In a dream, a dwarf entered his room and asked him to dance. Because he was tired, he declined and ate grapes as the dwarf set up a portable record player and danced alone. He looked through the various records that were spread on the table in front of him and found them incredibly different in genres and styles. The dwarf was haphazardly taking records on and off the player halfway through songs, scattering the records around him on the floor. 

He told the dwarf how great of a dancer he was and when the last song ended the dwarf gave a dramatic twirl and then a bow. The dwarf then launched into his backstory, explaining how he was from the north country, where dwarves don’t dance, and so he came down south and danced in the taverns and before the king. After a revolution broke out, the king was killed and the dwarf was banished to the forest. 

The dwarf took a break to dance to “Night and Day” by Frank Sinatra. He imagines the dwarf doing a similar dance before the king and ate grapes during the rest of the performance. When he sees a large black butterfly fly into the forest behind them, he knows his dream is ending and the dwarf bids him goodbye. He thanks the dwarf again for the performance and says he might never see him again, but the dwarf responds that he will return and that he’ll live in the forest and dance with him every day. He is taken aback and when he asks how the dwarf knows this, the creature responds that “it’s been decided.” 

He woke up alone, facedown in bed and drenched in sweat. After he washed his face and made breakfast, he took the bus to the elephant factory. There, he went about his usual job this month of manufacturing ears in the production of living elephants. All the workers switched body part production each month, and last month he’d been creating heads. Making heads is much more rewarding and tiring than making ears. Next, he will work in the trunk department. The purpose of the factory is to maximize the amount of real elephants, chopping these elephants up and reusing their parts. Each elephant produced is ⅕ genuine and ⅘ imitation. This effort is driven by the human desire for more elephants, as the animals, left to their own devices, would produce far less offspring at a much slower rate. 

The Elephant Supply Corporation, a publicly owned monopoly, buys the elephants, tests them, and then brands them with their company logo before releasing them into the wild. The factory makes about fifteen elephants a week. After finishing the easily attainable ear quota for the day, he tells his partner about the dwarf. The man didn’t say much, which was disappointing, but then he said he’d heard about the same dwarf before. He said that a worker on Stage Six, where hair is planted, had told him about the dwarf. He remembers seeing the man before and thinking he was crazy, but decides to track him down. 

He finds the man at the old tavern where photos of elephant factory workers lined the walls. The man pointed to a picture of him working as a young man that was taken before the revolution. When he broached the topic of the dwarf, the man told him not to tell anyone and talked about how the dwarf used to dance in the very bar they were in now. As people watched him, they would either feel intense happiness or grief, at the dwarf’s choosing.

The chief of the council of nobles soon found out about the dancing and connected him to the king who gave the dwarf a room in his castle. When the king was killed in the revolution, the dwarf ran away. The revolutionaries were looking to capture him and some people say the dwarf was the cause of the revolution through his manipulative dancing. 

He didn’t dream about the dwarf that night. On the next lunch break, his coworker told him about a pretty girl on Stage Eight that everyone was trying to take out. He approached her and asked her to go dancing with him tomorrow night. She said she was already going dancing, but she wanted to go alone. He told her he’d join her. 

That night, he dreamt of the dwarf again and the creature was smoking and looked weary. The dwarf told him he was sick and asked if he wanted him to get the girl to like him. The dwarf says that if he can learn to dance well, he could seduce her. The dwarf offers to climb inside his body and control its movement on the condition that he doesn’t say a word to the girl until they have sex at the end of the night or else the dwarf will keep his body forever. 

At the dance hall, he navigated through the crowd while the dwarf spoke inside of him. He waited at the bar for an hour before she finally entered in a tight shimmering dress. Men approached her, but she waved them off and danced alone in the center of the floor. He walked up to where she danced and felt his body succumb to the dwarf’s moves. They danced together for hours and at the end of the night they walked to a nearby field and kissed. 

Suddenly, her face changed and fleshy white maggots crept out of her nostril and pus began to pour from her eyes. He resists the urge to scream, knowing this must be a hallucination of the dwarf’s doing. He closed his eyes and continued to kiss her. The dwarf left his body and warned that although he’d won this time he would lose eventually.

This proved to be true in the end. Now, every policeman is looking for him after an old man noticed his dancing resembled that of the dwarf. He’s been on the run for the past month, hiding in the forest, but sooner or later he knows he’ll be caught. At night, the dwarf comes in his dreams and orders to be let into his body, but he knows this will damn him to a lifetime of dancing. In the distance, he can hear the dogs howling and he knows they’re almost here.