--IT MAY LOOK LIKE I’M SURROUNDED, BUT I’M
SURROUNDED BY YOU
The Music
Box
Teal and Delaney wake inside a rusted-out
freezer, simultaneously stirred by a wind mote that’s tickled both their
noses.
Their bones feel like equal parts metal rails
and shattered glass. They are thin,
disheveled and not particularly clean, but they have shelter and are together.
Teal’s stomach gurgles air while the rubber
bands in Delaney’s gut stretch and stretch until they almost snap. Delaney is older by two minutes, and so she
sees herself as her sister’s protector.
She rummages inside a man’s too-big parka that
she’s wearing and pulls out the partial loaf of bread she’d fought a feral gang
of crows for yesterday. The bread has
broccoli buds of mold growing around the crusts, but Teal takes a full bite
without wincing and gives her sister a wink.
All across the dump yard, a tattered sheet of
fog hangs near to the ground. Teal
thinks the fog resembles cotton candy or an old person’s white hair. She thinks it’s beautiful and says so. Teal is always finding wonder in common
things.
On the north hill where cast-off appliances
slouch against it like headstones, two spotted fawns snout the ground. With their boney long legs, they are light
and as graceful as ghosts.
Teal grabs Delaney’s wrist and squeals with her
face, without making a sound. It feels
good not to have to invent happiness for once, and so the twins watch the
animals until they lope away, either bored or unnerved by the garbage and odor.
The twins no longer speak of their mother, who
many months ago, said she was venturing into town and would be right back. From their mother they learned how to sort,
appraise, polish and price other people’s castoff treasures, and on a good day
peddling, the girls might make as much as five or six dollars.
“Up and at ‘em,” Teal says in a jaunty voice,
stealing Delaney’s ritual command.
Delaney nods no. Her throat feels filled with quicksand and
thorns. Her eyes want to weep, her
fingers want to scratch and rip, but she’s too weak for it. Sometimes the mornings betray her in this
way.
Teal has full eyes, swirling with concern. She looks away and burrows, snuggling against
Delaney’s puffy coat sleeve, tapping the padding like a metronome.
Both of them doze. Maybe they dream. Perhaps they experience the best dreams of
their young lives.
When Delaney wakes, the fog is gone, replaced
by a searing sun that Teal’s shadow partially blocks.
“Look,” Teal says.
“What is it?”
Teal lifts the lid of a box she holds in her
hands, and as she does, wind chime notes swing through the air between
them. It is the most beautiful music
Delaney’s ever heard, uniquely theirs and eternal. After a few moments, something like fairy
dust glitters across two slices of sunlight, so sugary they can smell and then
taste it.
