Queen of the Dryads

Abstract

Queen of the Dryads Sophia Veltfort (bio) Seth had left for work by the time the stranger entered Sophie's bedroom: a stiffly upright woman with white-gold hair to her waist. She wasn't the landlady or anyone Sophie had seen in the building. Seth had probably left the front door unlocked, again. You'll come home one day and I'll be missing, she'd told him, or dead, our valuables gone. What valuables? he'd wanted to know. "You'd better get up, Sophie," the stranger said, not moving from the doorway. Her words were quick and precise. "You're dancing the Queen of the Dryads at the National Ballet Theater this evening." It was six thirty in the morning, five hours before Sophie's alarm was set to go off. On her forearm the red and green remnants of a temporary tattoo suggested the image of a radish. With effort Sophie recalled someone pressing a wet blue washcloth to her skin the night before, at Seth's birthday party. Since then, sweat had shifted pieces of the leaves from her wrist to her watchband. She thought she might still be drunk. She reached for her cell phone as she examined the woman more carefully. Below a wide-set jaw, the contours of the woman's chest bones fanned out from her sternum like flying buttresses. Last night Seth had complained that Sophie never danced with him, never kissed him, never tried to look pretty anymore. Not true, she'd said, brandishing her forearm: it's a ravishing radish. She'd taken care to wear a dress he liked, an old purple bodycon from college that still looked okay if she held her stomach tight and stood up straight. "Did Seth send you?" Sophie asked. "Is this a weird sex thing?" "It's act two, scene three of Don Quixote," the woman said impatiently. "Get up." "That's a book, not a play. I've read it." In fact she had read only the Prologue. [End Page 85] "It's a ballet," the woman said. "Choreographed for the Imperial Theatre in 1869. Adapted in 1900 and 1902." As a kid Sophie had taken dance classes. Her fellow students had laughed at her weak core and quadriceps, the way her abs strained vainly during floor exercises. But the teacher had drawn the class's attention to the easy arch of her feet, the natural turnout of her hip rotator. Sophie liked to think that couched in her weak, flexible figure lay a wellspring of possible greatness. In the stranger's error, Sophie savored the alternate reality in which she had tapped that potential and become a dancer of singular ability. She imagined that deep down she knew the choreography, that this performance had been scheduled for a long time. "Look," the woman said. "There's a car downstairs. You've wasted any time for breakfast, so bring a power bar." Sophie protested that she had no power bars, but the woman had picked up her cell phone and was murmuring animatedly into its base. Sophie got out of bed and raised the window blinds. Pale light sloped into her bedroom, and she gaped at the beauty she slept through every morning. In the early light she felt vested with new ability, quickness, and composure. She did not feel like a fraudulent human being. "Are you going to gawk out the window all day? I've told you we're late," the woman hissed. "Are you the audience or the Queen of the Dryads?" Sophie searched the room for appropriate clothes. On the floor her purple dress from the night before lay crumpled beside Seth's socks and boxers. She pulled on the blue jeans she wore most days and a scratchy black sweater with a leotard neckline. ________ From the back seat of a maroon Honda Civic, Sophie texted Seth, A woman thinks I'm queen of the dryads and has abducted me. Sophie's abductor looked placidly out the passenger window while the driver, a man around Sophie's age with dark brown curls not unlike Seth's, steered the car east to Amsterdam, then south. At...