The dancer is a patient and must be made to comply. They cannot be trusted with their own sensory perceptions. They suffer from hallucinations of pain and delusions of exhaustion. There is no such thing as malpractice when it comes to the dancer. You cannot be punished enough. Your skin is an interface for needles and pressure cuffs. Your skin exists only to alert him to your mistakes. You must dance in a state of exposure, so he can inspect you for bruises, stains of clumsiness. Do not think your body is something to be admired. You are a disgusting male. But you are not a man. You are stunted. Your anorexic ribs are a kind of descended gynecomastia. Your bulge is sexless, juvenile, and clownlike. Your body is the mannequin and the dress at the same time. Beauty can never exist for you as a noun, but it might as a verb.
Your handler caresses mentholated cream into your feet. His sensitive surgeon’s fingers, long and slender in clear nitrile gloves, sweep along your sole and dig between your toes, leaving burning, sticky numbness. Analgesic mint and nerve-cauterizing capsaicin and whatever chemicals he thinks you need.
✦
Cancer’s legs are stretched by a black bar, locked into an agonizing permasplit that seems impossible to maintain. His bony prominences are pressed into the hard floor, split open as if he was being penetrated by the core of the earth, impregnated with something so divine his entire body must be ripped open. Thank the bar for helping you. Kiss and hold the bar, in your off hours. Pray for the return of the bar. For the moment he helps you lock yourself back into it. And all the other special instruments which make you sing, held to your strings by leather manacles, bracing your wrists, ankles, waist, and throat. You must be very still to dance. You must not move a muscle.
When he is not dancing, he thinks about it. He marks the beat on the bus. Being around non-dancers is excruciating. Sluggish, trapped, inert, arrhythmic. Their lack of grace infuriates.
He spreads his legs in his sleep. He cannot escape the bar. He does not pleasure himself before bed, because this would drain his vital essence. His dreams are burning and gush from him, pooling between somnolent splits which give the moonlight free space to roam. Silvery puddles on this blanketless bed.
✦
Try not to gasp. His fingers stroke your very sensitive place, and you are dizzy with intoxicating, icy fumes. Your slender feet, bruised bleeding and blistered, are being repaired by the skillful hands of your handler. Repaired is the wrong word. The mentholated cream allows you to ignore the pain. Ignore the damage. But it’s still there. And you’re going to keep dancing. Even if he has to drain all the waste from your body, keep all the food from your throat, and replace all grotesque, bloated, mammalian fuel with the angelic mana of narcotics and amphetamines. Stimulant use during your developmental years stunts growth. He tells you this as he prepares your dose. Why does he tell you this? His voice soft and glistening, like the ripples of a night stream.
Your body is better this way. Streamlined and amphetafeminized, congenitally demure. He has you on the scales, every ounce of your young flesh visible to him in unerring LEDs, and he has you under the stadiometer, the slider coming down the pole to crush tight against your head as if reminding it not to grow. He cuts your dark hair into neat bangs and clips your toenails, taking such close care with anything that might exceed the bounds he has determined for your body.
✦
You pour ketchup on toilet paper and eat it. It mimics food. It mimics the bleeding when you wipe. It makes you gag, the grainy powdery tissue soaked with glossy red slime and sticking to the inside of your mouth. Who could kiss this disgusting orifice? A good reminder that your body is one of those dolls that little girls feed pretend food.
The cellulose is indigestible. It comes out like a magician’s trick, aborted ribbons wilted and decayed.
✦
He peels your pointe shoes off, and they smell like dead fish. Your battered feet fall into his hands, aching ripe fruit he could explode with a little pressure. Toes webbed with blood, devolved into primordial ur-ballet. Your nails blacken and fall off. He collects them like badges. Marks of your perseverance and devotion.
Your bones are changing. Ballet hip. Your posture, your sway, your basis of perambulation, belongs to dance. The dance that will save the world.
✦
✦
thank you sammy for ballet torture research, to which this owes so much <3 🩰