The Bodyguard ("Trapeze" story #65)

TRAPEZE
by Michael Kroetch

The bodyguard’s mother and her yoga instructor are walking arm-in-arm beside the river. The setting sun lights the trees, turning them into a carnival of color and texture. Each one seems to ring with secret music. She is so happy to be here and near them—these luminous trees, these circus dancers—that for a moment she forgets herself. Her feet move lightly, tapping lightly on the stones of the path. The crimson rhythms pierce her. Her body swirls around. She can feel herself becoming lighter, becoming one of the circus trees. It’s an exquisite feeling until she notices the shirt tail hanging out of the back of her Hindu lover’s pants and her face goes flat. Why does he do this to her? The beast. Her arms are as stiff as the concrete rail. It is over. She knows that now. Despite the fact this man has the best posture she has ever seen, she cannot be with him. If he really cared about her and about what was happening inside her, it would be different. But it isn’t. He and his horribly crumpled shirt tail will have to find someone else. She walks ahead, her shoes thundering down.

He looks at her whisking away in such banging anger and is not able to understand it. He wants to stop her, wants to ask what has happened, why her shoulders have narrowed so much they are now pinching into her neck, turning it purple. But this is not his way. He focuses instead on his own breathing. Making it slow and measured. Steady. He concentrates on the radiant energies within himself, letting them flow as the river beside him flows. His love of life’s slender thread is pure. He knows this. And it’s perhaps because he is concentrating so intently on the pulsations of his pure love that he doesn’t see the small gap in the path of stones which trips him and sends him spinning and howling over the embankment, cart-wheeling down toward the river.

When the bodygaurd’s mother hears these screams and looks back to see her instructor flailing and falling into the river, she does rush to help him. But not quite right away. Before she can stop herself, a laugh comes out of her that, although it isn’t exactly nice, is somehow sweet. A little like those she laughed as a child when her father took her to see the clowns, cotton candy, and the sparkling women flying high through the air, high above everyone on the trapeze.