Dancer in Blue

For the prompt “beads go flying.”

There’s a swirl of color in the center of the room. It’s blue at its core but beaded in black and purple and silver, surrounding a woman who surrounds herself in a veil of swaying arms and clever, inviting hands. She is wearing a midrift-baring silky sapphire top and a skirt of the same shade, covered in a net of dark beads and flashing coins that sound like bells with each stamp of her foot.

She has a backup singer in the background, and a man in a vest playing some sort of drum. It’s hard to pay attention to them, when her movements snap with a precision that seems almost painful, and then sway with a langoir that almost puts you to sleep. The music slows, and her hands slow with it. The arc of her black hair turns downward, flowing around her shoulders, and the rhythm of her hips is a gentle shh, shh. Her skirt, you notice, is embroidered with a pattern of feathers in black thread, just visible under the black net of beads and silver coins that make that sound that is getting under your skin and weaving itself with your heartbeat. You find your breath slowing in sympathy. Her figure is round and has no hard edges, except her nose, which writers might call ‘striking’ and you would call flat and oddly appealing, though that might be the way it looks with the blackness of her eyelashes and the curve of her neck, the line of her shoulder, the way the light flares golden across her skin as she circles and you can see the spread of her upper back above her shirt.

The drum begins to beat louder, slowly. Drum. Drum. Drum. She finishes the dance with a swaying walk, and as her hips echo from side to side, the beads on her skirt go flying.