Mozart is in her Brain

by Rebecca Loudon

Mozart is in her brain, attached like a twin. She hears music in vegetable bins, sheets, silverware drawers, piston engines. In sleep, every note gleams like a zygote. At 3 a.m. she practices violin—animal tears drop from the point of each finger, older than her mother, lazy with grief, drunk on cheap wine. Those subtle muscle movements swing a stone in a circle over a pregnant woman's belly and her thumbs break into a fine dust; crumbled silt that drifts, eddies, turns. She's not a martyr, considers small animal sacrifice, potions, a nod to the black arts. She wants to believe like a dog licks a branded paw, there is a place in the brain where sound becomes light but it's always her skin she finds clumped and etched like blood in her patent leather pumps. She has forgotten the blunt twitch of eyes around any group of people. Her father tells her you never wanted to fit in. Pry open the lid, the stuck hinge. Sometimes we just need a little quiet to slice the halves of brain that keeps us up, that hum and shiver of hurricane air, wings mended and nestled, grown and busking like pens in her hair.