Sister Sonata

But I stared, deeply, into her eyes as she swam up to the edge of the tank and peered through the sun glare. She looked at me, at Father's coffin, at the mound of dirt, at the people. She knew some of them. She had been in their houses, had played with their children. She looked at me, and it sounds funny, but I swear I could hear music piping from her tank. Not flutes or horns, or mad violins, but the deep, slow voice of a Blues musician. One of Chirpy's favorites, no doubt. Lightin' Hopkins. "One kind favor I'll ask to you, see that my grave is kept clean." No one else seemed to hear the words, but I could see her skin change color as she sang, and the ripples on the water as each note percolated from her spine, like fart bubbles in a tub. I sort of snickered, as if we were sharing a joke. She seemed to laugh too, and Lightin' bubbled up and up in honor of our father. I winked at her. I was tired of fighting and feeling ashamed. I was tired of blaming her for something that was my problem?not hers. She was a mutant, and that was that. Nothing else to say.

The preacher finished and the crowd slowly faded away. Some of them tried to approach the tank, but most just slipped away, too afraid to take another step. My wife took our son to the car and waited. I asked her to. This was Mira's time and mine. Our song. Our duo. No one else could play along.

I walked up to her, and Chirpy and their friend stepped back. Mira put her webbed hands against the side of her tank, and I touched them through the plastic. "I'm glad you came," I said, smiling.

She smiled too, as best as she could, and rubbed my fingers through the barrier between us. For now and all time, I realized that that barrier would always be there, keeping us apart. Her songs were different than mine now. She had made choices that would forever keep us apart, and eventually she would forget about me and her father and mother, like all mutants finally do. She would lose her connection with us, and live the rest of her life (however long that might be) in blissful peace with her new kin.

I had listened to her at the foot of the pool. I had listened to her reasons for becoming a mutant. She said that she would never fall victim again to her nature, but look at her now. A creature of water, shaped and mutilated by the musical notes of life. She couldn't stay out of water for too long; it hurt to speak; her eyes gummed over if they touched too much air. She flew through schools of fish like a bird, and found scraps of food at the bottom of tanks. It made me wonder. Was she so different now than before? Hadn't she merely replaced one set of "natures" for another?

I rose up and said to Chirpy, "Take her away now. It's time for her to go."

As I watched them place her back into the El Camino, my thoughts drifted to William Faulkner's character Joe Christmas in Light in August: "And it was the white blood that sent him to the minister, which rising in him for the last and final time, sent him against all reason and reality, into the embrace of a chimaera?It was the black blood which swept him by his own desire beyond the aid of any man, swept him up into that ecstasy out of a black jungle where life has already ceased before the heart stops and death is desire and fulfillment."

And so it was with Mira. Like the confused blood flowing through Joe Christmas' veins, she had been trapped between the musics. It was her human music that defined her misery. It was her mutant music that defined her joy. It was her human music that had driven her away from us and into the embrace of a chimaera; and it was her mutant music that had swept her into an ecstasy beyond the very touch of God.

The car faded away beyond the hill, and I realized something. We have a lot of tough days ahead of us, we Homo Sapiens and Homo Orchestrals. I began to cry. Sister was right about one thing: It is in our human nature to kill.

Joe Christmas had been killed by the mob; Mira's was yet to come.