The Dancing Savant

Emily cha-chaed on primetime TV. The crowd whooped as she calculated pi to 22,000 places during her mambo. Her husband, a pathologist, complained she was hard work to be around, that she was simply robotic and forever keeping count.

After her death, Emily’s husband conducted an autopsy. He was the lead pathologist on her case and the first to identify vibrations in her frontal lobe. They pulsed through his hands and made them quiver. Disbelieving, he scraped a stamp-sized section of tissue into a petri dish, where it radiated like hot pink satin. He carried it out of the lab deep in his pockets. His muscles contracted as he performed a smooth shuffle. Warm breath whispered in his ear. It urged him to keep moving and then it started to count.

Katie Coleman’s flash fiction stories have appeared in or are forthcoming in The Ilanot Review, Briefly Zine, Bending Genres, and Potato Soup Journal. Her work is nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology in Fiction. She has a master’s in creative writing and works as a teacher in Phuket, Thailand. She can be found on Twitter @anjuna2000.