“The Man Who Dances To No Music”,
The Man
Who Dances
To No
Music
The books in the library are like little tenants of their shelves, just waiting to be interacted with. Some do and get checked out, leaving gaps where they once lived. Some are big. Some are small. Do you see me? one asks. Shut up, says the other out of jealousy. She’s my reader. But I don’t think I am.
I don’t like going to the library. But Mama has to come to print her income documents. They keep bugging me at the welfare office, she says, and I can’t stay home by myself just yet so I have to come with her. The clerk and her talk for a long time, laughing and joking about life as if it was one big comedy, though it is more like a comedy of errors.
Eventually she gets up and I get up too and we leave. Outside of the library is a big, tall man. He’s the dancer. Once he danced on Mango and Delaney by the corner grocery for a whole day before the neighbours got sick of it and called the police and had him taken away. But of course he came back. He’s just so distracting; the way he moves his hands, kicks his legs, gyrates his hips, is like he’s at prom again in his younger days or with his wife on their honeymoon or on a trip to somewhere in the islands. But it’s not that. It’s just the library, and he’s alone.
Mama tightens her grip on me when she sees him. Don’t look for too long. He’s loco, she says. Crazy. Of course he does nothing in response; he’s too busy to care. We walk down and down and down away from him as the library grows smaller and smaller until it is gone, and with it the man, the man who dances to no music.