Bellydance Veil Swirl (Photo credit: VelvetJAM)

Silk veils float through the air around her as she dances. My nephew said her veils were like snakes, moving on their own, but snakes have no place in the ethereal vision I see before me.

She is lithe like a cat, but I feel the cheetah in her too. There is strength in those elegant legs that I suspect would be able to run down any antelope, and as I watch her I feel some of that strength return to my shrivelled body. I feel again the wind in my hair as I rode to battle in my war chariot, the arrow between my fingers as I drew back the bowstring.

Her dark eyes flash at me when she whirls past, and I remember the smell of blood and the sound of fracturing bones as I rolled over fallen bodies with my chariot.

She wraps a red veil around her hands and I see that my own hands are smeared with blood. Which is strange, because I always killed with my bow or my chariot and never touched a dead body, so how did so much blood end up on my hands?

Her movements slow, and her body writhes as if in agony. A pressure in my chest makes me gasp. It grows and I feel an urgency to hang on although I am not sure what I am hanging on to. So I fasten my eyes on the dancer and admire her full lips and long fingers, finding it still harder to breathe as her dance becomes faster. When darkness creeps in at the corners of my eyes, I think: ‘No. Not yet. She has not finished her dance.’ As if I expected that the darkness would not only be able to hear my thoughts, but also care about my wishes.

She leaps.

And I see no more of her dance.