• Rows of big round lights reflect off a mirrored wall. Many of them are going out, hollow shells of glories past. Visible in the dirtied glass is a thin young girl, no more than six or seven years old. Her arms reach upward, and her light blue eyes look to the heavens as if hope is there in her grasp.
    She isn’t tall or muscular, but as she dances her thin tanned limbs give the illusion of length when she extends them as far as she can, almost seeming to be the gracefully tall ballerina she always strives to become.
    She mimics the dancers she’s seen on her best friend Maiya’s TV, and she forgets everything but the way her flat, worn, ballet slippers kiss the hard wood of the studio’s floor. When she dances, there are no girls to make fun of the way she plays with boys and not with other girls. When she dances, she isn’t poor, with a mother that can barely scrape together enough to feed her and her four sisters. When she dances, the world goes away.
    She twirls in circle after circle, forgetting. Forgetting the way her daddy left for America, promises spilling from his lips of how he’d soon make enough money to bring them too. She forgets for that instant of her dance that he left three years ago and never sent news home. Pale pink fabric on old wood erases her mother’s cries at night.
    Who needs school when it costs too much money anyway? She can dance her way to America, and she can remind her daddy how much they love and miss him, and won’t he come home soon?
    An uneven board catches her toe, and the little girl stumbles. She catches herself with a roll, but her dance has been interrupted. Suddenly she’s very aware of the severe winter cold seeping in through ancient walls, and life comes back in a rush.
    Tears sting her eyes, but she knows she must return home to help her mother. Bundling rags over her freezing legs, she stands up just as a familiar call is heard.
    “Karina Matsevich, where are you?”
    “Here I am, Mama!” She calls, running for home, envisioning a future as Russia’s greatest.