Dance at the Edge
1.
Emma Persimmon discovered the Edge in the first month of her life. Chance gave her a glimpse of starscape, of a black denser than that of simple night, of a glittering spray of lights as splendid and desirable as a gold pendant dangling just out of reach. How it fascinated her infant self! It was the very second thing she pointed at; and countless times a day it made her giggle and stretch her fingers to grasp.
At five months, Emma knew where to look to see the Edge and that it was different from everything else and always changing. Suddenly able to crawl, she raced to enter it—only to discover that touching made it recede (or sometimes even vanish altogether). The large, strange, shaggy creatures splashing about in a mud hole were there, yes, to her eyes, but not to her hands, fingers, toes, mouth. Emma learned she could crawl to the Edge and occupy the space where something else had been, and the Edge would leap back, and instead of a mud hole, there would be just the floor, just the air, just herself… In this, Emma resembled most babies. They, like her, played fort/da with the Edge. But at least one of Emma’s parents did not pretend to her infant self that the Edge did not exist, although as Emma grew older, that parent of course denied ever seeing it.
By the time she started attending school, Emma understood that any acknowledgment of its presence was beyond “bad,” “naughty,” and “unacceptable.” Even so, Emma got in trouble her very first day. The Edge in her classroom lay along the back wall, out of her proper line of vision. Usually in such new circumstances the Edge would have been easy to resist. But the Edge in her classroom that day was not just any Edge. It was a scene of a desert wash so full of light that whenever Emma looked at it straight on, she reflexively put her hand up to shield her eyes from a glare that she only, of course, imagined. Through the rocky wash trickled a thin silver stream of water, in which grew long thick grasses, tiny jewel-like blossoms of sapphire, topaz, and garnet, and tall willows, lush with mauve trumpet-shaped flowers and long slim leaves. Tiny green birds with fantastically long beaks hovered over the willows, wings whirring, dipping their needle-like beaks into the bells of the flowers they courted and drained in exuberant, darting dance. Emma’s parents had taught her about bees and nectar and pollen. It excited her almost unbearably to think that these strange little birds were probably doing what bees did. The classroom, by comparison, seemed dull and stupid.
Emma, young model of propriety, did not openly stare over her shoulder; rather she stole glances from the side. But—“Emma Persimmon!” The teacher’s voice cracked like a whip, making Emma jump guiltily. “What are you doing, staring off into space, daydreaming?” The tone of the teacher’s voice clearly implied that daydreaming was among the worst crimes a student could commit. Emma almost cried with humiliation. Obediently she stared straight ahead, directly at the teacher, for several minutes. But unused to sitting in a classroom, increasingly fidgeting and restless, she forgot—and turned her head to snatch just a glimpse. “Look at Emma Persimmon,” the teacher said almost at once. Jeering: “Off in her own little world.”
The children copied the teacher’s words every chance they got, tormenting Emma with the confidence of the unthinking young.
No, Emma wanted to protest. Not off in my own world, off in another world. But just a kindergartner, she lacked the words for talking about the socially invisible and knew the whole present world against her. So she kept quiet and grew very shy and strove mightily never again to be seen staring at that wall in the classroom (though she still stared often enough to get a reputation for daydreaming).
Most children let go of the Edge in their earliest years. Emma Persimmon never did. Instead, she wondered how the teacher, facing it, could so easily pretend not to see it and, later, whether others even saw it at all. And since everyone—even the one parent who acknowledged its reality during Emma’s preschool years—acted so completely as if they did not see it, she finally understood that at least in one sense they did not. By the time she was sixteen, Emma began to wonder if it was even really there and not just something she’d been fantasizing all her life.
The need to avoid social opprobrium can be truly terrible, not to say terrifying and terrorizing. Emma carried it all inside, afraid to whisper a word of it to anyone—until her parents sent her to town for training in the Ecohusbandry Guild, and she met Viola Knight.
2.
The moment Emma Persimmon laid eyes on her, she thought Viola Knight the bee’s knees. Clad in tailored muslin pajamas, she stood straight and smart, brushing her teeth with a style that literally took Emma’s breath away. Oh such beauty, Emma thought inanely, transfixed by the graceful precision of a wrist bone framed by elegant pajama cuff. Emma, stationed at another basin, fiddled with her bath kit, eyes glued to that wrist in the mirror, and forgot to brush her own teeth.
Viola Knight, thorough in all she did, never noticed.
Emma returned to her room, burning with that all-consuming awareness. She fought off sleep for most of the night, tormented by images of the lovely wrist and perfect white sleeve, until sunrise tricked her into a doze.
Viola Knight, lost in the fascination of the Elementary Principles of Optics, never much noticed anybody who didn’t shove themselves right up into her face. Emma, though, now living for even the most fleeting glimpse of the divine object of her desire, almost forgot the Edge existed. When her genetics instructor caught her mooning, it wasn’t for staring at the Edge, but for doodling hand after hand of thick, strong, spatulate fingers and comely, sharp-boned wrist, compulsively, religiously, intemperately.
Emma had it bad.
