She Walks on Glass

A spotlight appears around Brooke Shields, who is dressed in mock-Arab style, with a jeweled halter and a long sequined skirt, gold bracelets on her wrists and arms. The spotlight widens to show a large rectangle on the floor, and I see what I had taken to be some kind of bad taste mosaic is really a large box, like a long sandbox, filled with pieces of broken glass.

Teary-eyed, she pauses halfway across the glass, a jewel stuck somehow in the middle of her forehead, her hair longer than I’ve seen it, layered softly over her shoulders. She moves her hands to draw attention to her red fingernails, and from them also to her red toenails, poised above the red labels of the broken bottles, all that red supposed to make the red blood on her foot seem like an illusion, but I see it, spreading under the skin the way blood does, as she concentrates on each step, each motion of her hip, her final step off the glass as deliberate as all the others. She makes the same measured gesture with her hand and then runs off the floor, skipping a little on her bad foot.