Summary
A spectral prima ballerina, still reeling from the on-stage death of her partner, drifts through gas-lit corridors and frost-laced rehearsal halls where grief has ossified into choreography. Her every arabesque is a seance; her every jeté, a scream no one hears. Into this twilight of tulle and sorrow stalks a once-celebrated portraitist whose canvases now devolve into carnivorous smears of vermilion and lampblack. He watches her obsessively, sketching the tremor of her clavicle, the violet half-moons beneath her eyes, the way her tendons leap like harp-strings when memory detonates inside her muscles. Commissioned to immortalize her in paint, he instead begins to cannibalize her anguish, layering pigment thicker each night until the portrait’s surface resembles a wound scabbed then reopened. The ballerina, half-hypnotized by her own reflection in the studio’s cracked mirror, mistakes his voracious gaze for the only witness left who can still see her pain. Between them grows a danse macabre: she rehearses Swan Lake’s death scene on a rooftop slick with sleet, he stands below counting heartbeats like metronome clicks; she pirouettes barefoot on broken glass, he grinds scarlet oil with the heel of his palm until it bleeds. When the company departs for a triumphant tour, she alone remains, quarantined in the echoing theater where the wings smell of mothballs and extinguished footlights. The artist barricades the exits, insisting the portrait lacks only one final pigment: the exact hue of a soul abandoning the body. Over three fevered nights he chases that impossible chroma, while she, dancing without audience, begins to shed skin, hair, identity, until only the swan’s death throes remain. At dawn, the police find the canvas completed—an apotheosis of wings dissolving into ultraviolet mist—and the dancer vanished, her last breath crystallized on the painted lips of her own image.
A grief-stricken ballerina becomes the obsession of an increasingly unhinged artist.
