Dance Moms One Shots

Card Towers // mnz

This is possibly one of my favourite things I've ever written (I think I was having a panic attack while writing it - I've never been diagnosed with anxiety or anything) and I just feel it a lot, even though it's not my greatest writing ever.

Pick up two playing cards off the stack. Make sure the numbered sides face each other. Lean the top edge against each other as you set them down on the cold wooden floor. Pick up two cards. Face the numbers in. Set them down in a triangle. Place a single card on top, number facing down. Pick up two cards. Numbers in. Triangle. Card on top. Two cards. No numbers. Triangle. Card on top.

On and on and on I go, creating and lifting triangles made out of cards. When the row is seven cards long, I start on the row on top.

My stomach freezes against the wooden boards of my living room where my shirt has lifted up, and my feet dangle bare in the air, soles parallel to the floor. The action of picking and meticulously placing the playing cards relaxes me as I breath slow breaths, desperately trying not to blow over my tower.

When I get to the fourth row from the ground, I make a mistake.

I see it before it happens - I will place the cards so slightly wrong, my hand will bump them and
they will
all
fall
down.

I feel the rush of anger and madness and horror and frustration that rushes in as they collapse. How terrible it is that the only thing that calms me helps to ruin me.

I push the cards back into a pile, blue pattern facing up, faces down.

And I start again.

Two Cards. Pattern out. Lean. Repeat.

Hours later, I'm still stacking, building my card walls. They fall down so many times, and I pick them back up. With each triangle comes a sense of tranquility, each row a little more peace. I focus on nothing but placing and stacking and placing and stacking.

It's not an addiction. But the cards are like drugs or alcohol. They take away the pain until they fall.

But then they take it away again.

It's a vicious cycle.

I hear a door open somewhere in the house, and a call breaks the silence I have enclosed myself in. A few minutes later, the click of heels enters the living room, and I look up into the face of my mother. She stands right in front of my tower, careless of whether she knocks it over, and the temperature of the room seems to drop ten degrees.

"Maddie? Stacking cards again?"

I look back down, and build another triangle.

"It can't be healthy, you know. Other kids don't do this."

I nod, and start a fifth row of cards.

She sighs. "Mackenzie and your father will be home soon. I'll be making dinner if you need me."

She knows I won't need her, she understands that much at least, but she says it anyway, before stalking out of the room, her heels clipping the floor. Her long coat swishes though on her way out, and creates a gust. There's nothing I can do as the cards fall
one
by
one.

The room gets colder as I pick them up and start again. My limbs tingle and goose bumps spread across my body. But I don't move. I want to keep stacking - I have to keep stacking.

I stack ferociously, my irritation - oh what a bleak, plain word that is. It's like it has no emotion - showing in my hand movements, and the tower collapses quickly.

Sometime later, my father and sister come home. I hear my mother tell them I'm stacking, that it's not normal, that I need help.

I do need help.

Just not theirs.

They don't see that.

They talk about me like I can't hear, and the temperature drops again. I want to tell them what's going on. Why I'm like this now.

But I can't find the words.

Mum and Dad start to argue over me - I try to block it out.

I keep stacking, until a loud bang of a fist against furniture rings out, resonating through the floor, knocking my cards over.

They just don't get it. They knock my cards over. They hurt me unintentionally. Every shared glance over my wellbeing, every word in secret that makes me colder and sends me scrambling for my refuge. My cards.

I've drifted away from everything, clutching onto the few things that keep me sane.

If I try to stack and build in an empty classroom as school to calm after I've been hurt, someone finds me. They knock me down, they knock my cards down.

Sometimes I wonder if the cards mirror me.

Or if I mirror the cards.

So fragile, hard to put back together, so easy to break and watch collapse into hundred of useless scraps.

I try to keep myself together, but I'm breaking. Every thump, every knock, every gust of hurtful words.

They all knock a card down.

I don't go for dinner. No one comes and tries to get me. I keep building.

When I know it's almost lights out, mum calls me to get ready for bed.

I'm one triangle away from finishing the tower - seven triangles on the bottom; then six; five; four; three; two. And the two cards in my hand.

I steady myself to place them on top. I'll finish it - the first time I've finished a tower this big, and then I'll blow them down and go to bed.

I place it on gently and then-

It happens in slow motion, each card falling. I watch, unable to away as they each fall in a different pattern, spinning though the air before hitting the ground with a soft, but final pat.

The cards littler the ground and I gaze at them, cold, cold tears prickling in my eyes.

So close. Yet I failed in the end. I couldn't do it. I'm useless - just as useless as everyone thinks, says I am.

I clean them up and push the cards into their box, before silently tip toeing up to bed, where I finally let the tears for everything fall.

I've never felt more like a card tower before. So thin and frail and hopeless and on the verge of collapsing if someone stepped wrong or talked too loudly.

Maybe I should just blow myself, save everyone the guilt of destroying me.

I sit there in the dark of my bedroom pondering what it would be like to finally spiral and fall
and
then
not
build
myself
again.