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Class

by Katherine Stuart

I am here for the class. I am here to make my heart pound in my chest, and to make my blood boil up to the surface and show red and steaming under my skin. When it is all over, I will wipe off the steam from under my skin, the sweat. I will not shower, not wash it away. I will hold the towel to my nose and inhale it.

I am here, and I am sitting, waiting. A Japanese woman sits beside me pounding on her thighs with her fists, thumping them, hard, harder, bouncing her fists like balls off her shiny thighs sculptured smooth in their elastic casing.

There are only women in this class. They all jiggle or pound at their muscles. I alone am still. I am perfectly still, waiting.

The instructor is fervently young and deeply in love. His hair is long and golden, tied back in a sleek god’s helmet off his forehead. The stripes on his leotard lead the eye inexorably to his sex.

Now the music has started. Our hearts begin to pound and he is leading us away fast today, fast early, too fast, too soon. His arms pump wide and in, wide and down. We can feel it, that crushing embrace, and we begin to breathe deeply, heavily.

There is a point at which we let go. Our eyes are fixed and we are matching our movements to his without thinking. We have yielded and we are all dancing intimately with the god on the dais, back and forth across the floor, we have left our feet below and 'Travel!' he shouts, and we are gone.

We brush the floor then only now and then with our toes, toying with it, dipping our toes in the blue-green ocean carpet. But today he is going too fast too soon, and some of us fall crashing down with exhaustion. ‘Too soon, you are too fast with us!’ Our limbs are like crushed green twigs criss-crossed under us. ‘We need a slow hand!’ He is so young, they whisper, sinking, I need more time, I am like the old TV that needs to warm up but then, oh then, the picture is beautiful, still beautiful!

The god hears their call and slows the pace and soon we are all rising again, twirling our toes in air, we leave the ground en masse.

You are sceptical, I can tell. You may well ask ‘How? How do you leave the ground?’ I would say to you think of the transcendental meditators who levitate, and I would say to you think of your own bed. Some say it is the music which pumps thick waves of air rolling over the carpet like updrafts and do not gliders float for hours on nothing but these?

I tell you we rise up into the air with our toes pointing slackly downwards in a careless gesture of arrogant nonchalance for the earth to which we are daily bound, and our arms are wide and pumping and we need only be mindful of the pillars and other bodies.

But no! No! He is beginning to put sequences together! Why? Why? It requires thinking and I do not like to think about it. I do not like to hold one sequence in my mind and add to it another, and another. I do not like the mechanics of it, it is too mechanical, too mindful. Doesn’t he understand this? I have yielded and I will go where I am taken. I do not want to be active in this, I want to be taken! Here, I have paid my money and I want the full ride!

I know what it is, I know why. I can tell. Today he is in love, and not with us.

The sequence is complete and we are going for it. Yes, yes, we will give it all we've got, for we are approaching the end. We are hot and full and there is a cushioning layer of bodily effusions between us and the air in which we swim. Like schools of fish we swim one way, turn, and then the other, flashing silver wetness. There, and there, and there the jaws of the predator are avoided. Snap! the guilt from the looks of strangers when she wore that sexy dress and Snap! the red lace underwear he bought her for her birthday that she’s only ever worn to a girls’ night out for a joke.

He is not in love with us, but it doesn’t matter. He is love, and it is enough. We have travelled with him, we have gone all the way and now we must return. The air is cooler now as we sink. It caresses us with delicate icy fingers. The once warm sweat chills and shrinks, and cushions us no longer. It slithers down our bodies and leaves us naked, shivering. It oozes, drops thickly onto the carpet from our toes, from our bent heads, and is absorbed.

It is over. I pick up my towel and wipe off the steam from my blood still rising red from under my skin, the sweat. I do not shower, do not wash it away. I disdain those cubicles reeking of disinfectant, flourishing foot fungus. I walk cleansed like a salty lemon out into the hot dusty air. And I hold my towel to my nose and inhale.