The Dust Has Learned to Dance

How it begins

The dust performed a perfect turn beneath the radiator. Ruth Venn watched it rise, gather itself, and finish in the position her left ankle no longer permitted.

She stopped the vacuum. The dust fell.

At fifty-nine, Ruth had seen enough badly fitted windows to distrust anything graceful that happened near one. She checked the sash. Shut. She checked the heating. Cold. Then she took one careful step backward.

The dust rose again.

It remembered the sequence. So did she. Three steps, a turn, the foolish suspended moment when a body seemed to have forgotten what falling was. She had practiced it in a church hall thirty-eight years ago, before work, before the injury, before sensible decisions acquired the weight of permanent furniture.

'You'll make yourself dizzy,' someone said.

Iris Saye stood in her doorway holding a bag of mending. Ruth had cleaned this building for eleven years and knew the retired costume maker's slippers, her tea preferences and the exact place her kettle cord caught on the cupboard. She did not know why Iris was looking at the dust as though she recognized a person.

'You saw that?'

'I saw the turn.'

'There wasn't a turn.'

'No,' Iris said gently. 'Not quite yet.'

Ruth switched the vacuum on. It gave one offended cough and swallowed the dancers. She immediately regretted it, though regretting dust was a new low even for a Tuesday.

Iris set her mending on the hall table. From the bag she drew a piece of faded blue fabric, light enough to float between her fingers.

'I made a costume once,' she said. 'For someone who moved exactly like that.'

Inside the vacuum, something tapped against the filter. Three taps. A pause. Then three more, keeping time with a tune Ruth had not allowed herself to hum in years.

She unplugged the machine.