Fire-dancer

by Zyra Ymon (Bulgaria)

I didn't expect to find Bulgaria

My time in Bulgaria has been riddled with misadventures, misconceptions, and mysticisms. However, there was one remarkable episode which crowned it all: when I entered into the woods with nothing but a backpack and three grapes cupped in my palm, and was lost. Each passing day was spent wheezing and panting my passage through the dense woodland, wearying of bears, boars, bees, and any other menace patron to the second letter of the alphabet. Each passing night was spent dancing around a campfire with a bottle of rum, chanting old folk tunes to the brooding evergreens; peerless for ambiance but dreadful singers. At the brink overlooking my third week of solo travel, I eyed a long winding vista adorning the side of the mountain and elected to follow it, for it seemed to be the kind of trail that sends you where you need to go. Eastern Europe is nothing without a little dark romanticism, after all. The path was wild and serpentine, and it churned me around throughout the deep dark bowels of the forest before finally spitting me out at the posts of a secluded village hidden high in the peaks of the Rhodopes; unreachable by road or lift, and isolated since it’s conception from wanderers of the outside world. Rows of white birch manned the borders like pale sentinels, and for a time I but stood and breathed in the honeyed slips of the wind as though they were a lover’s perfume. The settlement appeared abandoned; the stone cabins responded non to my knocking and the vast building I can only assume was the pub, likewise barren within. I padded between homes like a lost hound when at last I detected a muffled uproar droning from beyond the trees. As I pierced the gloom and wormed my way towards the festering din, I began to fear. Suppose these people were not altogether sane? Suppose I was walking straight into mortal peril? Fortunately, however, I came to the reasoning that should the inhabitants truly be mad then I would likely be in more favorable company anyhow, for following my weeks of self-served company and one-sided conversation, I had become quite mad myself. Furthermore, I determined that a prerequisite for any person mad enough to kill me was that they would first have to be sane enough to be mad enough to kill me, and I was willing to gamble that I had started off as saner, and was presently therefore madder, having thus the advantage. It made perfect sense at the time, but then again, I was as previously stated, quite mad. When I burst forth from the shadows, I discovered the entire congregation of the town huddled round an enclosure. Well nigh a hundred people sheathed in geometric weaves of scarlet, auburn, and earthy green, leaned over the verge of the corral and cried in wonder at the marvel they beheld within. Wholly unheeded, I burrowed my way to the fore of the crowd and ogled in at the strange spectacle. On a bed of seething embers, women in white lace gowns danced barefoot. Ringlets of long dark hair swung like pendulums as they spun and leaped over the blazing coals, giggling when throes of flame burst with spits of ash from alongside their step. A slow smile crept over my face, when suddenly, I locked eyes with one of the dancers. She tossed me a wink and a flash of her tongue, before springing into a pirouette just as a jet of fire erupted from where she had stood, it’s flickering tongue falling just short of her heel. She landed with a flourish and a twinkle, and twirled on. All eyes inevitably led back to her- the grace of her willowy form, the lustre of her glossy black hair, and the way the white of her frock beamed against her olive skin in the sunlight. Certain moments can never be forgotten, not even a single second could I feasibly surrender of mine. And though those that followed in the company of the glorious fire-dancing woman are just as haunting, their value is perhaps heightened further by the very nature of their being unwritten.