COIN 2022
By Meg Freitag, Mary Pauline Lowry, Chris Mathers Jackson, Natalie Disney, Tracy Sunderland, Ariel Delgado Dixon, and Natanya Biskar
Help drive this year’s COIN story by supporting The Cabin during Idaho Gives 2022! Check back for progress on the story on May 5th.
About COIN: An annual fundraiser in conjunction with Idaho Gives, COIN is a creative story collaboration that challenges eight professional writers to work together to write a story driven by community donations (i.e. donate $20 = get a sentence in the story). Always offbeat and fun, COIN is one of our hallmark fundraising events every year.
Meg Freitag
I had set them each a place at the table with the rest of us, but the ballerinas didn’t want to hang around for dinner. They were tired, they said, from the performance. They didn’t want to eat beef wellington and smile and politely hold their cloth napkins up to their mouths while they chewed, after someone asked them a question. They wanted to take their baths and eat their Pop-Tarts and drink their strawberry milks. At first, I was disappointed. They’re old enough now to hold conversations and I’d like them to get some practice. I don’t want them being empty in the head forever. Not for my sake, for theirs. The older I get, the more I appreciate having thoughts. I wish I had even more thoughts now, that I’d started younger.
But I could see they were suffering in a minor way, standing there at the center of the room in their minimal beige outfits. Their white and grey makeup had streaks in it from sweat. The stage lights we’d rented admittedly might have been a bit much. They’d heated up the room enough that we were all perspiring, even those of us who’d just been standing still. The ballerinas shivered visibly in their damp clothes, which were not fit to throw jackets or sweaters over. The wings they wore were large and cumbersome. I’d spent a small fortune on them. Genuine feathers. For a moment, I could feel what the ballerinas felt. It happens to me sometimes, like catching a breeze. They were exhausted, it was true. And cold. And felt uncomfortable among the guests, most of whom they’d never met. To mingle well is a delicate and difficult art, like ballet.
I allowed the ballerinas to take their leave; they each gave me a little curtsy before turning to go. I watched them climb the long staircase, one after the other. It wasn’t always easy to tell them apart, especially from behind. The guests watched them, too, as though it were a continuation of the performance. Their white footless stockings all stopped mid-calf on their long ballerina legs. It was strange sometimes to see them not dancing. There was little else they did with grace. Especially with their pointe shoes still on, and without music to animate them. They looked odd doing the things that regular, everyday people do. It was like when rabbits try to walk.
I wondered what the guests were thinking. I get some pleasure out of imagining what others are thinking. I imagined they were thinking We’re hungry, which was fair. The performance had gone on longer than anyone expected. Once the ballerinas get dancing, it’s hard to get them to stop. They become impervious to time. Or it’s possible time just moves slower for them then, and they don’t realize how long we’ve all been standing there, consumed by the excruciating beauty of it. Wanting desperately to move around ourselves but not knowing how.
I rang a tiny gold bell and the guests moved into the dining room and sat. There were holes in the seating arrangement, where the ballerinas were meant to go. The short women whom we pay to bring the food out at parties brought the food out, wearing their black dresses and their black gloves up to their elbows. The dark eye makeup they wore made them look sleepy and sad. I adored them, suddenly. They were a vision. I couldn’t have imagined a better evening—even if the ballerinas had opted to dine with us, I’m not sure it could have possibly improved my view. And now we could even talk about them—their performance—like they weren’t here. Because they weren’t.
The chef had outdone himself, as usual. Every dinner tends to be more lavish than the last.
Mary Pauline Lowry
There was a clink of silverware against fine china. A sense of nervousness surged through me as it always did before guests took their first bites. After tonight’s performance these donors would hopefully give a total of twelve million dollars for the new performing arts space. Those funds might dry up if the beef wellington was cooked medium, if it didn’t melt in their mouths.
But Randolph Hurstenberg, great-grandson of the founder of an infamous Wall Street chemical company forked a chunk into his mouth and sighed audibly. It was a sigh of great, almost sensual pleasure. The sigh said, “This beef wellington is medium-rare, leaning toward, rare, perfection.” A sense of relief flushed through me with such force I realized I’d been nervous all night.
Betty Van Slot said, “Those girls. Exquisite. Imagine it. Being able to float across the floor on one’s toes.” Betty Van Slot had perhaps once been a slender agile girl. Now she had the tough, dried out look of a middle-aged person who eats too little and exercises too much. But there was no grace to her form. She had none of the ballerinas’ dewiness. I imagined her stretching out her hamstrings each night with a yoga strap. Still, it would be a wonder if she could do a high kick.
From upstairs I heard a yelp and then a ferocious crash and a volley of screams. After the performance, before their retreat, the ballerinas had been nearly silent. It was a shock to hear their vocal cords put to such piercing use. I prayed for nothing more than a minor scuffle over the last cherry poptart.
Dear God let it be nothing more.
Nothing worse.
My wine glass was halfway to my lips and I forced myself to take a slow sip. I set the glass down gently and said, “Girls! What they do get up to.”
But inside I felt afraid.
As a child, I had loved the game Clue.
The singing telegram girl shot by Ms. Scarlet.
Mrs. Ho, the cook, stabbed in the back with a dagger by Mrs. Peacock.
The motorist bashed on the head with a wrench by Colonel Mustard.
The ballerinas all looked alike to me. But to each other they were entirely distinguishable.
They could identify each other with nothing more than a bit of toe shoe, the edge of an ear, the set of a bun to go on. To the ballerinas, each inch of each of them was entirely unique.
And with such intimacy and knowledge came animosities, enmities, jealousies petty and deserved that the uninitiated like myself could not imagine.
“It sounds like they are getting their yah-yahs out,” I said. “Which they deserve after all their hard work tonight. But I think I’ll check on them, all the same.” I pushed back my chair and I stood and made my way up the stairs, away from the eyes on my back as if I was perhaps some extension of the ballerinas’ performance.
Chris Mathers Jackson
A hush followed me as I climbed the stairs slowly, deliberately. For the time, no noise came from above. Had they made their own peace? Perhaps divided the last poptart into pieces? Soothed the flaring temper of one among them who felt slighted, excluded? Or had the ballerinas moved past the ferocity of a physical attack to a more subtle, whispered one? I hoped the delicacy of the beef wellington would soon distract the dining guests.
“I do hope all is well,” I heard someone behind me say in high-pitched disdain. “I know this evening’s success means so much to a great number of individuals.” I imagined the leer on their faces, the delightful curiosity in their eyes as they turned to their neighbors to speak in murmurs, excited by the ballerinas’ continued performance. I breathed out audibly, relieved I was no longer seated among them.
Oh, let this be nothing. Let it be something humorous, something that will entertain those affluent people dining below. Something to reinforce the ballerinas’ mystique. I raised my chin ever so slightly and reached to lightly hold the rail in my ascent. I had been trained all my life to appear calm, in control, even when cold sweat glistened under my polished hair threatening to unnerve me.
My foot fell silently on a small landing midway up the large spiraling staircase and I paused. The window to my right looked out over the extensive gardens alive with scent and color. A breeze moved through the delicate blossoms–pale pink, gossamer white, wine red–adorning the many flowering trees without. Petals rose and fell dancing in unseen currents with the same elegance the ballerinas had embodied less than an hour before.
Despite the garden reverie, I jumped slightly as glass shattered above me. A slamming door echoed through the cavernous stairway ensuring every conversation paused below, every head turned. My attention retreated from the mesmerizing artfulness of the garden and the evening breeze, returning to this matter. As quickly as my formal footwear allowed, I hurried up the stairs.
“Why me?” I silently asked. “Why am I the one left stewarding this legacy?”
The few bites of beef wellington I had managed to eat rose in my throat and mingled with the final sip of wine I had forced myself, for appearance sake, to swallow. I reached the upper floor with a silent curse.
Natalie Disney
Something–someone–darted from the dressing room at the end of the hall, a flash of chalky white. I halted, peeking around the banister. My cheeks burned, as if the stage lights had choked back to life, stunning me with an electric blue heat.
One of the ballerinas had come outside to guard the heavy door.
It was the little dancer with the chapped ring around her mouth, reddened more by strawberry milk–she’d performed with a particular deficit of charm. She was shaking her head again and again, as if trying to loosen an unwanted thought.
Unwanted thoughts. I had them myself, from time to time.
Suddenly I wanted to run back down the staircase, to be enveloped by the gloved arms of one of the short caterers; to find safety in her sleepy dark eyes, to be fed and cared for and called princess. Beef wellington–oh, hadn’t it been my choice? Hadn’t it called to mind a hundred dinners in that very garden, fragrant late evenings in long-ago summers, when grandfather would sing along with the string quartet, and we never had to ask anybody else for their money?
“Are you alright, dear?” I asked, approaching the ballerina as if she were fast asleep. She did not seem to register my presence, but went on shaking her head, her soft bangs lolling against her forehead. “Is everything alright?” This time she stilled, her eyes meeting mine with dread.
“You should go look,” she said, then sucked in her lower lip.
I moved closer to the door, gesturing for the handle. “Won’t you let me in, then?”
“Go look,” she repeated. As she raised a finger toward the terrace window overlooking the garden, it occurred to me that she was no longer wearing her wings.
Tracy Sunderland
Unwanted thoughts, yes. She imagines what she’ll see if she looks out of the terrace window. It’s too gruesome to consider. At least, not yet.
She pushes past the chapped-lip, wingless ballerina and wrenches open the ornate dressing room door.
She sees but can’t quite process the world unfolding before her. It would have been easier if there had been a dead body, a Mr. Mustard holding the knife.
She watches the ballerinas dance - a slow, languid improvisation. They wear their wings, their beige-clad bodies streaked with cherry-red tart filling..or is it blood?
Every angel is terrible, she thinks, as she watches the gossamer girls move and sway, touch and then push away. They seem caught in a strange, dangerous ecstasy that doesn’t include her.
She shivers: it’s cold, suddenly. The window curtains flutter, affirming that a window is wide open, letting in the stiff night air.
She gazes at the open window then back to the young women - these girls she can now distinguish in all their tender, sharp-edged fragility. In their bloody, somehow holy, reverie.
She is awestruck, mesmerized.
Beef Wellington is forgotten. Grandfather and string quartets are forgotten. Millionaire donors forgotten. She thinks suddenly of Francesca Woodman and her photographs -- that ominous delicacy. Yes, that’s what she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Something desperately awful has happened in this room.
Questions deluge her: are they drugged? Were the Pop Tarts tainted? Whose blood is that? Is that blood? What the hell is going on?
She snaps out of her own reverie over. She makes her way to the open window. She looks down.
A fallen angel.
Natanya Biskar
“We’re sorry about the mess.”
I jumped. Next to me was the tallest ballerina. Across her leotard, streaks of red. I felt an internal lurch, the way the ground continues to sway after you disembark from a yacht. The ballerina tilted her head, eyed me curiously, in the same way a dog might regard you after you have spoken. Then she laughed–surprisingly deep and throaty for such a reed of a person. She looked down at her leotard and swiped a finger through the red.
“Food fight,” she said. “So childish.”
She licked her finger, sucking in her cheeks. Behind her, the other ballerinas had grown bored of their dance. They splayed over the wingbacked chairs like cats, all long limbs and a heightened kind of disinterest.
“What–” I said, my throat dry, the words catching– “what happened here?”
The ground swooped away and I reached to steady myself. I gripped the cool, bronze head of a tabletop statue of a Daschund. One of our family Daschunds. What had been the dog’s name?
The ballerina smiled around her finger, still in her mouth.
“You’re talking about Evangeline.”
At the sound of the name–Evangeline–the other ballerinas paused their humming talk. They turned their faces to us, turned them as one, like a many-headed creature, and in a deep, choral voice, they intoned, Words without blood are nothing but air.
The ballerinas began talking again, their voices casual, ordinary.
The tall ballerina smiled. Her skin was poreless. A breeze from the open window trembled through the feathers in her wings. Real feathers. Real birds.
“I have guests downstairs,” I said.
“So true!” said the tall ballerina. She turned and clapped her hands once, a resounding sound. The company jerked, stood up, no longer languid but militantly straight.
“Sisters,” the tall ballerina said. “There is work to do.”
The ballerinas seemed to drain from the room like water. When they were gone, the tall ballerina turned back to me. She gave me a quizzical look, her eyebrows pinching. I saw that I was holding the heavy statue of the Daschund in both hands.
“We’re really not bad people,” the tall ballerina said. She pursed her lips. “Though we are shit dancers.”
From down below in the garden, voices snaked upwards. Singing. An eerie warble.
Bone, flesh, and breath. Bone, flesh, and breath.
“Do you ever think about the permanence of matter?” the tall ballerina asked. She snapped her fingers. “The conservation of matter! I always forget the right way to say things. Accuracy, specificity–it’s so important, wouldn’t you agree? Everything–words these days–they’re so floppy. I like old words. Ancient languages. Latin.”
Bone, flesh, and breath. Bone, flesh, and breath. Return to us now.
“The words of incantation? Super specific,” the tall ballerina said. “They’ve barely changed in thousands of years. Think about that. The words we say are the same words someone was crying out in the birch forests of Prussia.”
“Prussia,” I said.
“Exactly!”
I felt acid in my throat, a rancid sear. The ballerina joined me at the window. She leaned down, resting her elbows on the sill.
Ariel Delgado Dixon
Sprawled on the bluestone garden walk, three stories down, she laid artful and still, a demure arrangement of limbs.
“Aw,” said the ballerina beside me. “She looks like she’s sleeping.”
She did look peaceful, if a little stiff.
She reminded me of innocent little Clara, from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. The whole candy-colored ordeal of Sugarplum Fairies and Dewdrops and Russian Dancers and spiraling Flowers had turned out to be Clara’s midnight dream. Pure invention.
I was hoping the same was true for me, but I was rarely that lucky.
The ballerina drummed her fingers on the windowsill. She seemed to be waiting for my reaction. The other dancers watched on, tittering their incantations and preening, comparing wingspans.
Down on the bluestone garden walk, beside poor Evangeline, the shortest caterer had come to investigate. She looked up, saw me in the window.
“Don’t move,” I told her. “I’ll come to you.”
Downstairs, one of the more seasoned caterers had the sense to close the doors to the dining room. Music was playing. I heard the pomp and circumstance of “Waltz of the Flowers.”
A neat, choreographed row of dancers had followed me down the looping staircase and into the garden, where the shortest caterer stood speechless above Evangeline.
Before the bloodless work of raising funds and hosting dinner parties and buffing the egos of the charitable elite, I too had been a dancer. I was good, but never great. Always, my talent lay in the grander architectural work of planning, managing, orchestration. I could troubleshoot a dry Beef Wellington, but a prima ballerina felled by a deranged, Latin-obsessed horde of company dancers was a taller order. Still, I trusted my capabilities. The shortest caterer and I would make quick work of Evangeline’s body, send her off in a car toward a hospital, gather up the company dancers and lock them up some place until the last guest signed their check and rolled away in their limo.
While I told the shortest caterer what to do, the ballerinas whispered their own plans. It occurred to me that Evangeline’s window exit was not the night’s finale, but perhaps the beginning. What did the ballerinas have planned for each other, and for the rest of us?
Bone, flesh, and breath, the ballerinas had chanted. And that’s all dance was. Control of the body as it flung through space and time, the body the instrument, the body’s effort made invisible, made of grace.
“Here,” the shortest caterer said, “I’ll grab her arms, and you grab her legs.” The shortest caterer’s smoky eyes seemed to disappear when she blinked, but when they opened again, the fairest blue.
“Don’t touch her,” one of the ballerinas said, stepping forward from her pack as the new lead. Like a flight of swans, the rest of the ballerinas closed ranks behind her, their wings imposing.
“Or what?” the shortest caterer said, but before we could take another step, the lead ballerina and her flock gathered around Evangeline.
By turns chanting, smirking, weeping, the ballerinas circled Evangeline in unison, one long-limbed murmuration, making their own current and music with every pointe-shoed scrape along the bluestone. If it weren’t so gruesome, so unhinged, it would’ve been beautiful. At least, it was transfixing. The shortest caterer and I watched on as the circle moved faster, still in unison, the music made by the dancers growing louder and they spun, shielding Evangeline from our view.
I felt the shortest caterer’s tiny hand slip into mine, and I was grateful. Her touch let me know it was real. I wasn’t dreaming at all. Whatever madness had struck that night, it wasn’t mine alone.
Just as the ballerinas’ spinning hit a crescendo, a cold blur of white and wings, the doors to the garden opened behind us.
The dinner guests in all their evening wear looked stricken.
“I can explain—” I began to say, but the shortest caterer gripped my hand tight, shook her head.
The guests watched the whirl of ballerinas as the occasional red streak flared in their costumed ranks. I tried to read the faces of the donors, tried to plan ahead what I would say, how best to salvage an evening gone wildly off the rails—but, I didn’t have to say a thing.
As the circle of dancers slowed and settled, their last variation complete, Evangeline rose to her feet, then onto her toes, a perfect pointe, prima to the end.
A first tentative clap broke the silence. Applause spread out into the garden as the guests whooped and cheered louder than I’d heard at any performance. One woman in fur plucked a rose from the garden and tossed the petals gleefully, first into the air, then toward the ballerinas, and then, finally, at my feet.
The End.
