Dance at the Edge
3.
In her first three months in town—before she saw Viola Knight brushing her teeth—Emma had taken to hanging out with a disparate collection of individuals living in her dorm, all apprentices in arts guilds. They amused her and easily swept her into their intense personal dramas and fantasies. With them she developed the beginnings of confidence in her capacity for existing socially. For the first time in her life she discovered a tolerance for the “daydreaming” and eccentricity people of her own sort found by turns irritating and disquieting.
She attended a play with them her second week in town. It struck her that the very idea of a staged drama must have come from somebody’s awareness of the Edge, and this insight plunged her afresh into her old metaphysical questions. Were all of these creative people attracted to the arts because they sensed—but had been taught to ignore—that it was there? Or did they all know it was there and seek somehow to replicate it in such a way that their audiences would see it without a loss of innocence as to the real Edge they did not? As bright and imaginative as she found her new friends, Emma did not dare speak any of her questions aloud.
Quickly Emma slid into a sort of niche with them. She made them laugh, but with pleasure at—rather than to mock—her rather ingenuous wonder. She did not know why they accepted her, only that they did. But she discovered her position among them to be conspicuous when at dinner, a few nights after Emma’s body began burning for Viola, Letitia Shadows murmured, “For shame, Emma Persimmon,” as Emma’s eyes tracked Viola Knight all the way from the salad bar back to a table of engineering apprentices. “Inspired by the slide-rule over the cello.”
“Both instruments celebrate the abstract,” Paulus Square, the only cellist present, said. Pale and unsmiling, he bowed across the table at them, his austere body virtually as abstract as either calculus or music.
“People have been known to fall in love with paintings, statues, and vases,” Royal Quiet said.
“But I’ll take someone with a warm, juicy body, any day,” Elizabeth Peartree said.
“Yes,” Letitia Shadows said, sounding sad. “Someone like Emma Persimmon, whose body, in the perception of my senses, bursts with heat and juices like a peach hanging ripe in the sun.”
Emma blushed hotly and denied nothing. She glanced sidelong to the far reaches of the room where Viola Knight sat, only a meter or so from the Edge.
“Never fear,” Paulus Square said to Emma. “She’ll never know—unless you tell her yourself.”
Emma sighed, relieved and disappointed when she believed him, relieved and fearful when she did not. She was amazed that they had seen her passion without her speaking it. Why, then, would Viola Knight herself not see it, too?
4.
Surely it was inevitable that Emma Persimmon’s ardent devotion to Viola Knight would eventually bear fruit. Had not all the famous Fated Lovers of their world, from its earliest history, always come—eventually—together, even those from distant villages or feuding guilds? Emma hoped, feared, believed that her own desire combined with simple proximity must make it happen.
One Saturday afternoon, Emma followed Viola Knight onto a bus to the edge of town and from there on foot into the forest. She stalked and tracked Viola Knight with no subtlety whatsoever, flying from one inadequately-shielding tree-trunk to another, frequently catching her flowing red scarf on the bare winter thorns, wincing often at the racket her sneakered tippy-toes made as they scuffled gold, red, and brown leaves and fractured sharp, dry twigs. When Viola Knight came to a stream, followed its banks for a few yards, and then trod a narrow log to cross it, Emma’s desire grew giddy. Flitting and gliding after Viola, ever deeper into gloomy, fern-loving wood, Emma knew the delirious thrill of the hunt and the delicious chill of the possibility that the hunter, discovered, might herself become the hunted.
Then Viola Knight stood stock-still, hands on hips, head thrust slightly forward in total, utter concentration. Emma took a look around—and gasped. Viola had brought her to an Edge. A huge, stunning, exceptionally wonderful Edge. Out of doors.
Viola Knight walked along its face—and then turned sharply, where the Edge actually seemed to come to a point, as though it were an acute angle—and walked along an apparent second face. Emma, so astonished that she forgot her purpose in tracking Viola, unthinkingly followed and saw for herself that this Edge was actually wedge-shaped, like a sliver of giant pie plopped down right there in the middle of the forest.
And what a pie it was! Emma Persimmon had always been more enchanted by the existence of the Edge than by the things she usually saw beyond it. But beyond—or rather inside—this three-dimensional wedge of an Edge glittered a world unlike any she had ever seen. Wild gouts of flame poured out of torches topping twisted cast-iron rods that had been placed among bizarrely-shaped trees, brilliantly illuminating the immediate areas around them, creating dark, impenetrable pockets of shadow. Willowy human figures wove in and out of the torches and trees, their faces painted the cloud-white of their stockinged legs, their eyes, mouths, and eyebrows heavily outlined in thick black paint. All of them wore scarlet, gold, and purple knee-length coats over tight black bodices and black silver-buckled, blockily high-heeled boots they stamped smartly each time their hands came together in a clapping Emma Persimmon fancied she could almost hear. They spun. They jumped. They clapped and stamped. They leaped. The intricacy of their dance surpassed any Emma had ever known.
