All She Wants To Do Is Dance

Eva skiffles into the kitchen, doing an improvised side stepping booty shake, singing at the top of her lungs to Hold On blasting from her computer. Old school rhythm and blues quells the melancholy. How can one stay down when rockin out to Sam and Dave? The kettle screams to life, undercutting the horns then rapidly overriding them, a shrill alarm. Eva pirouettes and hooks two fingers under the handle intending to slide it off the flame and onto the stove but her sock foot catches a sticky spot of maple syrup on the kitchen floor, a leftover from her gluten free buckwheat pancake disaster of the morning, and she trips into the counter. Her fingers slide off the kettle knocking it sideways, sending it crashing to the floor. Boiling water gushes out at a furious pace. Eva jumps back and crashes into the fridge, both feet flying out from under, landing on her tailbone in a pool of boiling liquid, scalding her hand and leg halfway up her left shin. Talk about ass over tea kettle. Stunned and shaken she hops up, shaking her leg hokey pokey style, waving her hand in the air, turning around, oblivious to the pain as shock sets in. It's the smell that hits her first, a sharp slap across her senses. Burnt flesh. Like marshmallows on a campfire or hair in a flat iron, somewhere between the two, a sickly almost sweet singed aroma faintly familiar but stomach turning all the same. She knows she should do something, anything, but what. Her brain freezes, she draws a complete blank. Suddenly the sound of water fills her ears; she's in the tub, dousing her arm and leg in a frigid stream pouring from the tap. Her right hand, the good one. Her left foot, in opposition. This is going to be awkward. Two seconds and her entire life changes. Weeks of healing turns to months of recovery to years of pain and reconstruction while she relearns to walk and becomes left handed. Brushing her teeth confounds her. High heels are out of the question. So many grafts that her body is a roadmap of rebuilding, reconfiguring tissue to better suited plains. All for a cup of tea. She's sleeping again, which is good. Although whenever Sam and Dave come up in her playlist she's overwhelmed with the smell of flesh melting. Eventually she'll wipe her computer clean, start fresh from scratch. Strangely though, right now all she wants to do is dance, knowing that will ease her discomfort.