingerdance, the finest piece of finger picking she’d ever heard. Perfect for a day spent in forced isolation. It was bouncy and energetic. It was rich in texture and almost ticklish in places.

When the music started, Crystal cocked an ear, assessing. Too loud? Certainly not. Not when your husband sleeps like a bear in hibernation. She cranked the dial and spry music filled the house.

Rubber gloves on, mop in hand, she attacked the kitchen floor, only slightly aware that her hips rocked to the music. Tongue clashing with teeth and lips, she hummed along with the jaunty music and scrubbed the kitchen floor. The euphoric sounds of the Fingerdance inspired her. She wrestled with furniture she might otherwise mop around. She leaned in and scrubbed away grime barely visible to the naked eye. Crystal Spooner was a cleaning machine.

The bedroom door squeaked on its hinges and a pale figure stepped from within. Hair wild, chest naked, Evan Spooner came bopping through the bright living room and into the kitchen. Bare feet stepping onto wet tile, he danced his way to his laboring wife. Lost in her mopping, she turned around and started at the sight of him. His right hand flew into the air. Then his left one. He bounced up and down on muscular legs and threw his head from side to side in time with the music. His eyes were closed and mouth drawn in a half grin of sleepy ecstasy. Evan Spooner was moved by the Fingerdance.

Dancing forward, snapping his fingers, he grabbed his wife by the hands and drew her into the dance. She dropped the mop and moved with him across the shiny floor. Her head bobbed along with his. She bounced on her legs as he did. They didn’t say a word, but danced in erratic circles around the kitchen, fingers weaved around each other’s, goofy grins on their faces.

It went on for ten minutes. They left strange footprints on the drying floor but didn’t speak a word. A lazy breeze pressed through the windows as if to spy on this frenzied couple. The Fingerdance climaxed with a swirl of chords and then ended almost sadly. For several moments, silence filled the kitchen.

Breathless, feeling as though she’d spent several minutes hypnotized, Crystal Spooner gazed up at her tall, sleepy husband.

"After all the yelling and shaking and pleading, it’s the music that got to you?"

Evan Spooner grinned at her. His eyes were puffy. There were lines from the sheets still drawn on his face like old wounds. He held his wife’s hands and smiled down at her.

"It’s the sound of sunbeams bouncing through the house. It’s like little fun ferries cavorting in my head. Each note is like a string fastened to my hands and feet and I had no choice, darling. It drew me from my bed and set me to."

Crystal threw her head back and laughed at him. She hugged him around the waist and pressed her face into his chest.

"You’re a lunatic, my darling. But you’re my lunatic and now your wide awake."

The spent the day on the ocean. They rented kayaks and paddled through salt marshes. They ate lobster on a restaurant patio and lay on cooling sand as the sun went down. They walked hand-in-hand along the edge of the water, feet bare as waves lapped against their ankles.

A beautiful day. A perfect day. And it was only the beginning. For Crystal found that the Fingerdance would never fail to rouse her husband from sleep. Sometimes he came from the bedroom begrudgingly but he always came out dancing. He came bouncing from the bedroom with sleepy eyes and a cockeyed grin, moving to the dazzling notes of the finger picking as if tugged by melodic strings.

All of his days off were bliss. They went horseback riding and mountain climbing. They bought a sailboat, took up camping and went for drives all over. They stayed in exotic inns or went gambling in glitzy casinos. Crystal and Evan Spooner moved into their middle age with almost unblemished bliss and love so luminous it was dazzled others.

Evan was more relaxed and content than ever. He was promoted to captain on the fire force and commanded an entire division. He was loved and respected by his men and lauded by city leaders. On the job, Evan was as committed and hardworking as ever. Away from the station, he was a dedicated and adoring husband and life could not have been any sweeter.

The three alarm fire that took his life burned down an entire city block. Four people were killed including two children. But the headlines screamed for days after that many more would surely have perished if not for the actions of the hero Evan Spooner.

He busted his way through the back of a day care while flames consumed the front. A dozen children were inside and half had succumbed to smoke. Two-by-two, Evan hauled them to safety and then returned to fetch their pet gerbil. Those heroics would forever engrave the name Evan Spooner on the community conscience. But almost no one would remember the homeless man Evan tried to save in from a vacant tenement three buildings down. Both fireman and transient were lost when a ceiling caved in and crushed both men in a flash of fire and dark smoke.

The funeral service was huge. The honor guard led mourners in a dolorous ceremony to Pine Grove Cemetery. Speeches were given. A flag was draped over the coffin of the hero Evan Spooner. His agonized wife dropped the first fistful of dirt into the grave and then collapsed with grief so great, she did not believe she could bear it.

Friends stayed with her for several days. They tried to tempt her out of her gloom, but all had seen the powerful love she had shared with her husband. No amount of soft words or forceful hugs could reach that place in her that ached for her lost beloved. After days, Crystal was alone again, in a world of tears that tore through her in sobs.

On a morning when autumn gave way to winter, when the chill in the air grew teeth and the wind fangs, Crystal awoke early. She tried to sleep her grief away, but sleep would not keep her for long.

She awoke and sat on a sofa that seemed to big and stared off into a house full of meaningless space. The shades were drawn against the gray outside and Crystal felt the first sobs of the day trying to heave from her chest.

It was so quiet. It was too quiet.

Knowing it would deepen her pain, knowing it would stir up memories so wonderful they were horrid, she placed Fingerdance in the CD player and turned the volume up loud.

The rising and dipping and swirling notes dragged her from memory to memory. It carried her way up high and then let her plummet on chutes of anguish and C chords. The music was heavenly and hellish; beautiful and cruel.

At last, Crystal let out one long and screeching wail and flung herself down on the bed, to smell the odor of his aftershave on the pillow and remember the beautiful sounds of his snores.

She slept and awoke to heavy, pressing silence. She stumbled from her bed, staggered to the living room and pressed play once more. She poked at the buttons until the repeat function had been activated and stumbled back to her bed. Let me die here, she thought, with nothing but the dancing sounds of memory to lead me home.

It was midnight when the front door creaked open and an autumn chill crept in. The door swung open further but the sound was lost in the mesmerizing cacophony of the Fingerdance.

Steps across the tiled kitchen floor. Steps across the living room rug. Another long creak as the bedroom door swung open.

Crystal awoke to darkness and stared from her bed. There in the doorway, illuminated by the stark, white light of a streetlamp outside, her husband bounced and bopped to the invigorating notes of the Fingerdance. The hands that shot into the air were blackened and twisted. The face that moved from side to side was a black horror with wide, lidless eyes and a lipless mouth drawn into a skeletal sneer. The hair was gone. The scalp was charred and taut so that it gleamed.

Evan Spooner, burned dead, bounced on legs where skin and muscle had been licked away by fire. He bounced and bopped and moved to the Fingerdance as though on strings manned by an invisible puppeteer.

And at last, his wife joined him. Rising from the bed with a heart filled with glee, she stepped to her adoring husband and took his cold, burned hands in her own. And they danced across the bedroom floor in darkness as the divinely playful notes of the Fingerdance carried them across the night.

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Originally published in Alien Skin Magazine.