The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.

We have a different relationship to pain, their mother used to say. It’s our friend, our lover. When you wake up and the pain is gone, do you know what that means? What, they’d ask every time. You’re no longer a dancer.

Ballet was full of dark fairy tales, and how a dancer prepared her pointe shoes was a ritual as mysterious and private as how she might pleasure herself. It was often indistinguishable.