In the the nooks of my mind lives the dancer. She it is tumbling through my thoughts, swirling arcs of grace, like ribbons in the wind, dream catalyst by night, and under the sky of day, alive. I admire her in motion, blurring like a falcon in flight, or the subliminal slink before a vehement pounce. I see her wrapped in silk woven of clouds - and marvel.

I talk to her, but she never answers, not with words. I talk to others and see her winding into my vision with coordinated movements, slow, then with determined rapidity. In a sudden heartbeat she freezes, again to move as a feather in the still, summer air. I feel her swirl around me, close enough to touch, but impossible to reach. She is always there. I wonder if she sees me.

Once I viewed a sunset over the emerald waves - golden light, colors, as if a rainbow had spilled on the horizon, and her figure dancing on the water. I watched and wished I could name the way she moved - no word held so much poetry. I saw her dance with an invisible cyclone, revolving rhythmically before its twisting circumference, but always bending from its touch. Then I saw the stars dislodge from the sky and loom towards her, the center of the universe. The terrible illumination changed all colors to white. Peals of melodic thunder followed in their wake.

I closed my eyes at the apocalyptic glare and followed her dance through my intellect. She pressed her breasts to the wall of my mind, drowning the beat of my pulse. All was white and shades of white, except the pink of her skin and the dark honey of her auburn hair.

I blinked my eyes open and her form became sharper and clearly distinct.

"How are you feeling today?" she asked in my direction as she opened the curtains.

"Huh? Oh better, I think," I told her, slightly dazed.

"That's nice. You take it easy now."

As she walked past my bed I saw that she was a nurse.

Story #367

Thanks to Tilley, whose artistry is simply amazing, for sharing her photo.

Thanks to everyone who contributed a story (I'll comment on them shortly), and my apologies for being so impossibly late with my own story. My excuse:

Because of work and family I've had no time to concentrate on Indeterminacy - and it's been hot. The hottest July in Germany in over a hundred years, they're saying. My muse and I are reading "A Tramp Abroad" written by Mark Twain over a hundred years ago about his travels in Europe. He describes how hot it was here in Germany:

We followed the carriage-road, and had our usual luck;
we traveled under a beating sun, and always saw the shade
leave the shady places before we could get to them.
In all our wanderings we seldom managed to strike
a piece of road at its time for being shady. We had a
particularly hot time of it on that particular afternoon,
and with no comfort but what we could get out of the fact
that the peasants at work away up on the steep mountainsides
above our heads were even worse off than we were.
By and by it became impossible to endure the intolerable
glare and heat any longer.

I'm one of the peasants at work in a hot office. But now it's cooling off and I hope to post a story, and maybe a photo for the next round. Sorry to everyone who stopped by here hoping to read something.