Dancing in Fury

1: Stumble

She had a funny sort of walk, the kind that followed no fixed rhythm, only a tempo that she herself was conscious of. The irregularity drove him insane. Her walk was comprised of a tiny hop, a stride and a slight limp – all these fell in no regular pattern whatsoever, but she managed to seem graceful despite her awkward gait.

He would often watch her from his bedroom window as she loped down the narrow lane to the bus-stop every morning. Often, he would try to predict the next step in her gait, and often, he predicted wrongly. Often, he would stare after her even as she had rounded the corner and disappeared from sight. Only then would he get dressed and start his day, trying to mimic the way she walked. But that earned him stares and he didn’t think he mimicked her all that well, anyway. So he stopped doing it.

He never dared to talk to her.

*

Words spilled from him. It wasn’t a conscious effort on his part -- words just swam around in his head, like algae amassing in a pond, so he would have to grab a pen and write them down wherever he could. His hands, arms, and even legs were inked with scribbles legible to him alone and half-legible to others when they tried to read off his skin.

And read they did. As they passed him in hallways or on the streets, many would cock their heads this way and that – some subtly and others not quite so – to try and discern the words. Some words were smudged, some written over others; some were sprawled across his skin while others were squeezed in a narrow slanting script.

Visceral. Amorphous. Bacchanalian. Orifice. Obsidian. Percolate.

Words that had a melody on their own. Words that curled around his tongue, rolled from the back of his throat, and dangled off his lips. Words that comforted and sang. Words without context, without relation to their neighbours on his skin.

He heard them in his head like a track spun in an endless loop. He was aware how strange -- even scary -- he looked. Maybe, like what the other kids said, he was a freak. A freak who couldn’t shake off the compunction to write on himself or ignore the words floating about in his head.

He read the words off his palms, the back of his hands, the inside of his lower arms, his knees, his calves. But he found no words that could help him. Help him tell her he loved her.