How does a girl dance when her legs are bent at the knee? This is a riddle my grandmother once asked. At the time, I had no answer. My legs were as still as the two beams of the cross, and I dared not do anything but stand as straight as corn.

“You’ll have to bend sooner or later,” she told me. “All girls get on their knees.”

She crushed rose petals in her palm until the red dripped down her arm like a wound. She did this for many weeks, each morning and evening, until her skin was a gnarl of stains. She collected the droplets into a silver bowl. When the liquid neared the brim, she bade me bring her my white shoes and dipped the leather in.

“When you’re up there with your head bowed with the rest of them,” she told me, a wink creasing her eye, “they’ll only be looking at you.”

Red shoes needs black stockings and black stockings need a white dress to cover them, but I had no white dress except the one I was to wear on my knees, and so I put it on. I twirled and plied and pirouetted as well as I could, though I had never been trained to do more than lower my eyes. None of us girls were trained beyond the smallest of movements. An eyelash flutter there. A curl of the finger here. Anything more and you’d have green eyes on you.

Green eyes on red shoes was another sort of riddle, but there was a simple answer to that.

The other girls were already on their knees when I arrived at our little church, so the only eyes on me were the priest with the buttoned-up cassock. When he woke up that morning his eyes were blue, like bird eggs, but when they changed the other girls saw—such magic, after all, is only possible through our Lord—they began to weep, for nothing they wore inspired a miracle.

But a miracle is not a miracle unless it spreads as dandelions do in the wind. I bent my legs where bone meets bone and leaped into the air, so high that the girls could see my body over the pews, and more so, they could see my shoes, as bright as rubies, tipped to a point at the toe.

I knew better, but how could I stop, now that I knew all the ways my body could move?

Later, one night after dancing well into starlight, I awoke to my grandmother weeping in the other room, and the hands of my sister-cousins holding me down. The moon was only half full through my window, but it was enough light to see the edges of green in their eyes, and the glint of silver on the dull blades they grasped.

How does a girl dance with only shoes? They asked this to one another that evening. One by one they put my red shoes on over their stockings, but they had never considered bending their knees for anything other than kneeling, and no matter which way they swayed back and forth, they could not dance.

If their hands were not covering my mouth, I could have told them: shoes were not enough, not for twisting, not for crouching, not for leaping. They realized this on their own soon enough, but they did not solve the riddle of how to bend.

They took my legs as well.

Grandmother wept but she did not weep long, not even when, over the small fence around our house, we saw my legs propped in the air, my red shoes bright in the sun, swaying back and forth in a macabre parade. Even with these parts of me, those girls did not know how to dance.

Later, my grandmother would tell me she did not mean me any pain. Later, she would say that a girl with legs as long as I should have been born in a place where girls were not discouraged from knowing what their bodies were capable of. Later, she stood far enough away from me so I could not touch her, and her grimace pulled at her chapped lips until they bled.

Then she brought me another pair of bright red shoes.

“How does a girl get out of bed?” she asked me. “Will you bend again?”

I moved what I could at first. A twist of my neck. The curl of my thumb. Blinked both eyes. My belly could curve inward.

My hands slid into the shoes as easily as my feet. An elbow is not so different from a knee, and mine curved into a fine edge. I could swish. I could reach. I could lift myself into the air.

How does a girl dance with red shoes and no legs? The answer is me.