The Dance Tree

THE DANCE TREE

Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Contents

Strasbourg, 1518

None dancing

One

Two

Three

Four

One dancing

Five

Six

Forty-seven dancing

Seven

Eight

Nine

One hundred and sixty-three dancing

Ten

Eleven

Two hundred and twenty-nine dancing

Twelve

Thirteen

Three hundred and fifteen dancing

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Five hundred and eighty-seven dancing

Nineteen

Twenty

None dancing

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

For Katie and Daisy, who held hope for us when it was too heavy to carry alone.

Their fragile bodies are like the strongest gusts of wind, and the paths of creation, innumerable as they are, tell us that nothing and nobody is expendable.

FROM

The Beehive Metaphor

BY JUAN ANTONIO RAMÍREZ

Sometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has abandoned every other possibility.

FROM

Fugitive Pieces

BY ANNE MICHAELS

When I saw this spectacle, I wanted to live for

A moment for a moment. However inelegant it was,

It was what it might have been to be alive, but tenderly.

One thing. One thing. One thing:

Tell me there is

A meadow, afterward.

FROM

‘A Meadow’

BY LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO

Strasbourg, 1518

None dancing

She heard there was bread in the square. It’s possible it’s a lie, or that the loaves are so blighted as to be inedible, but Frau Troffea doesn’t care. The hope is nourishing as anything she’s had in her throat these past months. She went mushroom-picking with the others, laid traps to skin hares in the forests like Gyptians. Nothing. Even the animals are starved out after the Hungry Winter, this scorched summer. She brought home an un-nested bird and cooked it right on the ashes of their fire, chewed through its soft, shattering bones, chafing her gums until her mouth filled with iron and salt.

Her husband doesn’t know how she suffers, has never seemed to know hunger. He grows sinewy, muscles like ropes wrapping his arms. But she has it inside her like a child, and it grows and sucks and swells her belly, until she cramps with carrying the full weight of its gnawing emptiness.

She has started chewing off-cuts of leather. She has started sucking the ends of her hair, and contemplating the stray dogs with new attention. She has started seeing white lights hang before her in the air. Lately she can stir them about with her finger.

But Frau Troffea has not yet lost her mind, and as she stumbles through her city, she comes up with a plan. If the bread is burnt, she can soak it in the river until it softens. If it is rotted, perhaps others will have left it. If there is not bread, or if it is all gone, she can fill her pockets with stones and walk into the water, as some have done. Women have been seen throwing their babies in so they can feed their other children. She would have done the same, had her children lived past infancy. The son that did is long hanged as a traitor. Samuel, one of hundreds sentenced in the place of their leader Joss Fritz, who melts into the Black Forest after each attempted revolt easy as snow.