Stormsinger's Birth
an excerpt

She threw what was left of the flower at the tomb, and she brought her fists up to her mouth and tried not to start crying again. It seemed like she hadn't really stopped, not ever, since the other night. "I'm wasting my breath. I'm just talking for my own benefit here. Look, Elliot, that's all I wanted to say really. That I'm sorry, and that I'm gonna remember you, and that's gonna keep me from hurting anyone else ever, ever again. I swear."

For a few moments she sat there in the echo of her own angry voice, resisting a sudden impulse to sing up her power and throw a supernatural tantrum. Then she said, "What the fuck." And she did begin to sing, soft and low and, if you knew what to listen to, tense with the temporary necessary self-restraint. Four bars later she simply wasn't there, but if you'd looked up in the sky you'd have seen what looked like a shooting star or maybe like a flash of heat lightning flaring through the underbelly of a gray-red cloud that hadn't been there five minutes before.

An old woman--not so old really, old enough to have been Shoya's grandmother but only just, and only if her son had married young, or she had--came around the tomb then and did stare up into the sky. She watched the pulse of electricity in the spring cloud cover, watched the pulses take themselves farther and farther away, south across the river and out, perhaps, over the gulf. She hummed to herself, the same four bars she'd heard the girl sing. Then she gave the four repetitive bars an ending. They'd been in a minor key, but she modulated into the relative major and let the tune end on a hopeful note.

"There," she said to herself, "and were this a fairy tale I'd end up spitting jewels and rose petals for that. Good damn thing this is real life." She sat down on the steps of the Dubois family tomb and eyeballed the newest name plate. "I think my son might have envied you, my dear," she said. "There's worse than dying by them. There's outliving them, for a start. Ah, well."

And after a few minutes she, too, was gone, but in the usual way. If you sat quietly on the steps of the tomb, you would have heard her moving slowly down the lane, uneven steps taking her back to the car her friends had kept running for her. Humming that tune the whole way home, from sad minor key beginning to improvised hopeful end. And you might have thought about fairy tales, and happy endings, and the way that real life happy endings--such as they are--are always improvised and composed more of hope than of contentment. But no one else was there, and she kept the thought to herself.