She got her first baton when she was four. And she was good. She practiced until she had calluses on her fingers. She practiced while watching TV and also in her dreams. She could have been State Champion. But the high school was small, there was no band. That didn't slow her down. She had enough sparkle on her own.
``Who needs a band anyway,'' she said to the dance team. So long as they had a boom box and a couple of tapes what else did they need?
Perhaps a better sound system. When they played their music the stadium speakers turned it into a kind of homogenous blare.
The last game of her senior year was close. The cheerleaders yelled as hard as they could. At half time she stepped out to do her routine and her baton flashed and spun and flew into the air as never before. The music from the sound system was barely recognizable, but she didn't care. Her baton flew starward then back to her hand and she arched her back and danced in place and smiled like a movie star and the people began to cheer and the visiting school band picked up their instruments and instead of playing for their own dance team across the field they took up the garbled music from the speakers and they played along and as she spun the baton ever higher it seemed she rose to meet it and the audience could hardly believe what they saw as she ascended to the level of the tree tops then descended gracefully to the ground.
There was a wire, some people said.
It was an illusion, some people said.
It was a spell, said others.
People were silently respectful as she bagged their groceries.
After high school she went to community college and kept her job at the market. She was married for a while and quit school. The mill closed and a few years later the high school shut down too, and people moved to other jobs in other towns.
The years passed. The young men of that long ago football team were drifters and mechanics and salesmen now.
On hot summer nights sometimes she would sit on the trailer steps and smoke and look up at the stars and remember her brief moment of glory and wonder how it happened.
She knew it no longer mattered. She knew that she had become just another lost legend from a forgotten town.