Estelle stretched her left leg over her head, held it straight up for as long as she could bear, then allowed it to drift slowly to meet the ground. She did the same with her right, until her muscles began to tremble and throb. She folded herself in half and gripped the box and the platform of her shoes. Finally she unfurled to her true height, higher, until she felt almost as if her fingertips could brush the ceiling. Then she rose to pointe, took a breath, and began to dance.
Wax trickled down the candle.
She had lived in this house her whole life, a sprawling estate that seemed so very small when it had confined you for all of your twenty years. Had taken breakfast, lunch and dinner sat in the seat at the grand dining table that she always sat in. When she was young she had read fantastical stories about houses like the one she inhabited, stories about rooms hidden behind paintings, people living in attics and other worlds buried beneath the tangled roots of the garden. But she had looked behind every painting and found nothing – had wandered the garden ‘til her feet grew sore and found only square hedges and lawns mowed flat – had searched the attic ‘til the butler had come to wrest her back into the bedroom assigned to her with a pre-recorded monologue about the dangers of dust to her sensitive faculties.
The wick grew bright.
When she performed – on the rare occasions that Estelle was granted leave to perform on a distant stage – she was accustomed to dancing to music that was performed live by technicality yet sounded the same every time. Still it was a more pleasant sound than the distant chatter of the ballroom down below, the sound of her parents conversing with business partners, shareholders, investors that they truly didn’t need but would accept the money of anyway, all of them waited on hand and foot by the clockwork servants they had made their fortune off of the backs of.
Estelle spun in a pirouette, seamlessly picking up the jug as she transitioned into her next move.
These days she saw more robots than people. Uncannily human looking and off-puttingly beautiful. And in spite of her sheltered existence she knew she was not the only one. Her parents’ products cooked and served in restaurants, wrote and performed in movies, ran the receptions of hospitals and looked after reception kids in schools. Today her parents were sealing the deal on the production of robots with finer motor skills than ever. Robots skilled enough to become surgeons and tightrope walkers. Robots skilled enough to become dancers.
She spun, and spun, and allowed the liquid to catch the light, shimmering, before crashing to the ground in waves.
And the robots were everywhere in this house. Cooking the meals, cleaning the corridors, maintaining the garden, making clothes, reading stories to her little siblings and making up new ones with the same characters and the same premise and the same metaphors and the same setting and all of them utterly indistinguishable from one another. Her siblings did not care – they, like her parents, were content to become bystanders in their own lives. Still, they were very young. That was why Estelle had suggested to her parents that they be sent to their grandparents’ country house for this evening, so they would not have to suffer the boredom of bureaucracy.
The candle grew short.
Of course, even for the short walk of half a mile down the road, her siblings were all accompanied by their own bodyguards, big and solid and pretty in the wrong ways. Estelle’s own bodyguard sat in the corner of the studio, holding a candle in one chipped hand and standing steadfast on its single remaining leg. This was the only robot she had ever allowed in her studio, the only place in this house that was truly hers (as even the bedroom that was supposedly her own would be stripped and remade by robots once a day). An older piece of her parents’ work – not covered in the synthetic skin that the newer models were but painted in cheery colours straight onto its tin shell. Her siblings’ bodyguards told them what to do, where to go, but her little tin soldier had always stood by her side and simply allowed her to go where she pleased. Had given her parents the security to let her out the house. Had opened doors for her, held her coat when she ventured indoors, and silently passed over her inhaler when she requested it.
A drop of wax sizzled to the floor.
Then – quite unexpectedly – one day she awoke to find its leg had fallen off. ‘Fallen off’. She wasn’t stupid. She knew the difference between a stress break and metal that had been sawn cleanly through. Her parents had been hinting that they wanted her to upgrade for years. But there was nothing wrong with her perfect soldier. Nothing wrong at all.
The petroleum ether rippled.
Her parents were inventors at heart. They kept their materials locked safely away in their study – a study whose wooden doors could be broken down even by a one-legged tin man in an effort that would not be heard over the sound of champagne bottles popping.
Estelle’s chest grew tight. She did not know whether it was asthma, or the oxygen in the room slowly burning away.
Her parents had put their foot down – had insisted she would not leave this house until she accepted a new bodyguard. One who would keep her just as trapped outside this house as she was within it.
She spun and spun and the room spun around her.
And now they planned to replace her too. When the new models rolled out she would never step foot on a stage again.
A flame licked at the drapes of her dress and began to climb up.
She paid it no heed. The routine was almost complete, but not yet. Allégro, up and down, forward, back, swinging to and fro, her movements violent and beautiful for it. She was one with the fire and she consumed the room.
She leapt through shadows. Landed on the floorboards as they cracked and vaulted away as they gave out. Breathed in the acrid and smothering scent of freedom and raised her arms above her head and twirled and flew-
And landed in the arms of her tin soldier. His paint peeling, body melting. He held her to a chest that blistered her skin and she pressed into him, wrapping her arms around his body as they deteriorated.
They would not be found until the next day, when three orphaned children picked their way through the wreckage and uncovered an ashen skeleton tenderly embracing a lump of misshapen tin.
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