The words echoed in her mind as she blasted past galaxies and hit light speed, spinning into an endless abyss of stardust flesh, a million worlds at her fingertips.
Then, with a blinding flash of light and a thunderous CRACK, she slammed abruptly back into her flesh. Her body convulsed and fell from the swivel chair, landed hard on the clean linoleum floor, writhing. Blood and white cream sprayed from her mouth and nose as the kids watched in silence. After a minute, the convulsions stopped, her body went limp.
Jimmy knelt down, put a towel to her chin, wiped a tear from her broken face.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
She smiled back, her mouth smeared in blood, a new root already climbing from the gum where a tooth had been knocked free. She felt the bones of her nose shift and click into place, and her eyes, she knew, were bright as his own. “Fine,” she whispered, and he helped her to her feet. People on the sidewalk stood watching through the window. She looked at all the faces and knew them. She turned to Jimmy, her mind a buzzing hive of voices, and slipped a hand into his.
He squeezed it reassuringly. “What now?”
“Now?” she said, as if waking from a sweet dream. “Now...”
She wiped blood from her chin, hungrily licked the last of the white froth from her lips. She smiled like a serpent, like Eve.
“Now it’s time to go home.”
SYMPHONY
FATHER DOESN’T KNOW about this journal and if he ever found out he’d kill me.
ESTHER HEARD THE music again.
It played over this scene: she with her mother, running through fields of impossible green. The birds-eye view of an omniscient observer would have noticed specks of bright blue, budding wildflowers among the tall grass. There were also flecks of white, beads of yellow. The meadow lay the width and breadth of heaven, and no matter how fast or far she ran, holding her mother’s cool, soft hand, she never tired, never felt her chest grow heavy or her brow grow hot. Mother wore a white linen dress, Esther crimson silk that flowed and trailed behind her, riding the tips of the grass, giving her blood-red wings.
It came from above. Always from above.
Horns, gentle and rising in a chorus. Strings plucked and run across with a taut bow, interrupted by bright bursts of staccato wind chords, as if through flutes or sagging bagpipes. Simultaneously cacophonous and melodic. A mathematical movement stuck with barbs, an orchestra created by a genius and performed by a thousand madmen. It came from a distant point and Esther looked past her mother’s face to the sky, seeking the source. The hovering clouds were white cotton stretched thin, with puffs of gray near the horizon. A mounting storm. From there the sounds emanated, and it was toward that gray swirling cluster that the women ran, headlong, faces stretched into smiles.
The clouds climbed higher, spreading like smoke from a house fire, reaching over the expanse. Esther started to slow, to cry out for her mother to stop, to turn back. She pulled at her mother’s hand, but it was no longer soft, no longer cool. The fingers were thick, hard, long. The fingers entrapped her own and pulled her along at the same breakneck speed. She tried to get her mother’s attention but could only see the back of her head, blonde hair flowing, the thin white dress a writhing sack of pumping arms and legs.
“Mom!”
The head turned slightly, and Esther saw a chin, a nose in profile. The skin appeared strained, wrinkled, scabbed.
The music amplified—and, oh, it was beautiful—filling the sky end-to-end like swelling twines of muscle, straining against the atmosphere, the vibrations of chords strong enough to shake the earth. The gray clouds were above them now, and still they raced on. Rain fell in sweeping sheets, the hands of Neptune slapping across the plains, dousing them both. The linen dress clung to her mother like translucent skin, revealed her body’s slight, elfish frame. Her hair, like Esther’s, no longer flowed, but spilled over their heads like jars of paint. Mother’s pale yellow, Esther’s inky black. Esther no longer tried to scream, the raging harmony was too loud. Her vision juggled, eardrums tickled, teeth chattered from the physical strength of the music, so big it filled the world, split the sky like broken plaster. The shattered pieces fell as hail.
And still the music grew, a heaven’s worth of angels shouting down Jericho’s walls.
Above them, charcoal clouds circled in masses large as cities. A spiral funnel formed, a finger of God that pushed slowly through the fabric of the world, thrust itself down, down toward the firmament, toward Esther.
Her mother stumbled, collapsed face-down and motionless into the grass. Esther fell with her, her crimson dress running off her like warm blood. She clutched her mother’s prone head, lifted it from the ground to face her.
Mother’s eyes were hollow, her skin stretched, flaking and calloused, her teeth crooked shards. “Stay away, Esther!” the hag that was her mother screamed. “Stay away from him!”
Esther screamed but could not hear her own voice. The song crescendoed. Thunder rumbled alongside pounding drums. Great horns wailed, cymbals crashed. Lightning rode the rain down and spit fire into the earth. Dirt flew and Esther felt the heat from the electricity.
The rushing wind tugged at her with invisible fingers, lifted her small body from the earth, gently as a soul rising from the grave toward heaven. She spun her arms, reached for her mother but she was there no more; only a charred black chasm remained, into which her body had fallen. Esther could see downward into the great fires of Hell.
And still she rose.
She began to cycle with the twister, the world spun while falling away. Higher and higher she flew, into the gaping maw of the storm. Her body flipped to face the sky. She saw slits of golden eyes above an expanding, swirling mouth. Sonorous laughter came from the great aperture, and lightning crackled at the edges of the portal like fire-born teeth. She was pulled inside, swallowed. It was darker than she’d imagined, the earth seen only in dancing slivers. A spark bit her dress and it caught with flame. Her skin burned, the meaty smoke filled her nose and her mind screamed at the hungry storm which had engulfed her to let her go or let her die.
But the music did not stop.
Even when she woke from the dream, surrounded by the banality of her shadowed bedroom, it lingered.
Rain spattered the windowpane, opaque against the night. She sat up, her shirt and pajama bottoms soaked through with sweat, strands of hair sticking to her cheeks and neck. She slowed her breathing, her rapid heart. Listened. The melody remained, as it often did. Persistent. As if to say, this time, child? This time will you heed the call?
She squinted at the window, eyes adjusting to the gray-toned sketches of the landscape: the flat shadow of large meadow, the thin smoke-trail of road that led to a larger world snaking away from its edge. It was the middle of the night, and the moon shone strong despite the rain. Esther nodded to the dark in acquiescence, pushed down the covers and swung her legs out of bed. Her toes dangled inches from the floor as she faced the window and studied her spectral reflection.
This time, she would heed the call.
THE RAIN WAS different than in the dream world. The haunting music was still distinct, but faint, as if pressed against a massive membrane that separated this world from that of dreams. The sound of the drops hitting earth and flora was like the arguments of fairies, soothing with an underlying hostility. She felt observed by the rain, but did not mind.
Her clothes absorbed the cool water, turned heavy and chilled against her skin. Esther turned back once to view the pale house, misty and beaten by shadows; its half-open window a sleepy eye in the western wall of the one-story ranch home. The milk-toned walls wore sepia shingles like a sharp-angled hat. Father’s room was on the opposite side, and she did not fear his seeing her, nor did she fear his coming to her room late this night. She had learned his patterns, sly though they might be.
The sky danced with flashes, popping bulbs of lightning. The music above her swelled. Horns fattened and swayed, a melancholy dirge. She turned and ran across the knee-high grass toward the trail head. The trees that surrounded the meadow and enclosed their home were old and dense, protruding fingers of oaks, maples, birch and cedars. Beyond the woods, up and over a ridge, was the trail, an old Chippewa path kept alive by the occasional Sunday hiker and the environmental leanings of the local council. The trail was hardly ever used this close to Paw Creek, where her and Father lived, but would take you six miles north if you let it, winding along the big lake to Little Bluff, a quaint tourist town that thrived in the summer and hibernated, like they all did, in the cold months. Esther had never walked the entire way, but she and Mother had often explored the trail, marveled at the long tunnel of trees it afforded those who passed through. Just ahead was the flute where the trees opened, a dividing not unlike the Red Sea, a clear path of thin grass, rock and dirt piercing the old woods like an arrow shaft.
As she strode into the forest’s moon-dipped fissure, she closed her eyes. As rain pattered her head and cheeks and shoulders, she debated whether she truly wanted to continue. She took a breath, smelled the life in the rain. Took another.
A whip-crack of thunder, and her eyes sprang open. A chorus, sweet as a swarm of locusts, sang in her ears. The orchestra bellowed, not from the sky, but from the trees. A swelling coda of dancing keys infiltrated the surrounding wood, and as the rain slapped against earth and leaves it stopped being random white noise and instead took on a melody, a rhythmic beat, a fantastic pulse of notes flowing through her like waves of energy, a complex and torrid symphony as haunting as it was blissful. The wind gusted at her back, pushed her forward despite her uncertainty. The trees were bent unnaturally, the hardwood creaking as the tips arched into deep courtship bows, branches reaching into pointed bark-coated fingers.
This way, they said.
She ran, let the wind lift her off the ground every few steps, gently place her back in stride, heel-to-toe on the wet earth. She entered the trees, felt them watching her askance as they bowed deeper, uniformly directing her steps.
Esther saw the tunnel take a turn just ahead, darker here than at the entrance, the moonlight not breaking through. The crook in the trail was called the Devil’s Elbow, and her mother had said it came from an ancient Indian name, translated roughly to “where the spirits live.” Esther didn’t believe it of course, knew her mother was teasing, trying to frighten her. But now, alone in the dark, Esther thought it an appropriate name. She felt energy here, a tingling that carried from the bottom of her spine up through her neck and along the back of her skull.
There was a sharp break in the song, a stuttering record skip, and the trees groaned and lifted themselves straight as soldiers. She slowed, then stopped. Waited. She was confused, lost without the music. When it started again it was soft. A sonata. The trees cracked and leaves murmured. She watched in wonder as they swayed, gravitating to a synched point, the ones to the left of the path bent nearly horizontal in their reach, the ones to the right dipped so sharply as to be upside-down U’s. She stepped forward to where their leaning tips directed, a sole spot in the earth along the shoulder of the trail. She looked up, spun around, saw the tops of the trees looking back at her with stern, leaf-skinned faces.
The music rushed back like a sharp wind, frenetic and hurried. Gasping, she dropped to her knees and ripped at the soft earth with her fingers, yanked at the top layer of grass, then into the pale brown mud, pulling away rocks and small roots, tossing it behind her as she dug.
