Free Dagmars Daughter by Kim Echlin Page B

sleep, the young girl spun around to face her mother, one hand gripping the neck of her fiddle, the other in a fist with her bow on her hip and said, I like to be awake! The girl set her own ear, and fuss over her as Dagmar did, Nyssa always slipped away. All that she asked was that her will not be usurped.

    T he moon is no door. The future enters long before its orb is run. Nyssa wandered up to the woods, up to the gaze toward Moll.
    There in a hole lined with blackberry earth squatted the bald-headed woman. She held balanced on one bony hand her bronze pot. With the other hand she ran a smoothed stick around the edge. The pot sent up a low echoing moan, mro ohoh. Moll stopped her hand’s circling and the sound died out and she looked up. Her eyes lacked all expression and Nyssa could not tell if she would speak or not.
    Moll asked, Are you compelled?
    Nyssa said, No. I’m just here.
    Missed the path?
    Nyssa looked at the pot gravely and said, Can I try that?
    Moll spat a dark spit. She handed up the pot and Nyssa held the pot out on the open palm of one hand. She picked up the stick and rubbed it hard on the side and nothing happened.
    Slower, lighter, said Moll.
    Again Nyssa made a circling motion with her hand around the outside of the pot and again she heard nothing. She looked up at Moll, her eyebrows raised.
    Moll rolled a cigarette and reached into her dress for a wooden match. She scraped it against a rock and the flame appeared and she lit the cigarette and blew smoke through a black hole in her right upper incisor. Nyssa bowed her head and torso over the bowl and tried again. She felt the metal vibrate against her palm and through her wrist. She felt the sound and then heard it, hers a higher-pitched hum than Moll’s low moan. She moved the stick on the rim of the pot around and around, playing with the sound, feeling the vibrations move up through her hand and arm and into her body. Slowly her ear was opening to the relationships shared between pitches. She began to move through her own darkness as if not tied with joint or limb or held in the air on the brittle strength of bones.
    As she played Moll began to speak. Moll said that Nyssa’s grandmother talked to her sometimes through the weeds and knew darkness but that most people turned from her. Moll said that she heard Nyssa play at the pole house and that she played well but there were sounds in her fiddle that she did not yet know about. She said that they are in the earth and she did not know if Nyssa was capable of hearing them but perhaps. She said some people are just born to it. Nyssa said, Born to what? Moll kept on. She said that some people are compelled toward questions and a kind of living that have no answers and some can tolerate this and some cannot. She said to Nyssa that if she thought she had come to Moll to play the pot that this was only an excuse but it was as good an excuse as any. She said that no one can say why one person finds darkness in her own soul and another does not. No one can say why. But if a person is compelled, then not to look means that the soul goes stale and stunted and she will languish and consume everything around her and will not know that it is her own spirit within that is being devoured. She said there were many things that stopped people from looking at her but that the greatest was fear. She said that when they saw, they lost their former selves forever. She said it was not safe to look at her or to be in her presence. She said there were others like her and she did not know their origins or where they might be and she had not met any of them but that they must exist. She said this was a world that kept turning from its own darkness and did not embrace it or sing to it or talk to it but tried over and over to forget it. She said Nyssa’s grandmother Norea sang to her and she liked that. She said many things that the girl could not fully understand, but when she finally stopped, Nyssa laid down the stick and