Gina was doing ninety when the semi truck in front of her blew a tire. Freak accident. Nothing anyone could have done. The whole tire exploded around the hubcap, shredding against the merciless pavement. Hot ribbons of rubber spewed from beneath the massive machine. Two found Gina’s windshield. The first pulverized the shatterproof glass but failed to break it. The second finished the job. The wind propelled thousands of shards of swirling glass into Gina’s face. The car rolled. The world shifted into a dimension of pure noise. Screaming and chaos and tires pumping against a road that was no longer beneath them. Then, inexplicably, she thought of dancers. In the slowed state of time brought on by near-death, Gina saw endless rows of them, leaping across an infinite stage. They coalesced into a single beam of bright, a fixed spotlight falling, coalescing into a perfectly-poised ballerina, one leg bent like a flamingo’s, the other straight from the hip to the tip of the toe. The ballerina looked up and said, IFNOTNOWTHENWHEN FNOTNOWTHENWHENI NOTNOWTHENWHENIF OTNOWTHENWHENIFN TNOWTHENWHENIFNO NOWTHENWHENIFNOT OWTHENWHENIFNOTN WTHENWHENIFNOTNO THENWHENIFNOTNOW HENWHENIFNOTNOWT ENWHENIFNOTNOWTH NWHENIFNOTNOWTHE WHENIFNOTNOWTHEN HENIFNOTNOWTHENW ENIFNOTNOWTHENWH NIFNOTNOWTHENWHE The car came down in the median. [hr] When Gina came to, a team of doctors surrounded her. Bright lights and blurry vision and surgical masks obscured their faces. Her husband was arguing with another doctor in the corner. Gina couldn’t see him, but she sure could hear him. The doctor said in an impatient voice, “It would kill her if we started now.” Her husband, ever spineless, said, “If not now, then when?” [hr] When Gina was in college, she’d studied to be a dancer. Now in her late forties, she had quit the competitive and bodily-destructive art form to pursue a life of education. She still interacted with dance three times a week, driving to the inner city to teach disadvantaged grade schoolers the joys of the art she loved. Her drive followed a two-lane highway typically clogged with semi trucks. The impact shattered a majority of the bones in her body but didn’t kill her entirely. Her legs, in particular, had taken a beating. Think plastic shards mixed into jello. The doctors said she’d never use them again. Don’t even think about it. Don’t hold out hope. Twelve surgeries, two million dollars, and four years of extensive therapy later, and Gina finally had some semblance of motion again. With the aid of a walker, she could hobble around the ground floor of their vast suburban mansion. It wasn’t so much walking as throwing her useless legs forward with a swing of her hips. For Gina, it was a miracle. That first day back from the hospital, with her walker and her husband to lean on, felt like she had walked through a gout of fire, fusing her into a single piece of fragile glass. But she was alive. And she was mobile. Things could be worse. The following night, she threw her useless legs one in front of the other into the garage to grab a beer from the refrigerator, where she found her husband of twenty four years fucking the doctor from the hospital on the hood of their replacement car. “You were going to figure out somewhere along the line,” he said, not even trying to pull his pants up. “If not now, then some other time.” [hr] Gina made the long walk from her car to the front gates of the auditorium, where a waiting concierge with a wheelchair helped her to her seat. It was not often she could leave her assisted living home. The nursing team was short-staffed, and transportation was a luxury, and at any rate none of them really liked dance anyway. The lights went up, and the dancers roared onto the stage, a stunning modern adaptation of La Sylphide. The chorus girls leapt in unison. Gina’s shattered legs almost twitched in anticipation. The dancers prepped for an intensely acrobatic synchronized leap. There came the run-up, the tense, the leap--and they were flying through the air, weightless, exuberant, beautifully perfectly alive. They landed with hardly a sound. The chorus girls faded away until only one remained, a lead frozen in place, one leg bent up like a flamingo’s, the other straight from the hip to the tip of her toe. The ballerina looked up, right at Gina, her eyes teasingly serene as if to say, If not now, then when? Gina felt her foot move.