Pirouette of a phoenix

Emily’s right leg trembled as she stood alone on the wooden stage, the darkness that surrounded her felt almost alive. The curtains emanated an ornate grandeur that seemed to swallow her diminishing confidence. A deep, velvet red breathed around her like the wings of a creature waiting to rise. Beyond the blinding lights, the audience blurred into a dark maze of miniscule, glowing  faces. Some stared at her with eager curiosity, others with an impatience that she could practically feel with the crawling bead of sweat on the back of her neck. 

The silence pressed against her chest, the buzzing in her head mingling with the thudding of her heart. She closed her eyes and the past rushed in. The flashes flickered through the remnants of that unfortunate night.

She remembered finishing her final routine that night, her lungs burning delightfully from the effort, her head swaying slightly through the graceful turn, and legs spinning in rhythm, when a  sharp, electric jolt sliced through her left leg. A single moment. A single fall. A single failed attempt at a pirouette. What followed were sirens, concerned questions, the metallic taste of a fear that was so foreign to Emily that she blocked everything out until—“We’re so sorry… we couldn’t save the  limb.” These few words would replay in her head endlessly. 

What she did not understand was that the silence held a more merciless kind of pain—the quiet, pitying glances, the gentle touch of condolence that felt more like pricks of a thousand thorns, the whispered assumptions that her life as a dancer had ended before it even began. Her body showed its fractures, but her spirit held the punctures no one could see. 

Weeks passed, where she couldn’t bring herself to listen to music. Months passed where she couldn’t wake up without mourning the leg which used to spin her through the glossy floors of the studio. Until one day, an anger rose inside her, a fire that crackled beneath. This fire was quiet but fierce; the pitying stares stirred the embers that were sitting beneath the ash. She held onto a realisation that she did not mourn her lost limb as much as she was made to mourn what everyone assumed she lost with it. 

Emily wanted the stage again, she wanted the movement, the flow, the adrenaline, and most importantly, herself.

She was told what she asked for was impossible, she was dismissed for balance would be unreliable and her safety was uncertain. However, the time to heed to warnings was long gone. It was time to listen to the memory of familiar beats: both of her heart and the music. 

She found her way, through muscles that burned, blisters that reopened, moments that frustrated her to tears and relentless training that moved like sand through the hands of time. Just like that, three years had passed and Emily relearned how to hold onto gravity. She found strength in parts  of her she didn’t know existed. It was like a language of her own. She spoke with every part of her body that translated her refusal to let her identity shrink around the absence of a limb.

And now, as she stood centrestage, the air thick with anticipation, a moment suspended on the edge that was risky, one she had bled and dreamed into existence. Emily opened her eyes. 

A hoop shone above her like a silver halo, a strip of silk hung around it like a cascading waterfall in white, waiting for her to hold on. A soft gasp echoed around as she placed her right foot forward, the only foot she had now, yet the only foot she needed. 

Gentle music hummed through the air as she lifted herself with a practiced grace, twirling like a bird taking her first, confident flight. When she released her hands in an impossible moment of suspension, everyone saw her in her true form: 

No longer a girl missing her left leg—but a phoenix, mid-pirouette, who was reborn under flashing lights.

“Pirouette of a phoenix ” was the first runner-up in the flash fiction segment of the creative writing competition at NSU DEML 2025 Winter Fest.