Free Invisible Ellen by Shari Shattuck Page A

think, Ellen. Did I bore you?”
    â€œWhat do I think?” Ellen repeated breathlessly. She was baffled, searching for the words that might begin to express the fireworks that had exploded inside and left her tingling: that if she didn’t hear this music again, she would wither and die. What she said was, “I think that I was the opposite of bored.” The words were sadly inadequate; they were puny and wrong. She hung her head.
    But both Justice and Temerity were smiling broadly. Justice said, “I believe, sis, that we have witnessed the birth of an aficionado.”
    Though she wasn’t sure what that was, Ellen could tell from his tone that it must be a good thing. “I’ve never heard anything like that,” Ellen breathed. “I mean, I’ve heard music on my portable radio and on TV, which is nice, but it’s so much . . . smaller that way. That was . . . alive. It’s a story, isn’t it?”
    Temerity agreed enthusiastically. “A journey, yes, the composers write them to take the audience through an experience, to make them feel something. The good ones anyway. Most people don’t get that.”
    Oversaturated with feelings and overloaded with stimuli, Ellen desperately needed to get away, to think and absorb—or repel—what had happened. She said her awkward good-byes and made a hasty exit.
    Out on the street, she breathed deeply, closed her eyes and swayed to the strains of remembered melody.
    â€œI got it,” she whispered, tingling and excited.
Most people don’t,
Temerity had said. Suddenly everything was a little brighter and more frenetic, the buzzing light at the end of the alley had a living voice, the murmur of traffic was its own conversation. They were no longer indistinct noises, absent of meaning.
    Though she didn’t yet understand it, somewhere in the inner distance, submerged far away in her murky, sleeping consciousness, a bell was ringing, calling her to wake up.

A rriving less than her usual hour early meant that the women’s locker room was not empty when Ellen got to work, though, of course, none of the three women already there took any notice of her as she slid in and sat in the familiar, darkest corner. A more than usually despondent Irena was slumped on the end of a bench, staring down at her hands in her lap. Two of the other cleaners whom Ellen had nicknamed “the Crows” were hovering over her. Ellen had assigned the name of the large black birds to these two because of their habit of poking their beaks into other people’s business, and their arrogant disinclination to be shooed away from any scene of emotional carnage.
    Though she’d never spoken to either of them, Ellen had learned many things from listening to their conversations. They both wore the sated expressions of women who had just partaken of their daily bread, several loaves of it.
    Watching them, Ellen wondered what scraps they had pecked from Irena’s bony hide that had left her so depleted. The Crows were both in their fifties. Kiki, an inappropriately youthful moniker in Ellen’s opinion, was tall and pale with steel-gray hair and deep jowlylines that dragged her face down around her mouth. Her crony, Rosa, was short and stocky.
    As Ellen watched, Kiki patted Irena on the shoulder smugly and said, “Now, don’t you feel better? You can always talk to us, you know that.” But the Russian woman, beyond caring, did not acknowledge the insincere sentiment. Exchanging a knowing glance with Rosa, Kiki cocked her head and the Crows moved away, around the far side of the lockers where Ellen could hear them whispering. Ellen slid along the bench until she could see down the other side of the square block of lockers and was within earshot.
    â€œ. . . poor thing,” Rosa intoned in the way that people do when they are disguising their invasive behavior as concern. “What bad luck. She