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the room.
    I resolved to practice violin for an hour after dinner. I promised myself an hour of whatever I wanted to play instead of what had been prescribed for me to practice. Getting lost in music meant I wouldn’t have to think about my father, the burning man, my strange dream, or Haden Black.
    As a child, I took to music quickly and with what seemed to everyone else very little effort. I could never explain to them that the hard part of playing the violin was not the notes or the finger placement, or even the calluses. It was the pieces of me I had to sacrifice when I pulled the songs out. When I played for myself, I belonged to the song, and the song became the real Theia. Without a tutor or an audience, my own world opened up. A world richer than the one where I lived. A place where I didn’t feel bound to expectations or fault. When I played for others, the opposite was true. The songs I played for them weren’t to unlock my world; instead, I disappeared in a way, and was able to open up theirs.
    It was a heady thing, to be told as a child that I touched people so deeply. Strangers. I’d been told I was gifted, but so often it seemed that what I was given was a gift for others.
    And so I used to long for the time alone with my violin, to escape and release the girl I wanted to be from her captivity inside the girl I really was. Used to. Lately, I no longer felt compelled to make my own music, but the last two days had wearied me. I needed a holiday from me.
    As the sun sank into the horizon, I played from memory the melancholy tune that had lured me into the labyrinth the night before. I’d chosen the sunroom off the kitchen, with the wicker furniture and ferns, because it had the best view of the setting sun; I’d chosen the song without realizing I’d done so until I’d been playing for ten minutes.
    By then, I also realized I was crying. Real tears rolled down my cheeks, plopping onto my violin, but I didn’t stop playing. The song took root inside of me, like an invasion. Each note I played felt like I was searching for something; if I could whittle to the core of the song I would have it. Yet the more I played, the more mysterious and elusive whatever I was searching for became.
    As I played, I became one with the song and unburdened of my life. The further I reached for the tune, the more the world fell away. Suddenly, I walked through the hedges and smelled the night air. A waking dream. Part of me knew I was still in the house, but part of me had been set free.
    I stepped on a twig and it snapped beneath my foot. The noise startled the birds that had been hiding in the hedge and hundreds of black-and-white doves ascended from their perches at once. The sound of the multitudes taking flight thundered deep in my ears, and the mass of the birds covered the moonlight. Leaving me in the dark.
    I covered my head and crouched low, trying to shield myself from the swarm. The lack of light disoriented me and chilled the evening by several degrees. That the moonlight was warm in my dream struck me as odd. My heartbeat accelerated and so did the song. It got faster and faster until the sound made me dizzy.
    “Theia, stop at once!”
    I was back in the sunroom, sweat pouring off my body. My father stood in the door, bellowing at me to stop playing.
    I couldn’t pull myself out of it, even though he bade me stop. My whole body jerked, and what I played sounded more like noise than music, but I couldn’t stop. Faster, faster. I must have looked like I was having a seizure. My violin started to smoke—that was when Father crossed the room and forced my arm still.
    “Theia, what the hell are you doing?” He wrenched the instrument from my hand and I slumped into the chair.
    I couldn’t answer him. I couldn’t even be sure I was really in the room with him. I’d been possessed by something. Something unforgiving in its quest to take over my life.
    My father stared at me for a few seconds. I wonder what he