The Instructor

A furtive flâneur named George, already trembling from a near-brush with the gendarmerie over an innocuous wink, ricochets through the city’s neon arteries until a handbill—crisp, absurd, luminous—advertises a roller-rink pedagogue. He cons his way behind the chromed counter, straps on virgin wheels, and proceeds to fracture both gravity and decorum. Each glide becomes a guillotine of hubris: the parquet a mirror of his fraud, the mirror a tribunal of onlookers. Between pratfalls he courts a melancholic cashier whose laughter is a rusted bell; together they choreograph a delirious ballet of deception, scuffed kneecaps, and the sweet vertigo of almost-belief. When the rink’s tyrannical owner demands a gala exhibition, George must either confess imposture or transcend it, spinning toward a denouement that pirouettes on the razor-edge between slapstick grace and existential face-plant.