The dancer sits on the ground, stretching her body across her leg; the flexibility she laces upon her own limb is a natural extension of the moves she has taught herself over the years. Her legs are spread almost completely to the sides. She is supple now. This is something she always does. So much peace emanates from this position, the grace she serves to you makes her seem almost unreal. It’s easy to be lulled into the perception of softness, looking at her. So beautiful is the dancer. She looks so lost in her world of movement, that it is easy to be deluded into thinking that this is the only world she lives in. Grace can do that. It can get you all mixed up with naivete.

If you are one of those unfortunates who are lulled by graceful moves, the kind who thinks that looks are your soul, you might be shocked to know the damage she has left. That her footsteps, oh so dainty. What they have done to mow down the inner sanctum of another’s soul. These kinds of things seem to come out of nowhere. You think that you are safe in the refuge of delicacy, and then swallow the false elixir that proves to be the poison that kills you.

It is difficult to read her emotional reaction. It is hard to tell what she feels about the psychic commotion she caused, or for that matter, what she feels about anything. For a member of such an emotional gender, for a girl so entranced by the femininity of the curtseys of grand plies, her face is only a stone.

There is a storm that the dancer caused just outside her doorway, a force to be reckoned with and strong enough to pull any bystander into its vortex. Hurricanes used to be named for women, but this one contains a masculine rage of destruction that seduces the compassion of the feminine with is wounds. Standing on the edge of the hurricane, it is easy to see into the eye of his storm. Everyone sees it, moves around the edges of it. Everyone but the dancer. How can she be so oblivious to the obvious? How can she forget what she left behind?

It is the determination that is written on her face that has made her intense concentration possible. You see, this dance that she commits herself to is not a softness of surrender. It is a discipline that she has honed with precision. Please do not think that exactness is the exclusive domain of the sciences, of machines made of mechanical parts, the hardcore masculine world of the tactical. Anyone deluded enough to think that would have missed her strategy. The intuitive nature of dance has its own methodology. She executed it all along, and only those blind to her motives were caught off guard.

Do you think the dancer doesn’t know how she has turned a hunter into prey shot by his own arrow, howling in the raging terror that comes with a wounded animal? She may appear callous, that she doesn’t care. But she does know, and she does care. That has always been the problem, you see. She had cared, cared so deeply that she drowned in a compassion that she always felt was somehow used against her as a weapon.

Dance can be a passionate thing, and she played her part well. She recalls the last dance with the hunter before she walked away for good. She can still feel the heat of the dance, even as she concentrates on the steadiness of her breathing. It takes everything in her to put aside the moves that seduced and swallowed her alive. Dancers tend to make things look easier than they are. This is part of her magic.

The dancer then sees the next victim being attracted to the hunter she has left behind. The victim approaching the predator becomes caught in his trap, ready to join him in his pain. The dancer doesn’t know what to say to stop her, or to him to prevent the next wave of destruction. The words, they all ran out so long ago.

For the dancer, there will always be the dance, which is where she returns to now. It is her own refuge from the storm. It is the place where she can put all of that behind her, or at least have the consolation of something to move forward to. The dancer refuses to look back. She does not want to return to the trap that lured her, magnetized to a disaster that shook every part of her soul.

Here, the dancer is herself as she thinks of her next move. It is her body, and she has fully reclaimed it as hers in this moment. She dictates its movements, and it complies with her demands. It moves with her. It does not exist to clash with her. The dancer finds comfort in that predictability.

Now the dancer rises to her feet, standing in the power that she has reclaimed as her own. Stretches done, she moves into the dance that she has created in her own mind. She pirouettes with delight as the dance carries her and takes new life. The storm to her is another territory, far away. She has created sunlight and she rejoices in the warmth of her own making.