A Death at the Dance

Flash Fiction

It would soon be morning outside, but the dance marathon continued inside the hotel. It was the early 1930s. The sky was pink with dawn, and the last few stars were fading away into the sky awash with color. The birds were singing outside. It was summer. But inside the hotel’s ballroom, the song of the morning birds was drowned out by the noise of the music the band was playing for the many couples who were dancing the night away, and now dancing the dawn away.

Opal was tired, her feet ached as she kept pace with the music and her partner for the dance marathon, Charlie. Charlie wasn’t tired, it seemed, he had so much energy still. She wondered why she had ever entered this dance marathon. The beads on her dress glittered in the dim light and shook as she danced. It had not been a good idea to wear a heavily beaded dress for something like this she thought. Yes, it looked nice, but wearing this dress was another story, it did not feel nice when her body ached with exhaustion. 

Suddenly, Opal fell to the floor, seemingly from exhaustion. Charlie was pulled down with her, but he quickly got on his knees and looked down at her to see if she had just fainted. The music continued and the dancers still swayed around them. It was a huge event, and they had been dancing at the very edge of the ballroom, so no one seemed to have noticed Opal falling to the floor. Charlie gently pushed Opal to the very edge of the ballroom floor, close to the entrance, and hoped that might wake her up. But now that he looked at her in slightly better light, he noticed she didn’t seem to be breathing. That’s when he called loudly for help. 

That was some 80 years ago, and that’s how the story of the dancing ghost at the former Vernon Hotel started, or so people say say. Sara looked at Erin who she was telling the story to, and said ”Opal just dropped dead, and now people say they see a young woman dressed in the fashion of the early 1930s, dancing by herself, rather sadly by the entrance to the former ballroom, now a dining room of a restaurant in the partly vacant old hotel building”.