Young Beatrice

  She was forced to step into the red-hot shoes and dance till she fell to the floor dead; just as her mother and her grandmother before her had done on the occasion of their thirty-fifth birthdays.

     The music was still playing as young Beatrice was finally allowed to turn away from her mother lying prostrate on the dance floor. Silently she vowed to never give birth to a daughter when she was older. I'll be the last of a dying breed, Beatrice promised herself, not knowing that her mother and her grandmothers before her had made the same promise to themselves when they were also ten years old.