Dancing On The Ceiling: A Short Story

Dancing on the Ceiling

It must be the most popular song in the whole world, he thought.

His cousin, before the fire, would have said that every song is just an old song

sung in a new way in the same way stories are just old stories with new names or

twists that make you forget you heard that one before.

But, oh, what a feeling when you?re dancing on the ceiling.

How do they do that? Paul wondered. Why the ceiling? he asked.

Lionel Richie like the white rabbit that Alice tailed, or some genie,

materializes disembarking from a red Ferrari, appearing with a flanking pair of

pasteurized troubadours, entering a towering apartment building in some

indiscriminate city and stepping into an elevator that leads to who knows

Millions of people like him

would follow Lionel?s red tunic down the hall, past unmarked doors that could only

open to other doors, and finally into the room and up the wall to the ceiling.

What a feeling when you dancing on the ceiling. Not a ceiling but the ceiling.

It wasn?t their first time, as they?his sister and cousins?had already seen the

world turned upside down by Turbo in Breakin 2: Electric Bugaloo.

Lionel doesn?t do this alone but beckons all to enter the room populated by

people in blacks, whites and grays, heeled and studded, horizontally stripped or zebra

printed, some in sequin and others in second skin metallic leather. The gelled and

molded sculptures on their heads reference reality but look nothing like anything he

had ever encountered in his world. In the middle the trickster, Mr. Richie, in his red

tunic, invites everyone to dance on the ceiling.

Before the fire Paul?s cousins and sister would usually watch Friday Night

Videos together, as their parents would collect the kids and deposit them at one of

The catchphrase is The Carpet

King Rolls Out the Red Carpet, and every commercial ends with the same footage of

the Carpet King pushing a giant roll of red carpet down the biggest set of steps in the

state.

The story of the red carpet goes back to ancient Ephesus which in expectation

of a visit from the Emperor during a water shortage, turned to wine to clean the streets

of the luxuriant city; the people wantonly emptying wine jars and wine skins on its

marbled causeways. The Emperor loved the oxblood hued marble streets and

declared they needed to be red henceforth. Wine alone wouldn?t suffice; more was

needed than a reddish hue, or a reference to red. Rather the streets themselves must

become the vivid oxblood of the Emperor?s mind, thus the carpets were rolled out as a

fitting tribute to his royal personage.

The red carpet will always be with us.

The carpet will always remind Paul of the feeling of dancing on the ceiling.

The feeling will forever be coupled with the moment the lamp lost its shape and his

life became a dripping remainder of a night with no beginning and no