Spoiler! :
It was night. The colours were dancing and screaming and swirling, threatening me as they flew over my head, flame and moonlight illuminating the faces of my father and my brothers until they were something morphed, something odd. They looked like skeletons in the streetlight – I looked like a skeleton, too. I was a skeleton in a torn dress, holding my father’s hand as tightly as I could while my feet tapped out a strange pattern on the pavement. A skeleton’s dance from a skeleton girl.
My father’s dance was heavier, weighing on the heels and toes. His metal feet were loud against the stony road. He sounded more like a horse than a skeleton man, but I knew he was my father: His frightening dance was there to protect me, and I sunk into his side, trying to hide from all the colours and sights that assaulted me. My brothers were lively, their dances stuttering as my father pulled them back with words. They skipped ahead still, their feet sounding out music, and it was music that distracted me from the world that lived around me and told me I was nothing but a dust mote. The night’s screams had blown me away already, and now I was just a shell of myself, clinging to that which shielded me.
I hesitated, the music breaking when a real scream cut the air, and my father was dragging me to the door of one of the war-song buildings, my brothers falling back to his side. We knew that horrible things happened in the city, and we always got to where we were going twice as fast if we heard anything.
We were summer skeletons, our feet clacking on stone, thin as bones compared to the man standing at the door. He was a fleshy mass that looked at me like the grandfather clock back home did, accusingly: Tick tock, tick tock, the grandfather said. Why so quiet, Ana? This man, though, seemed to be accusing me of loudness.
He looked back at my father and sneered. “The cut-off age is four.” His nose wobbled as he spoke, a strange piece of poetry in action, and on the word four his eyes crinkled up into a mockery of a smile. He delighted in telling my father that I was too old.
“She’s only three,” my father lied. “Her birthday was in April.” I knew better: I was five, small for my age. My twin brother was twice my size. I didn’t say a word, though, knowing that speaking up would get my father in trouble. Trouble was the last thing our family needed.
The man took a step back and looked at me, his stomach jiggling like bread pudding. His eyes narrowed again, this time suspiciously: Was my father telling the truth? “No,” he said after a minute of contemplation, “she has to be at least four. Girl, how old are you?”
“Three,” I said obediently, looking back up at him with my most pitiful expression – the one that helped me get second servings at dinner, or extra candy from the store. My father squeezed my hand.
“You see,” he said to the doorman. “How often do children lie about their ages?” The man returned to his position and shook his head. I could almost swear he growled at us when he let us in, but my father only smiled, as any good politician must. He was a puffed-up bird who loved to preen his feathers, but his music was different from everyone else’s, wonderful and strange.
The rest of the night was something of a blur; it sped up and slowed down as it wished. As we cut through the crowd, as we found our seats, nothing stayed for long in my mind. I could remember what the beginning of the play was like, with a beautiful woman in an even more beautiful dress, glowing like a peacock – I could remember the true music, the songs, the instruments that echoed while the huge crowd was silent, all listening – I could remember the boy, around my older brother’s age, who pelted me with scraps of paper and asked me what I was doing there.
“Watching,” I told him, and looked back at the stage.
“Well, you’re a girl. I had to ask.” He didn’t bother me after that, except to trip me in the doorway while everyone was exiting. I remembered his grin after that, when my father stood over him and told him to help me up, but he just darted away. My older brother Henry said that he was just one of the boys in school, and I shouldn’t worry, because the boys did that kind of thing all the time.
I didn’t quite mind when I found that there was another rip in my dress, at the hem, but I knew Mother would be furious. She would look at me like the grandfather clock and the doorman and say that she knew something was going to happen, and I shouldn’t go outside any more. No matter what Father said, I wouldn’t be allowed out for a week.
Then, the grandfather would look at me again, while I helped my mother sew up my dress, and it would say, Ana, why are you so quiet? Ana, why don’t you sing?
The only answer to that was ever, “I’m not allowed to sing,” and I could remember thinking that, replying to the grandfather’s question in my head, but it was late, and I was young. I fell asleep walking, halfway home, and my father carried me the rest of the way.
When I awoke, the night was a memory and the music was an echo; the skeletons had turned into ghosts, people in the day. A few winding stretches of song raced through my head, but it was sunrise, and breakfast was at sunrise. I couldn’t worry about the night before at sunrise; there was work that needed to be done, no matter what.
Still, I tried to remember, but the most that came back was that boy’s mocking smile. I didn’t think he was joking.
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