Dagmars Daughter by Kim Echlin

that silence is absence from sound. She played drones in her fiddle tunes until the people complained that she ruined the danciness of the music. They said that no one had ever played in this way before and that it didn’t sound right.
    Nyssa said, It’s what I hear.
    She was not afraid and she played what she wanted. Fierce and dancing, she followed what she was drawn to. Her ear was open.

    O ne night, after they’d finished their snaking, Donal played an old tune while the birdwatcher laid out the bones of a bird, trying to figure out how the skeleton went together. What’s it called? he said.
    Donal thought a moment and thought again. I can’t remember.
    The other man shrugged, turned the little bones of the ribs around and said, It doesn’t really matter. They all sound alike.
    But they didn’t and Donal couldn’t remember. He leaned his bass against the wall and seeing the pattern of the bird’s ribs quickly rearranged them in order, only the second one missing. Something in his ear was dying and he with it.
    Why do you stay so long out here? Donal asked.
    To see the end of the world. The birdwatcher admired Donal’s quick eye. He could catch a snake, drop it into a bag and tie it shut with his teeth before the snake flung itself up and attacked. He could look at scattered bones and see the living creature’s shape.
    Is this place the end?
    Could be here. Could be anywhere.
    Is that the only reason you stay?
    There was a woman but she left. She said she couldn’t breathe when I was there.
    Donal worked on the fine bones of a foot and shifted the small skull out of the way. He said, We say that we stay for love, run away for love, but a woman just goes firmly on in the same place being herself.
    You?
    I did not tell her that I loved her. She went with my friend. I didn’t try to change her course. This is the truest love.
    Where will you go next?
    Donal hesitated. Don’t know, he said.
    What was to follow? Donal’s hands were scarred with snakebite. He fished and climbed coconut trees for milk, wove fronds to replace worn thatch. But the hot winds never felt right against his skin. The sea is subtle—dread creatures glide under it, treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. An island, Melville said, is like a place in the soul, full of peace and joy, encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. Donal stared at the bones of the birds devoured by snakes and said, There’s an island up north where an old woman used to bury all the birds that broke their necks on her windows. That’s where I’m going next.
    He wanted to hear the old men at night. It was time to go back. Before everything disappeared. Colin would know the name of that tune.

    N yssa put on Norea’s old honeymoon negligee and danced a one, two, three around the old woman.
    I’ve got on your lacy nightdress, Nana, she said. I like it.
    A nightdress like that is not meant for keeping on as much as for being taken off, said the old woman.
    Nyssa admired her own round breasts under the thin material and looked across at her grandmother’s sagging skin. She said without thinking, Will I turn like you?
    A woman must be as her nature is, said time-shrunken Norea to the heedless girl.
    Nyssa wandered out and up to the gaze in the nightdress. She smelled the smoke from Moll’s short pipe.
    Girl, called Moll, a woman only is free to be very hungry, very lonely.
    She held out the pipe to Nyssa and said, Have some dudeen.
    Nyssa took the pipe and drew and swirled the smoke inside her mouth. She watched Moll stick a piece of grass through a black hole in her tooth and pull it out the other side. When the pipe went cold, she handed it back, and with her long bony fingers the woman stuffed it with more crumbled leaves, held a match to it, sucked and said, Can’t stand a ring on a man’s little finger!
    Nyssa! called Dagmar from down the shore.
    The girl squatted lower in the hole and said, I’m not going.
    She was weary of