The Gladiators Dance
A tale
This is a repost of one of my most viewed posts.
I was listening to the musical piece “Now We Are Free” from Gladiator and an image popped into my head. I tried to reproduce it with the help of the AI image generator and then I wrote this short story.
The music plays.
I imagine the music coming out of the score and flying in little butterfly-like movements. Yes, if music were an animal, it would be a white butterfly fluttering about. A gathering of butterflies would be a masterpiece.
There are atmospheres of dawn and fog in the air as if the earth were breathing hot breaths from its bowels.
Two dancers draw wind movements to the sound of the music. The flying sounds are everywhere, as if they were the voices of ancestors, reminding us that the past and present are constantly mixing as if they were dancing too.
The dancer is tall and strong. She is small and fragile as a daisy but graceful, like a rose petal gliding through the air, and her movements capture her partner’s gaze.
He holds her from behind, throwing her into the air. She spins around and lands in his arms. They stare at each other. Her plump lips are unfulfilled promises. There’s tension in the air, and their hearts beat strongly, stronger and stronger to the rhythm of desire.
He holds her in his arms, staring at her as if all time had stopped. He wants to perpetuate this instant.
A light touch on her soft skin, a subtle smile, her plump lips lurking like cocked guns. Their lips meet in silky, moist smiles. Their bodies are still, but alive. Their lips move apart, longing to return. But they are forever united now that they have touched. There is a memory in the body that stops people from forgetting.
He puts her down. Her bare feet hit the earth. Only today does he realize that she is perfect. They stand facing each other. There will never be any distance between them now that his lips have landed on her belly with gentle little touches, like petals falling on her skin. Her body wakes up in a shiver. She has never felt this energy that now runs through her, shining up from below. These are life’s whispers, so alive that it’s impossible they’ve been dormant for so long.
A light touch on the hair before the longed-for union. Two bodies coming together, bursting with vibrations of rebirth.
The stillness finally arrives and everything seems different now. She sleeps, resting her head quietly on his shoulder. He closes his eyes deeply now that he knows all the curves of her body one by one. He tries to learn them.
Memory is a dream, a reconstruction. They know this, but they decide to try, and one morning, they choose to love each other again, performing choreographed dances of pleasure as if they were gladiators facing the world.
Now that they have discovered how to be happy, everything seems so alive to them, and they smile, knowing what they were made for, so they decide to try. They know they’ll be lost without each other.
©Rolando Andrade, 2025