Juniper & Thorn

by Ava Reid

“They say he’s the youngest principal dancer in any Rodinyan ballet company, ever,” she said. “Only twenty-one. That’s so sad, isn’t it?” “Why is it sad?” “Because,” she said, “what do you do when you’re twenty-one and you’ve already achieved everything that most people can only dream of? You have the rest of your life in front of you, but nowhere else to go.”

But no one had ever told me that I was allowed to scream.

And once you became a woman, you gave up all the trappings of girlhood, all its precious bounties.