The Willow Stalker
By Taylor Johnson
Undressed, I moved truer, when your gaze captured mine. Like the sound of wind rustling through leaves.
Life, it seems, is far less courteous than the routines we rehearse. The moment I chose an ending, something—or someone—chose a beginning for me.
“Notorious,” “Talented,” “Scandalous,” and above all else, “Beautiful.” Words I had read, again and again, as if they alone could establish my worth.
But in truth, the ink never settled properly. Not even after months of reading the same headlines and newspaper columns of the same mirage. The creases were always off, smudged at the edges, refusing to absorb.
“Talented.”
Perhaps. But I knew better. I was simply the blooming décor of the season. And when Spring fades into Winter, I will consent to the wind plundering me of my foliage.
Roots for a performer are fragile things. The stage is our soil—however brief the moment we stand upon it. The only roots we ever truly grow are in the breath between the curtain’s rise and fall, in the thunderous applause that sends us off with glory, wishing us well on the next venture as we drift to the comfort of the next ditch.
But even that had begun to feel unsettling. I am used to people looking at me, craving me, touching me—wanting pieces of me, sometimes in the most uncanny ways. Some desires I even entertained for a few nights at best. “Connections,” my manager used to say. “In this industry, we require connections.”
But more recently, I’ve begun to realize how few of those connections ever involved me at all. They wanted the performer, the persona, the shimmering illusion I stitched together under stage lights. They reached for the character, never the shadow of the man. And each time I let them take a piece of me—whether for publicity, for opportunity, or simply out of loneliness—I felt the surfaces of myself drowning beneath a persistent thirst. The applause used to quench, but now, only an empty echo remains as hollow as my reflection.
I decided that Mourning Field Hall would be my final performance. It would be the last time the branches of my feet graced the stage. My final shadow would fall across the dirt-worn planks, and instead of stretching long behind me, I imagined it plunging six feet down.
I was to perform a rendition of the Black Swan. A befitting end—a tainted dancer performing a purified routine, a ballet of duality, of light and shadow. I’d been given full creative control—and perhaps that was what made the piece the most unbearable. If a puppet were suddenly given the chance to draw its own strings, would it know what to do with that freedom? Or would it come to appreciate the certainty of the master’s pull?
I wasn’t sure which I had become. But I was determined to linger in the minds of the master audience—whether through the ferocity of my performance or through my final act.
…
I studied the White Swan obsessively; it came easily to me. I had been gracefully performing the White Swan for years, slipping into its softness, its fragility, its trembling grace.
But the Black Swan…
No matter how many nights I devoted to the routine, I always missed a certain turn or failed to land with the sharp precision required. I was never satisfied.
All my tutors and teachers insisted that each rehearsal was the “peak of perfection,” their voices warm with praise. But I could not agree. Convinced I had not nearly crusted the surface. But that flaw didn’t matter now.
I took one final agonizing breath before the stage lights settled on my lone figure. With free will abandoned, my body moved under its own volition. The first step was a whisper against the floor, followed by a slow unraveling of the corps de ballet, then a series of pirouettes and pliés. Dancing felt like slipping into a truth too large for speech. Light warmed one side of my face; shadow clung to the other, and together they guided me through the ballet’s quiet storm.
With the last pose carved into stillness, a soundless ovation rose around me. I delivered a measured bow to all sides of the arena, savoring the strange and solemn finality of it all.
Moments before the thunderous applause entered its gradual, decaying decrescendo—I gave the audience one final piece of myself. Undressed, I offered a genuine smile, an exhausted droop from ear to ear. I imagined I must have looked like a fool, unfamiliar with my own face framed this way.
I offered the last petal I had left—the one I would have planted to take root in the next starlight ditch. But suddenly, my truth was seized by a restricted breeze that gripped my throat—an overwhelming urge to take fuller breaths, to clothe myself, to cover my neck, to claw at my own skin for air, to swallow more oxygen than my lungs could hold. I thought, for a moment, that I was simply getting cold feet about the only real decision I had made for myself in quite some time. I had let the mask slip for just a heartbeat, a small mercy to honor my final hours of breath.
I was too exposed, too naked before the world. Instinctively, I turned back toward the safety of the White Swan—the softness, the innocence, the familiar grace—but even then the feeling remained.
I searched every corner of the arena, the audience blurring into one wanting mass. Then I lingered too long on a pair of hanging, drifting eyes. Lost in my brief escapade, I went still—paralyzed by the unsettling knowledge of devoted eyes transfixed upon my undressed reflection.
I felt… I felt a certain kinship in it.
My thirst—if only for a moment—was quenched by the piercing glance of a man the headlines would later dub “The Willow Stalker.”