Free The Singing Bone by Beth Hahn

see your home doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

9
OCTOBER 1999
    Alice is in yoga class trying to get the pain to leave her back. When she exhales and extends her trunk, she visualizes her spinal cord encased in a rosy glow, the vertebrae spaced evenly, the muscles soft and long. Allegra taught her that. Your body is made of light.
    Alice prefers swimming—especially at six a.m. or eleven p.m. when there are only a few people with whom to share a lane. She likes the rhythm of her breathing, the small muted space she occupies underwater behind her steamed goggles. She likes the treadmill, too. She wears headphones. She doesn’t go to yoga often, but when she does, she tries to pick a teacher who doesn’t talk too much. A teacher who slips lightly around the room talking about her personal beliefs inspires a kind of hatred in Alice that she rarely experiences. If you face this direction. If you breathe like this. Repeat after me . Why? Alice wonders. What will happen? You’ll never die. Your children will be healthy. The inequity of the world will not trouble you, and when you realize that the worst of your experiences cannot be traded in for a predictable aphorism, you will not go mad.
    She’s in the back of the room—close to the door in case she has to escape. Relax, relax , she thinks. Breathe . She slows herself, moving with precision, inhale, exhale. She likes this teacher, who doesn’t bother them with philosophy.
    Hans Loomis keeps calling. Alice lets the machine pick up. His voice is soft—softer than it is in the films. He knows how to ask people to do things.
    Alice rocks back and forth in happy baby, her legs and arms extended above her. She keeps her spine pressed to the floor. She lets her face go. Inhale, exhale. No matter her other flaws, she thinks, Allegra was a good yoga teacher. Sometimes. She remembers the summer mornings when she first lived in Mr. Wyck’s house, how Allegra would take them outside to the yard and show them sun salutations. Inhale, lift the arms, exhale, fold. Unlike this teacher, though, Allegra was always blowing the universe up in Alice’s face. She taught them Mr. Wyck’s philosophy and on the days that he did yoga with them, too, Allegra seemed less sure of herself. “You are a star in the universe,” she told them, and then looked to Mr. Wyck for reassurance.
    They bring their folded knees to one side and then the other. Alice knows savasana is coming. She hates savasana. Once she loved it, but now, the thought of lying still on her back for five minutes without any intention of napping makes her uncomfortable. She likes to get up before the others, roll up her mat, and have a shower before the locker room gets too crowded, but today she likes the way her back feels on the floor. It’s better, so she stays, and she’s tired, too. Lately, her sleep is interrupted by strange dreams, by insomnia, by rising at four a.m. to read about Hans Loomis’s documentary online. SweetPea has become a lurker on the ­Wyckian Society site. DougRamsey is her mortal enemy. She’s glad for the mid-­semester break.
    She knows now that what Allegra taught as Mr. Wyck’s wisdom wasn’t really Mr. Wyck’s at all. It was a cobbled-together potpourri of crackpot and quasi-mystical schools of thought—the kinds of ideas that garnered attention back then . We are ethereal beings. Time has a plasticity. It is nonlinear. If something happened in the past, it doesn’t mean it is over; somewhere, it is still happening. And Mr. Wyck. Mr. Wyck was in contact with higher beings—God or angels or the devil. All of them. Satan was still an angel, wasn’t he? Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law. Man is made of two sides of the same coin. Here, let me see your palm. You don’t know that you’re special. You don’t know how loved you are. I love you.
    Alice covers herself with a cotton blanket