ballet slippers and childhood dreams

Ballet Slippers and Childhood dreams
Samantha did the exercises every day, almost a sacred act. Other parts of her life were routinely altered, skipped or otherwise set aside but never the exercises.
She didn’t really need to do them – she visited the gym at least three times a week and did a full work out each time.
The funny thing was she never did the exercise at the gym; only ever in the privacy of her own home even though it meant she had to be creative with the furniture in her apartment.
If anyone asked, as she was wondering to herself now, why she did the exercises she couldn’t answer. She’d often considered giving them up for an extra hour and a half in bed but always balked at the idea. Now, sitting staring blankly at the computer screen in her office with the smells of coffee left on the heat too long and the faintly perfumed, conditioned air fighting for dominance she asked herself the question again.
The clock on her desk read 16:48, the reports were completed and emailed to the respective recipients so she couldn’t escape the question with work; there was no more work. Nor was she overly eager to leave. She had, unfortunately agreed to drive up for the long weekend and spend it with her mother; not a prospect she was savouring but there was no way of escaping it without upsetting the matriarch. She could put it off until five fifteen when the offices closed for the weekend.
The question hung in her mind. Why? She sighed heavily but it wouldn’t go away.
From the outer office, wafting through with the smell of over-cooked coffee came the muffled sound of Mildred’s radio. Mildred, her motherly secretary, often had the radio tuned to Classic FM. It wasn’t to Samantha’s personal tastes but neither was it offensive so she didn’t make an issue of it. Now she found herself trying to identify the tune that was playing but it finished before she had a chance. Almost immediately another piece began, as barely audible as the last.
She physically jerked in her plush leather seat as the music reached in and touched something insider her.
‘Swan Lake.’ She whispered in an almost awed voice and remembered.
She was no longer a twenty something mid-level executive she was a ten year old girl and she was on a large stage, dressed in a willowy white costume… Beyond the lights of the stage was utter darkness and though she couldn’t see them she knew there were hundreds of pairs of eyes on her and the other girls on the stage with her.
Tchaikovsky’s music swelled out, flowing over and around the dancers on the stage and out into the audience beyond. It wrapped itself about her, like a mother’s comforting embrace as she danced. It gave her strength and confidence. There was no place she would rather be. The other girls swirled around her; they moved in perfect unison as though a single entity controlled by a single mind.
Finally the music quieted and for a long moment all she could hear was the laboured breathing of herself and the other dancers. Then the harsh sound was swallowed by the roar of a hundred voices from out of the darkness and a new sound buoyed her higher than even the music had.
She was sitting in her office once more but she could still hear the echoes of the applause and feel its euphoria. Beyond her office the music had stopped. The clock on her desk read 17:02.
There was a discreet knock and Mildred’s plump, bespectacled features appeared round the door.
‘Is it still okay for me to leave early Ms Carpenter?’
Samantha blinked.
‘Of course Mildred.’
The older woman started to leave but then paused.
‘Is everything alright? Only you look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
Samantha forced a smile.
‘Just tired.’
Mildred hesitated a moment longer then disappeared, pulling the door shut behind her.
Samantha had already dismissed her from her mind. That vivid, lightning stroke memory had awakened other, long dormant ones. Memories of the classes; of other performances and of the childhood dream.
She smiled at the familiar warmth the re-discovered memories radiated.
Why did she do the exercises?
For the same reason she kept the small, worn out ballet slippers hanging on the mirror in her bedroom. It was all she had left of the dream.
She stood up and kicking off the Jimmy Choo shoes moved around her desk. Slowly she began to dance to music only she could hear; to the rapturous applause that echoed from the dream.