never, no matter how much we wished it, would ever be heard again.
The music is different for every dance, wild and melodic and gorgeous and elusive; you try to remember it, hum parts of it a week or a month later, and it’s all gone save the memory of its beauty. There are other times when we’re all in some semblance of mental harmony, during a good hunt or a good feed or when a dream of the peaceful underground passes among us in our sleep, but never like this. We weren’t just choosing to play together; something else was playing us.
Renee’s eyes widened, feeling it, and she turned to me like a hoo-kiddie ready to ride the big roller coaster. She looked so small and thin and shadowy under the moon. I pushed her in Sam’s direction and she lunged forward with arms outstretched, a Frankenstein stagger, and Sam caught her hands and spun her dizzy. Our mutual song, traveling shrill and high as a winter wind on this mild spring night, slowed and thickened into a waltz so simple and plaintive that every note was a separate, irreparable heartbreak. Florian snuffled, melancholy at the sound, and Mags and Joe wept. Renee stood mesmerized, letting herself be spun.
Sam slipped an arm around her waist: step-one-two, step-one-two, Ben reached for Mags, Joe for me; Florian was a serene satellite, humming and shuffling around the spinning planets of Linc, Billy, Teresa. Perfect rhythm, perfect harmony, perfect unison. Renee whirled away, grabbed my hands, swung me right back round to Joe. Somewhere out there a hoo turned restlessly in his sleep, her sleep, dreaming of the calliope playing endlessly in some faraway carnival.
The music grew higher, sharper, the waltz more frenetic; we turned again and again around one another, rotating from night to day to night around each other’s perpetually shifting suns. The calliope notes only we could hear drowned out all distraction, stifled caution. I kept my eyes tightly closed and felt my feet lift free as I whirled from hand to hand without plan or thought, the better to take in the whistling winds, the birds’ night cries, the chitter of insects in the brush and the crawlers feeding slower than slow on our own dead flesh, the whole turn and tide of dying and rotting and earth-nourishing life and that smell, that lovely flesh-rotten chemical smell like formaldehyde except stronger and sterile like bleach diluting blood—
The smell made me open my eyes, that and a hand firmer and fleshier than any of ours clutching mine. I had wandered away, been carried away to a circle all my own, and the stranger dancing with me had sickly bruise-blue skin, a dazed expression and beads of sticky, slow-moving sweat congealing on his bare forearms like pine sap. Three or four others like him surrounded me, performing a mechanized stumble left, right, left and back again; their music was a shambling lampoon of ours, each tuneless note snot-sticky as the sheen on their skins and tense as guitar strings tightened to snapping point. They’d lurked on the perimeter of our dance, they must have done, awaiting their opportunity, and I jumped right into their arms and nobody even saw me go.
I pulled away, shouting, and they pressed in with shoulders, elbows, stinking skin—intact, fleshy, springy human skin—and formed a tight, insistently moving circle to keep me close. I pushed back, gagging on the smell, and they pressed closer, ashen faces and unseeing eyes dull as grimy glass shards in a gutter. They didn’t see me. My gang didn’t hear me. I threw my weight forward, trying to break through their Red Rover grasp, and slipped on a patch of mud. I was falling, they were closing in tighter. I flailed unable to right myself with only one arm and they grabbed me, squeezing tight like toddlers clutching a kitten, tighter—
The circle wavered and broke as Joe barreled in, striking at random with fists, feet; they released me, crying with pain. Joe hit harder. They had human blood, bright red,
The music is different for every dance, wild and melodic and gorgeous and elusive; you try to remember it, hum parts of it a week or a month later, and it’s all gone save the memory of its beauty. There are other times when we’re all in some semblance of mental harmony, during a good hunt or a good feed or when a dream of the peaceful underground passes among us in our sleep, but never like this. We weren’t just choosing to play together; something else was playing us.
Renee’s eyes widened, feeling it, and she turned to me like a hoo-kiddie ready to ride the big roller coaster. She looked so small and thin and shadowy under the moon. I pushed her in Sam’s direction and she lunged forward with arms outstretched, a Frankenstein stagger, and Sam caught her hands and spun her dizzy. Our mutual song, traveling shrill and high as a winter wind on this mild spring night, slowed and thickened into a waltz so simple and plaintive that every note was a separate, irreparable heartbreak. Florian snuffled, melancholy at the sound, and Mags and Joe wept. Renee stood mesmerized, letting herself be spun.
Sam slipped an arm around her waist: step-one-two, step-one-two, Ben reached for Mags, Joe for me; Florian was a serene satellite, humming and shuffling around the spinning planets of Linc, Billy, Teresa. Perfect rhythm, perfect harmony, perfect unison. Renee whirled away, grabbed my hands, swung me right back round to Joe. Somewhere out there a hoo turned restlessly in his sleep, her sleep, dreaming of the calliope playing endlessly in some faraway carnival.
The music grew higher, sharper, the waltz more frenetic; we turned again and again around one another, rotating from night to day to night around each other’s perpetually shifting suns. The calliope notes only we could hear drowned out all distraction, stifled caution. I kept my eyes tightly closed and felt my feet lift free as I whirled from hand to hand without plan or thought, the better to take in the whistling winds, the birds’ night cries, the chitter of insects in the brush and the crawlers feeding slower than slow on our own dead flesh, the whole turn and tide of dying and rotting and earth-nourishing life and that smell, that lovely flesh-rotten chemical smell like formaldehyde except stronger and sterile like bleach diluting blood—
The smell made me open my eyes, that and a hand firmer and fleshier than any of ours clutching mine. I had wandered away, been carried away to a circle all my own, and the stranger dancing with me had sickly bruise-blue skin, a dazed expression and beads of sticky, slow-moving sweat congealing on his bare forearms like pine sap. Three or four others like him surrounded me, performing a mechanized stumble left, right, left and back again; their music was a shambling lampoon of ours, each tuneless note snot-sticky as the sheen on their skins and tense as guitar strings tightened to snapping point. They’d lurked on the perimeter of our dance, they must have done, awaiting their opportunity, and I jumped right into their arms and nobody even saw me go.
I pulled away, shouting, and they pressed in with shoulders, elbows, stinking skin—intact, fleshy, springy human skin—and formed a tight, insistently moving circle to keep me close. I pushed back, gagging on the smell, and they pressed closer, ashen faces and unseeing eyes dull as grimy glass shards in a gutter. They didn’t see me. My gang didn’t hear me. I threw my weight forward, trying to break through their Red Rover grasp, and slipped on a patch of mud. I was falling, they were closing in tighter. I flailed unable to right myself with only one arm and they grabbed me, squeezing tight like toddlers clutching a kitten, tighter—
The circle wavered and broke as Joe barreled in, striking at random with fists, feet; they released me, crying with pain. Joe hit harder. They had human blood, bright red,
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