The Prayer to Iorene (Excerpt)
Inspired by Dolly Parton’s iconic song “Jolene”, this excerpt is taken from a short story that predates an expansive fictional world I’ve been developing for many years.
I was inspired by listening carefully to the song for the first time, and feeling as though it could be an eternal plea from any point in history. The dignified vulnerability of the speaker made me wonder how ‘Jolene’ would respond, and how a future society disconnected from its own past might interpret the lyrics as a prayer to the eternal spirit of youth that never fails to threaten present stability.
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Instead of plunging into the heat of a rehearsal as she had come to regret last week, Ascepiter roosted in the Royal Box: miserable in marmoset, slumped and fragile. Arcturus would have watched her dance from the very sightline where she now blearily observed the company’s morning class. In the rows of barres where the chatty corps, coryphée and soon-to-be étoile soloists warmed up with pristine tendus and casual relevés, it was easy to spot the deadly density amongst them, legs packed in wool warmers and slicing the air with arresting arabesques. She could have felt where the sickening beauty was even if she’d been hidden in the wings; a blind fetus in fur, Ascepiter felt the weight, scent, and passion of this deep-sea naiad as if she were a plum dropped into a still pool of water. Every ripple ached. She felt gravity bending around the girl’s immaculate line like light refracting through a prism. Though he only took human form through her once a year at best, one couldn’t spend twenty years sharing conjugal crumbs with a god without becoming sensitive to his hungers. She resentfully theorized that their blood bond had slowly entangled her nervous system to the point where her body ached and aged when his desire bent away from her.
In her capacity as producer, Ascepiter had been excited last week to finally revisit the ballet that had established her identity and distinction so young. The Oritskaya hadn’t staged The Prayer to Iorene since the sacrament witnessed here twenty years ago when Ascepiter’s powerful performance had given flesh to a god. Only a few dancers and singers, later dignified with the title prima incandescza, had been able to do so since the Thousand Furies centuries before. She had felt this kind of atmospheric desire then: a crackling, fitful electricity as before a hurricane. It sizzled like spitting oil. While the ballet mistress called to the répétiteur for notation, a pressurized storm that only Ascepiter could suffer seethed around the enchanting girl’s flaming mind, against her obsidian skin reflecting gold under the lighting tests.
The company pushed the barres off the stage for petit allegro combinations as the conductor arrived. Through the front door, Ascepiter guessed, settling a notebook on her unsettled stomach to at least appear industrious for her erstwhile paramour. Jakob Omondi was not a tall man but he was magnetic: determined brows, Michelangelo hands that confidently commanded an orchestra, a shaved mahogany scalp and clipped beard. He nodded up to her as he draped his greatcoat over the edge of the orchestra pit; if he was taken aback by her decision to sit outside and above the rehearsal this time, he did not show it in front of the dancers.
“We’re going to use the energy of our admirers outside today,” he addressed them jocularly. “The Matriarch didn’t approach Iorene with malice, did she? No! She recognized in that young girl the force of Spring. She knew warm winds always carry spores and change and enough pollen to choke the life out of me. If they doubt the power of gods, let it be our mission in these coming weeks to persuade them.”
Removing his sweater, Jakob had as beautiful a port-de-bras as any of the young men on stage. He had told her once, with only a few candles to illuminate the fascinating body that summoned music from strings and winds, that conductors had their own exercises to ensure they could sustain expressive, commanding tension for an entire symphony. The first decade of Ascepiter’s distinction as an incandescza had held too many long interludes of frustrated desire between infrequent marital visits paid by her divine suitor. It hadn’t taken a crisis of faith to finally let mortal hands touch her. Nearing thirty, she had only been able to justify her unfaithfulness by swearing that hands which conducted the music which could call forth gods must be compatible with her own anointed limbs.
“If two bodies are in service to the higher mystery, can’t they commune without offending whom they serve?” she’d rationalized while anxiously peeking onto her balcony, as if her rare husband would appear in a cascade of brimstone.
Jakob had rolled his eyes, more than ready to handle her none-too mystical flesh with delicious irreverence. He hadn’t needed delusions; he’d been concertmaster when she’d summoned life from the void but it hadn’t taken him ten years to see her as mortal woman.
“Nothing could have confirmed that more when you invoked him,” he’d reasoned while she’d bemoaned her lapse in fidelity. “Arcturus chose you because you’re light garmented in flesh; why deny either?”
He must have been just as aware of the newest member of the company as she was. The heavy door to the Box opened with a muffled pop, and for one anxious, hungry moment it might have been her demon lover come to comfort her, reassure her that this blinding little temptress meant nothing to him. But Jakob must have slipped away from the warm-up as soon as he’d charged his dancers with using the energy of protest. He took Ascepiter’s notebook from her lap, sinking into the velvet seat reserved for her illustrious grandmother. Opening it to the last page she had written in, his eyes tracked where her pen had blotted an ink stain and stopped taking notes at the last rehearsal.
“It’s not just that it’s Iorene, is it?” he hazarded safely, straight brows settling onto where their patroness-producer barely poked out of a pile of russet furs. “I thought— the way you changed when the corps asked about your production—”
“You thought it might be making me feel old?” she finished slyly with a queasy smile.
“Bah,” he dismissed with a flourish of his bony hand. “You’re acting old, cloistered away in all this fur up here. I thought it could be… confronting, that’s all. Twenty years is a long time to leave a popular show out of season. But it’s more than the material, am I wrong? You looked like you were going to be sick before you left.”
“Twenty-one years,” she amended.
Jakob wouldn’t be deterred. Setting her notebook down next to her chair with a finality that declared he knew she had no intention to use it today, he took her hand and held it low between their seats where none of the dancers or their mistress could see.
“Is he here today? Or was he here then? You’re always sluggish after he leaves.”
Ascepiter let her hand be held limply while she studied the lovely, warping presence now leaping across the stage in a row of four young women, an undeniable étoile in the making putting their perfection to shame.
“He was there,” she answered, remembering that Jakob’s irreverence for the gods and his own divine rival was perhaps the most trustworthy thing about him. “But not for me.”
To his credit, Jakob’s eyes stayed on her though Ascepiter knew it must have been hard not to follow her gaze. He already knew whom she meant; as he’d told her during their first dressing room rendezvous, a conductor will alway notice a ballerina who merges with music so seamlessly that she appears to be both its origin and result.
“Lily,” he called her. “Twenty-two, I think. Older than you were when Arcturus entered without a ticket. But a spirit of springtime if I ever saw one.”
“Well, I couldn’t stay the May Queen forever, could I?” Ascepiter conceded gamely, forcing herself to sit up taller in the chair with her free hand soothing her uneasy stomach under the furs. “There’s a new one after the snow melts in each village beyond the capital.”
He didn’t squeeze her palm as she had done for the young orator. Long before their initial attraction ten years ago had relaxed into a deeper friendship, there had been no safe way to pursue it. Every encounter had been stolen knowing her divine lover might kill both of them for this unsanctified rapture. But in a decade of painfully rare visitations, Arcturus had never reproached her. No mysterious disasters had befallen Jakob, though he avoided walking under the stately chandelier in the lobby. On the subject of his chosen bride sharing her bed while he was elsewhere immaterial, he seemed eerily indifferent as to whether it was with a conductor in the service of artistic sacrament, or the janitor who cleaned the aisles.
“Does their attention stray?” Jakob whispered to her, as if Arcturus or his fellow gods were listening in. “I thought choosing you was a declaration for life. Your life, anyways.”
“We wouldn’t have protestors if the gods were predictable or consistent in their interferences,” she grumped, shrugging off her marmoset as its warmth lured her into a nap. “I suppose we’re both allowed to grow bored of each other. There’s no engravings that dictate how long he be pledged to me. Maybe he’s finally paying me back for you?”
The conductor gave her a leery grimace and let go of her hand as she rose from the seat. “He can try. But neither of you have met her. Lily’s more than even he can handle.”