To Live

My mother used to say that to dream is to live.

She was wrong.

Dreams are a luxury of safer times. Maybe some people can dream—people whose father was not a revolutionary, people who do not live in a refugee camp. My mother lived in a time of security and prosperity, and sometimes I think it’s better that she died still believing in dreams. As for me, I cannot afford to be distracted.

I leave my shelter in the Forest Park refugee camp before dawn this morning, the day after Christmas. I always leave before dawn to avoid seeing my neighbors, who drink and cat call, who hold gambling tournaments in their shelter. Two nights ago, on Christmas Eve, I woke to the sound of drunken shouting, followed by three gunshots and loud laughing. Oh, silent night. Oh, holy night, and all that.

The sky lies hidden behind curtains of low clouds that reflect the lights of St. Louis with a dingy grey luminescence. The cement shelters of the refugee camp are dimly visible as shapeless mounds slumped across the golf course. Cold air presses in around the worn collar of my coat, and I pull my newspaper-boy hat over the tips of my ears and adjust the straps of my backpack.

Out on the road, it is very quiet. The morning traffic will start soon because even in a city still recovering from war, business must go on, and buildings must be rebuilt, and lives must be lived, apparently. Slowly, muffled light crawls across the sky, and the morning comes to consciousness as my mother’s favorite poet Eliot once said. Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn…

My mother used to say, “Kate, you have the heart of a poet.”

“I’ve never written a word of poetry,” I protested once, “except what they force us to write in school.”

“I didn’t say you are a poet. I said you have the heart of a poet. Your father does too, though he won’t admit it.”

“Dad? A poet?” I said. He was a general, a soldier, and practical in every way.

“Haven’t you heard him read the Declaration of Independence?” she said. “The Constitution? The Mayflower Compact?”

Of course I had. He read the Mayflower compact out loud every Thanksgiving, when he wasn’t deployed, and he often read the Declaration, the Constitution, and sometimes Thomas Paine or de Tocqueville out loud to us in the evenings, the way some people read the Bible.

My mother said, “It’s the love of the truth and the courage to express it. That’s the heart of a poet.”

“Well,” I said. “I’m still not a poet.”

“We know what we are, but not what we may be,” my mother said and smiled slyly. I could tell she was quoting something, but I didn’t dare ask what for fear of getting a fifty-minute lecture. My mother was an English professor.

A line twenty-five deep has already formed outside the door by the time I reach Food Exchange #4. A few people are talking in low voices, but most remain silent, shoulders hunched in the chilled air. I glance up the line and recognize many of these people as regulars, and I know which of them to avoid. Near the front of the line, two strangers in ripped coats lean against the wall. They look ordinary enough, but you never know. They might have come to deal or sell. Sometimes the police and even agents from the Terrorist Elimination Corps go undercover at the Food Exchanges, hunting for resistance workers or digital dealers or illegal letter runners. Everyone knows that more than food is exchanged at a Food Exchange.

I keep my hat pulled low over my face. I always try to avoid notice. It has been a year now since I heard a rumor that the Terrorist Elimination Corps wants me dead because of the role my father played in the war. After I heard this, I hid for a week in the sewers under St. Louis. But I couldn’t hide forever, and when I emerged from the sewers, nothing happened. No one swooped down and arrested me. Sometimes I think, who would bother about me? I was never a revolutionary. Then other days, I feel suspicious of every face on the street.

The door of Food Exchange #4 opens, and the line surges forward. Inside, the room is dingy and utilitarian. Off-white walls stand bare, except for the wall nearest the door where a huge bulletin board hangs, mired in a swamp of posters and flyers and cards advertising products: “’45 Ford pickup for sale,” “Twin mattress, gently used,” “Keep out the cold with wool socks,” “Second-hand shoes and boots.”

At the back of the Exchange, a high wooden counter extends almost the width of the room, a relic from the days when this building was a bar. The Exchange owner, Mr. Cribbs, dominates the space behind the counter and shouts orders at his five children, who scramble along rows of shelves crammed with out-of-date bread, crackers, beans, rice, and every other food the grocery stores have vomited.

Just ahead of me in line, a mother and her small daughter bend their heads together discussing what food they will buy. The mother’s hand rests lightly on her daughter’s back, nudging her forward as the line moves, an ordinary gesture full of unconscious trust and familiarity. Behind me, two grizzled men discuss the probability of a snow storm today or tonight.

When I finally get to the counter, I finger a few wrinkled bills and quickly make my selections: a small block of processed cheese, only one day out of date; a sleeve of crackers, slightly stale; and a dented can of Vienna sausages. I also buy a roll of duct tape to fix my boots, which are separating at the toes. If it is going to snow, I want them water-tight. I stuff my purchases into my backpack and sit on the floor by the wall to fix my boots.

I have finished repairing the first boot and have started on the second when I feel someone looking at me. I glance up to see a young man about my own age standing beside the bulletin board. He has well-trimmed black hair, and his white collared shirt is spotless, though a little wrinkled. He seems vaguely familiar. When I look up at him, he turns away, but not before I see the look on his face—something between curiosity and pity.

Since the war, I have waded through crowds of refugees and criminals, rebels and opportunists, and I have seen my worth reflected in their faces. The best I can hope is that they find me unimportant, invisible. What could this man have meant by it, standing there in his clean shirt watching me wrap my boots in tape?

The young man pins a flyer to the bulletin board. This done, he starts talking to an older woman standing in line. I finish taping my boot and cross the room to the bulletin board. The flyer flaps in a short, cold breeze as someone opens the door. In hand-written black marker, the flyer announces: “String Duet in Concert, Forest Park Golf Course, Dec. 26, 2055 at 7:00 p.m. No admission fee.”

I unpin the sheet and stare at it. Who would hold a concert in the refugee camp? No one has bothered about us since last December when the Red Cross passed out tiny solar heaters and reminded us that the shelters were temporary emergency dwellings, not designed for winter. As if we lived there for fun. Those who could do so have lifted themselves back into society and normal life by now, and those like me who could not have remained. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; Departed, have left no addresses.

“You will come?” a voice says by my shoulder.

I jerk away from the voice reflexively. The dark-haired young man stands just inches away from me.

“Excuse me,” he says, stepping back. “I have startled you.” He has a soft, clear voice with some sort of accent, maybe eastern European, and his voice sounds familiar.

I assume an expression of indifference, almost boredom. I always avoid talking to anyone at the Exchange, except Mr. Cribbs. The goal is to blend in, to be unmemorable.

He says, “I am wondering: you will come to the concert? I think you will enjoy.”

“I doubt it,” I say.

I turn and pin the paper back on the board. I pretend to look at the other ads, but I can feel his eyes on me. When I glance over my shoulder, he is still watching me with an earnest gaze.

“Can I help you?” I demand and glare at him.

He looks a little startled, murmurs something that sounds like an apology, and walks away. I watch him until he exits the Exchange, a gust of cold wind blowing in behind him. I wish I knew where I have seen him before.

This is the last thing my brother ever said to me: “Don’t you give up.” I try to live by this law. Sometimes, though, I wonder if he knew what he was asking of me. It is one thing to go on living but quite another to never give up. Night after night as I sit in my shelter, I hear the lives of others going on—babies crying, muffled conversation, laughter, loud arguments, the metallic clang of a pot, someone whistling. Late into the night I lie awake wrapped in thin blankets with the cold hardness of cement digging into my hips, and I hear the stillness. I feel as if I am the only one awake in that vast repository of humanity.

Still, I am trying to live up to my brother’s expectations. I am trying not to give up.

After leaving the Exchange, I hurry on to my janitorial job at St. Francis Xavier College Church. This morning, the day after Christmas, the church’s white-gray stone reminds me of an ice sculpture. The steeple reaches toward the gray sky, and the clouds seem low enough, or the steeple high enough, to almost touch.

The nave is a cool, echoing place full of tall white pillars and archways, with light filtering down from the windows. In a room like this, I could almost dream. I start to polish the wooden pews. Father Andrews, the College Church priest, enters the nave and calls, “Morning, Rose.” His voice echoes like clear bells around the pillars and the statues of the saints. I have worn the false name of Rose Lewis for over a year now, and I am accustomed to it, though I still feel as if the name belongs to someone else who will one day demand it back. I hear my mother’s voice: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

“We missed you at Christmas mass,” Father Andrews says.

“You know I never go to church,” I say.

“Except to clean,” he says and chuckles. “To think I can’t even get my regular attenders to volunteer.”

“Maybe you should give them monetary reimbursement for their volunteer work,” I say wryly. My pay is strictly off-record since I don’t have a valid I.D. card. We pretend I’m a volunteer.

Father Andrews laughs. I always try to make him laugh because somehow the day seems less lonely when he laughs. After a moment, he sits down on a pew near me.

“Rose,” he says, “they say it’s going to snow tonight. The first real snow of the year. Last winter was pretty mild…”

“Don’t worry about me,” I say.

He looks at me doubtfully but says nothing. I look away from him because I am afraid of his sympathy. I want so much to tell him everything—who my father was, how my brother died, where I live—but I force myself into silence. I do trust him, more than anyone, but what would be the sense in telling him? What good could it possibly do? Every careless word is a risk. I swallow a lump down my throat and gaze up at the ceiling.

“Father Andrews,” I say, “why do people sing in church?”

“Why?” he says, looking a bit startled. Probably this is something religious kids learn from the cradle. It’s not the first odd question I’ve lobbed at him, though.

“To worship God,” he says.

“Really? Is that really why they do it?”

“Well—yes. That’s the point anyway.”

“Okay, but why do people sing at all?”

Father Andrews rubs his chin. “I suppose it’s what we were made to do. Why does a dog bark? Because he was made to. We were made to sing. And so we do.”

“‘Made to sing?’” I say. “I don’t know about that. Maybe it was just random happenstance. Maybe it was just as likely we would bark as sing.”

Father Andrews smiles. “Now you’re just trying to make me argue with you. I do enjoy our philosophical talks, Rose. I wish more people asked those kinds of questions.”

I brush my fingertips along the smooth wooden pew. I spent my childhood listening to my mother ask questions about everything: Why is the moon cratered? What is the highest form of love? Why do we say that day is “breaking” and night is “falling”? Why did that author use a comma instead of a semicolon? I never thought I would end up like her, asking questions, many of which have no obvious answer.

There’s an aching pressure behind my eyes again, and I’m afraid that I will blurt out my real name, Kate Emerson, and tell him everything else: how I knew about the coup before it happened, but like a child did not understand what it would mean; how my father paused in the doorway the last time I saw him, his face full of unrestrained confidence and hope and pride; how my mother also walked out that door during the war and never returned; how my brother died in a soldier’s uniform on our living room couch while I fled out the back door. I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.

I press down all of these thoughts to a place deep inside me.

“Have you heard that there’s a concert in Forest Park tonight?” I ask.

“No,” Father Andrews says. “A concert?”

“Yes, a string duet of all things.”

“In the refugee camp,” he says musingly. “An interesting choice.”

I think about my drunken neighbors attending a classical concert. They would probably just laugh and talk over the music.

“‘Interesting’ is one word for it, Father. I think they’re wasting their time in the camp.”

“Is it a waste of time to give people hope, Rose?”

“Is music hope, then?”

“Not always,” Father Andrews says, looking toward the grand piano at the front of the church. “But I do think music gets inside us and tells us things we couldn’t hear otherwise. The best music tells us to hope.” He has the faraway look in his eyes my mother used to get when she talked about language.

“Father,” I say, “you have the heart of a poet.”

My mother used to say that to hope is to live. She was right, though she never had occasion to test this maxim. For her it was hypothetical, some theme she gleaned from literature, I suppose. I, on the other hand, have lived out this theory every day for a year and a half. If I did not hope, what would there be left to do? I might as well sit in my shelter all day and stare at the cement wall, or lie down in an alley one night and freeze. I’ve heard freezing isn’t the worst way to go.

To hope is to live, so I go on doing both.

One day last winter, I walked into a little bookshop to get out of the cold. It was quiet in there, and the musty smell of old pages put an ache of longing in me so strong my eyes watered. Ever since I was old enough to walk, I had followed my mother into ancient libraries and run-down bookstores overseen but shuffling old men whose fingers caressed the spines of books. I remembered her voice, inquiring after obscure texts with intricate, long titles, ones she could not find in a database.

“May I help you?” a woman had said.

I blinked away tears and turned toward the store’s proprietress, a woman with kind eyes and long white hair. She had a faintly Southern accent.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

I hadn’t been looking for anything except warmth, but I felt that I had to say something.

“T.S. Eliot,” I said. “Anything by him.”

She took me to a small poetry section and showed me a thin volume of Eliot. She took a careful look at me and probably concluded I didn’t have the money to buy books.

“Now,” she said, “there’s no hurry. You sit down and read all you want.”

She gestured toward a grouping of faded armchairs in a back corner of the store. I chose a well-stuffed yellow one and sank into it.

I understood almost nothing of what I read that first day and wondered why my mother had willingly chosen to become an Eliot scholar. Nevertheless, I came back the next day and the next until it was a habit. I read every Eliot poem and even some dry scholarly works. The proprietress, Mrs. Hansen, welcomed me back each time and started calling me Eliot. I suspect she scrounged up some of those books from other literary friends just so I could read them.

And as I read and reread, I heard something, like a voice whispering; and it seemed to me that if I only kept reading, I would find someone who understood, who had witnessed this strange, chaotic world and could tell me why the bombs had dropped in one place and not another, why I lived while my brother died. Burning burning burning burning O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest burning

When I leave the church around noon, it’s raining, a cold persistent drizzle. If this keeps up, it may stop the strings concert. I’m surprised to find this prospect a little disappointing. I didn’t know I cared. I pull my hat low to keep the rain out of my face and hurry toward Mrs. Hansen’s bookstore. It’s a two-mile trek, and I’m sure I will be soaked by the time I arrive.

A mile into the walk, I congratulate myself that the duct tape on my boots is holding: my toes are still dry. The wet ends of my hair soak my coat and drip water down my neck. I lift my eyes from the sidewalk and survey a misting world of sky and asphalt with cars whirring on the damp road. At an intersection up ahead, a man crosses from the other side of the street and continues down the sidewalk ahead of me, hands buried in the pockets of his coat, head bowed in the rain. He seems familiar. I quicken my steps to close some of the distance, and it dawns on me: he’s the young man from the Exchange who invited me to the strings concert.

I slow down a little and let the gap between us increase. He had seemed harmless enough at the Exchange, but he had also stared at me and talked to me, two things most people don’t do. On top of that, I still have the nagging feeling that I have seen him somewhere before today.

The man continues walking ahead of me, head bowed in the misty rain. He doesn’t seem aware of me, walking half a block behind. We take all of the same turns until we are finally on Mrs. Hansen’s street. Ahead, he stops under the wide awning of Mrs. Hansen’s bookstore. He opens the door and enters.

I hesitate. Maybe I should turn around or keep walking past the bookstore. I don’t want to be recognized. I don’t want to be memorable. I don’t want anyone to see the patterns of my life. On the other hand, I want to know who he is.

The cold rain finally convinces me to go inside. Maybe I can slip down one of the aisles before anyone notices. I hurry to the door and step inside.

The man is talking to Mrs. Hansen at the checkout counter, his back to the door. I am about disappear down the fiction aisle when Mrs. Hansen calls out a cheery, “Hello, Eliot!” and the young man turns. His black hair is plastered to his head by the rain, and this somehow makes him look younger than he had looked in the Exchange. At the same time, his face is serious, grave even, like the face of a much older man. I can’t decide on his age; it could be anything from fifteen to twenty-five. Suddenly, his eyebrows rise and his eyes light in recognition.

“Oh!” he says. “Of course, yes! You come here often?”

I can’t exactly deny it with Mrs. Hansen standing right there, so I nod.

He turns to Mrs. Hansen and gestures toward me. He says, “We spoke this morning, and I recognize…I knew I saw her somewhere.” He turns to me. “I knew I had seen you somewhere.”

He’s right. I realize now that I have heard his voice in this bookstore, as background noise to something I was reading. I have seen his face over the top of a book, maybe Common Sense? I seem to associate his face with Thomas Paine.

Mrs. Hansen beams. “Two of my favorite regulars,” she says. “Eliot, meet Alex. Alex, Eliot.” 

I feel thankful I never told Mrs. Hansen my real name, Kate, or even my pseudonym, Rose. All I want is for each part of my life to stay separate from the others, unrecognizable as the same person’s life. I want there to be four versions of me: the girl in the refugee camp; the girl in the Exchange; Rose in College Church; Eliot in Mrs. Hansen’s bookstore. Kate Emerson nowhere.

Mrs. Hansen says, “Alex has just been telling me about a concert in Forest Park tonight.” She looks toward the window. “I hate to say this, but it doesn’t look like the best weather for an outdoor concert.”

Alex shrugs. “It goes forward. We hang a tarp.”

“So you’re performing in this concert?” I ask.

Alex nods. “I play the violin.”

Mrs. Hansen excuses herself and disappears into the back. Alex looks at me seriously. He says, “I must apologize for this morning. I did not mean to stare. I only thought I recognized you.”

I nod. There’s something sincere about him. “I guess I kind of snapped at you,” I say. “You just startled me.”

“The rain has stopped,” Alex says.

Through the window, I can see the awning dripping, but the mist has lifted. Everything lingers in a cold, steely half-light, though it’s still early afternoon. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

“I do hope you will come to the concert,” Alex says.

I glance at him—he and his wet coat, wet hair, and wet black dress shoes, so thoroughly unprepared to tramp through this afternoon.

“Maybe I will,” I say.

Before he went away to wage a war, my father gave me a speech about the changing of the world and the honor of risk. I don’t remember much of it. But then his face took on a fierce intensity, and he gripped my shoulders with both his hands.

“You’ve got to be brave, Katie,” he said. “No matter what happens, you’ve got to be brave. Promise me.”

I nodded, but he only tightened his hold on my shoulders. “Say it out loud, Katie. Promise me you’ll be brave.”

“I promise,” I said, unnerved by his sudden vehemence.

He let go and sighed. “I know you will, Katie. I know you will.”

I know that I have not lived up to his expectations, or my mother’s, or my brother’s. I have not been as brave as my father expected, or as hopeful as my mother could wish. My brother was perhaps the most realistic when he ordered me to never give up. That, at least, I can make myself do. Yet even there, I do not always succeed. Some days my body goes on, but my mind surrenders to the endless task of living. Apathy, I believe, is a form of surrender. 

Today is one of those days when I am trying hard to be hopeful. I got a good deal at the Food Exchange. I made Father Andrews laugh. I met a violinist. Mrs. Hansen let me dry my coat by her heater in the back room. To hope is to live, really live.

I spend the afternoon in the bookstore rereading Common Sense—Thomas Paine in all his blessed assurance that the moment was right for revolution.

But I need not go far, the inquiry ceases at once, for the TIME HATH FOUND US.

And now, the time has found us doing what? Hiding from strangers and trudging through rain, selling books and planning concerts? The time found my father, and he died living.

’Tis not in numbers but in unity that our great strength lies: yet our present numbers are sufficient to repel the force of all the world.

I know you believed that, Dad. I know you believed it.

I sigh and put the book back on the shelf when I finally see the evening darkening outside. Mrs. Hansen brings my coat, now dry.

“How’s my Eliot scholar?” she asks.

“Thomas Paine today,” I say.

“Well,” she says, “it’s a good thing you didn’t ask for him that first day, or I’d be calling you ‘Paine’ to this day.”

I smile and add this to my list of reasons to hope for the day: Mrs. Hansen joked with me.

Outside, cold air seeps through my coat. As I walk, I can feel the temperature dropping. The air is quiet. By the time I reach Forest Park, it is full dark, made darker still by the low clouds.

I pick my way through the trees that line the park, and the shelters come dimly into view. The camp murmurs with life around me. Dark figures move among the shelters, some carrying flashlights or candles. Smoke rises from one or two cooking fires, and my stomach rumbles. Inside my shelter, I light a candle and eat Vienna sausages with crackers. I already ate the cheese and some of the crackers earlier in the day. When I finish, all that is left is a third of a sleeve of crackers, which I save for breakfast. Back to the Food Exchange I will go tomorrow on this continuous quest to live. For I have known them all already, known them all—Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons…I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music of a farther room.

I sit cross-legged on my blanket and stare into the candlelight, relieved to be here behind my padlocked door away from the eyes of everyone. At the same time, I wish there was something a little more satisfying than solitude. Around me lie my few possessions: a backpack, two blankets, a tiny solar heater, three candles, a box of matches, a spare pair of jeans, two pairs of underwear, a volume of Eliot’s poetry (which I saved for and bought from Mrs. Hansen), a sewer map, a knitted blue cap, a flashlight, a roll of duct tape, and a third of a sleeve of crackers. Compared to what I had right after the war, it is a fortune. I pick up the worn copy of Eliot and read, holding the book close to the candle.

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. I lower the book impatiently. I don’t want to think about death right now. Then out of the night, I hear a high note from a violin. It sails through the air, hurtles through the wall of my shelter, and lands in my ears: the concert. My heart leaps, and I hurry out of my shelter. Across the dark hilly bumps of the golf course, I can see flashlights and candles and solar lanterns bobbing, people walking in one direction.

Hurriedly, I blow out the candle, grab the flashlight, and padlock the door. The instruments are warming up in earnest now, one high voice and one lower voice, hopping through scales and dancing through runs. I follow the music past three rows of shelters to an open space in the northwest corner of the golf course. A bonfire burns, and in its glow I can see maybe three dozen people gathering on one side. On the other side, Alex stands with his violin tucked under his chin, bowing rapidly. Beside him, a cellist sits on an overturned bucket. He wears a suit and a grey fedora. His fingers tremble with vibrato on the strings.

Around me, the crowd buzzes with curiosity, anticipation. I wonder about this crowd, who these neighbors are that I so studiously avoid. Are they criminals taking advantage of the camp’s lawlessness? Are they resistance workers plotting the overthrow of the government? Or are they like me, driftwood washed up on an unfamiliar shore?

The musicians finish tuning and pause. The crowd hushes, and the silence that follows is like the moments between lightning and thunder. Suddenly, a tune bursts into the air, quick and bright as stars. It makes me feel as if I could run for miles or climb a mountain.

When the song ends, the only sound is the fire cracking and popping. Then someone remembers to clap, and we all disrupt the silence with our applause.

The next tune is quick and rollicking. It reminds me of Irish dance music. The mood of the crowd shifts. Around me, people start to move with the rhythm, and then suddenly people are dancing in pairs and in circles. I back out of the crowd and watch from the edges, a sense of lonely happiness in my gut. It is beautiful, all these dancers in the firelight.

When the song ends, Alex lowers his violin and whispers something to the cellist. Then Alex starts another tune alone. It’s slower, more of a waltz. It’s clear most of the people here don’t know how to waltz, but they try it anyway, tangling feet, laughing, bumping into one another, laughing again.

I remember those summer evenings when my brother taught me to dance. We would go to a dusty theater downtown where an old man and his wife taught half a dozen of us to waltz and tango and swing. My brother said he needed practice for when he met the right girl. Now I think he really did it for my benefit because he understood what my father did not: that courage must be built upon something, and why not build it step by step over a creaking wooden stage?

“Will you dance?”

Startled, I whirl around. The cellist is standing beside me holding out his hand. I glance across the fire where Alex plays the violin alone and the cello leans against the overturned bucket.

“Alex saw you standing alone,” the cellist says. “Can you waltz?”

I nod and put my hand in his, and we step into the circle of orange light. How long has it been since I touched another person? The smoothness of his palm feels strange against my fingertips; his hand on my waist is only a gentle pressure through my coat, but I have to swallow down panic over this sudden closeness.

The cellist is an excellent dancer, as good as my brother or better. I can feel his next move in the pressure of his calloused fingertips as he navigates the tangle of dancers. Up close, I can see that the cellist’s gray suit is a bit worn, but neat and pressed. Beneath his fedora, straw-colored hair drifts over his ears and forehead. I guess that he is a few years older than me.

A shout volleys across the dark. The violin stops, and the dancers stop. Light bobs in the tree line that borders the park to the north and west. I can make out half a dozen police watching from the shadows of the trees. My heart thuds. I want to run back to my shelter, but it would be worse to leave the group now. They would notice me.

The cellist is still holding my hand, and I feel his grip tighten. I follow his gaze to Alex, standing alone across the fire. Alex lifts his bow in a smooth arc and sets it against the strings. He begins the waltz again.

“Keep dancing,” the cellist says in a tense whisper. He launches us somewhat jerkily back into a box step. The cellist looks over my head, scanning the tree line.

“What are they going to do anyway?” he whispers fiercely. “Arrest us for dancing?”

The police stay where they are at the edge of the trees, and I close my eyes to block them out. I think of those dance lessons on the old wooden stage, music whining from a crackling speaker.

“Look up,” my brother said, “not at your toes. Birds don’t stare at their wings when they fly.”

I laughed. “Dancing isn’t quite exactly flying.”

“Isn’t it, though?” he said.

Perhaps my brother had the heart of a poet too.

The song ends, and the cellist hands me off to a circle of dancers: a little boy, an old woman, and a young woman. He returns to his cello, and we begin again with a lively tune. Under the shadow of the clouds and under the eyes of the police we dance, song after song, changing partners. Alex and the cellist place the music under our feet, and we follow it.

The first large flakes of snow fall from the quiet sky. They melt in the fire and in my hair. They glisten on the eyelashes of the girl dancing beside me. Someone finds an umbrella and holds it over the musicians.

The snow thickens, settling on our shoulders. I should be worried about the cold and the wet and the silent shelter waiting for me in the dark, but how can I be? How can I be right now?

In my dreams tonight maybe I will hear music, and maybe I will feel the creak of a dusty stage beneath my feet. And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells, and I go on, and on, and I do not give up.

 First published fall 2023 in the print edition of Relief: A Journal of Faith and Art, p. 92-102