A Siren's Last Song by Tsering Asha Leba

Prompt: moves like moonlight

They were demolishing the rink and all I could think about were my shorts riding too high up my crack. I yanked at the seam then pushed through the tinsel curtains to my waiting fans.

My life wasn’t a feel-good film. Roller skating didn’t pay the bills. It was my siren song. Sung soft, but proud, in the shadows of my small town. A place where the only skaters afforded respect were men on ice with long sticks and little pucks. 

​I glided, waving my arms as I twirled for the roaring crowd at Diva’s Disco Roller House. I’d skated here for 

so long, for so many people, that I sometimes joked the joint was mine. The audience — oh yeah, they ​were mine, no doubt about it. 

Wowing them never got old. Charming kids away from their phones? Impressing women during ladies’ night? Powerful stuff. Enticing husbands for family fun instead of spending their dollars at the dance club? Well, that was a swinging high (the wives loved me for it) and depressing low (creeps, all of them). 
Now it was ending and that was a damn shame. 

Strobe lights cast ripples of blue and purple across the glossy maple wood under my wheels, like streaks of moonlight moving and illuminating the ocean floor. My metallic leather skates shimmered. Two painful years fighting to save this century-old institution. And still, the suits and pockets simply bought and paid for Diva’s like nothing. I was tapped out. I had no anger left to feed into petitions or protests. 

My last offer was my performance. A final chance to hypnotize the crowd. A diva’s grand finale. All I wanted to do was to shepherd my wide-eyed spectators through these uncharted waters and go out with a splash. 

A hot spurt of air from the fog machine signalled me and I whipped around, skating backward toward my audience, undulating my hips. I straightened up, pushing my shoulders down and my chest out, feeling a familiar flush of euphoria down to my tensed toes. I smirked when I emerged from the haze into the humid air of people cheering and breathing and drinking and leering, in time, as one.

Hum. My wheels whirled and rumbled across the hardwood floor. 

Woosh. I pumped my arms and swam through the room, weaving and bobbing in figure eights to the beat.

Scratch. I halted; my rubber toe stops gripped the floor as I posed for my final position at the end of the track. 

The lights went out and I heard grumbling in the dark. Shuffling. A few minutes went by. My eyes adjusted. I saw the DJ tap her wristwatch. It was midnight and the lease was up. They’d cut the power. Those vultures. I lurched, pumping my legs to reach the rink’s edge. My breath came out in gasps. I flicked on a generator-powered spotlight, beaming it onto my audience. I looked out to an empty room. Everyone had gone home. Screw them all.

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Tsering Asha Leba is a writer and editor based in Calgary. (Photo courtesy of Avenue, Jared Sych.)