Under Shifting Glass by Nicky Singer

threshold of something, though I don’t know what.
    â€œHow would Liminal be?” I ask the flask. “You know, as a name?”
    No reply. Not even the slightest twitch or swirl or glint of a fishtail.
    And I’m just about to justify my choice, start being persuasive, when I remember how I felt when Si took the flask in his hands and declared it to be an eighteenth-century whiskey bottle, a pumpkinseed flask. How he tried to tack it down, see around all its corners, know what it was, only he didn’t know at all.
    And I think, maybe I’m just trying to do the same thing. I’m trying to know something that perhaps can’t be known. And what this flask and its inhabitant need more than anything else is just some space, some peace and quiet to be whatever—whoever—it is. Free from people like me trying to tape up its throat or slap a name on its ever-changing colors.
    Which is, I realize suddenly, not unlike the way I sometimes feel myself.
    That sometimes I’m small and sometimes I contain mountains.
    How do you put a name on that?

36
    Gran calls up the stairs to say she just has to pop to the store and will I be all right alone for a moment?
    I call back
yes
although, of course, I will not be alone.
    As soon as I hear the front door close, I take the flask downstairs and set it on the piano. Another thing I hate about the Tinkerbell piano, other than the fact that it has two nonworking notes, is that it stands in the hall. Yes, the hall. I think a piano should be in a room where you can go in and close the door, where you can be all lost in that piano for a while, with nobody coming and going and nobody interrupting and nobody hearing anything you play until you’re ready to play it to them.
    Si, who understands many things, does not understand this.
    Si says, “This space in the hall, it’s a perfect piano-sized space. What are you complaining about?”
    I’m complaining about them listening in. Them hearing me struggle to express whatever’s going on in my heart, here in the hall. Which is why I often play when people are out. Like now.
    I’ve been making up songs since I was about six.
    â€œThey just flow out of her,” says Mom.
    But actually they don’t. They come very quietly and from somewhere far away and deep, and often I don’t quite hear them right at first. I have to be very quiet and still and strain to listen. Sometimes there’s just a note or two, sometimes a chord, and the words, if there are words, they don’t come until the tune has almost finished itself. Because it’s only when the song is almost complete that I begin to know what it might be about.
    Today the song, which has been whispering to me for a couple of days now, comes in small and fragile. I want to say to it,
Be brave, I’m listening for you, I’ll find you
, but sometimes it doesn’t work like that. Sometimes a song has to find its own bravery.
    I don’t know how long I sit at the piano, listening, and letting my hands wander gently, carefully over the keys. Then I hear a phrase I recognize, and I can put my fingers and mymind straight on it. But it’s only when I play it out loud that I hear what it is. It’s a hair from the lion’s mane in Aunt Edie’s song “For Rob.” It’s the smallest, tiniest thread and probably nobody would recognize it but me—but there it is, right inside this new song. I listen even harder, expecting perhaps to hear other notes from “For Rob”—a spark of sky, a blade of grass—but I don’t. Instead there’s something else coming, something broader, richer, happier than anything in “For Rob,” and then I think perhaps it’s some blossom from the cherry trees in Aunt Edie’s “Spring Garden.” Only I can’t quite catch it, and the more I reach for it, the more it pulls away. I want to bring the two things together, the