Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,29

to Norea, Wait outside.

She looked into Nyssa’s eye, then walked to the northwest corner of the hut and brushed away some earth and lifted out of a depression in the floor a little clay pot. She removed the lid of the pot and pulled out an oilskin pouch. She dabbed her filthy finger on her tongue, reached into the pouch and took the eyestone from its vial of sugar. While Nyssa watched, she rinsed it in weak vinegar water and three bubbles pushed out of the black spot in the middle and rose to the surface.

Moll said, Lie there, girl. She pointed her dirt-stained finger at a pile of rags in a darkened corner partly blocked by the stove. Nyssa lay down on the rags and she breathed in the sour odour of rancid rags and did not move.

Moll said, The girl’s in the dark night. She lifted Nyssa’s eyelid, dropped the eyestone into the far corner of the eye, pulled the lid out and held it down by its lashes on top of Nyssa’s cheek. Moll said to the eyestone, Eat it up.

She took Nyssa’s hands, pulled her long arms straight and laid them firmly by her sides. Nyssa dared neither open her eyes nor move. She listened to Moll walk across the room. For a long time she lay still, feeling a scratching along her eyeball. She let her good eye flutter open, followed by her injured one and saw Moll naked to the waist. She saw Moll putting a poultice on a sore festering red on her right breast. Both breasts were horribly webbed with cuts. Nyssa stared at the disfigured orbs. She shifted her head to the side to see more. Moll sensed the movement. She turned away, pulled her dress closed around her and turned on Nyssa who closed her eyes and lay rigid.

Girl, what did you see?

Nothing, said Nyssa.

What did you see?

Nothing, repeated Nyssa.

You saw something. Open your eyes. Sit up.

The girl sat up. Moll stood and moved across the room and squatted beside Nyssa with an unlit lamp. She reached under her skirt and handed Nyssa a long glass tube, then lit the lamp’s tiny fire.

Put the tube over the flame, she said.

Nyssa lowered the tube over the flame, watched it stretch its blue centre, pushing through white and yellow. She heard it begin to sing a pure single tone inside the tube.

She felt the note against her eardrum diminish all other sound. Moll reached her great hand out and covered the top of the glass and extinguished not the flame but the tone. Nyssa sat back on her heels.

Moll stared through her blank black eyes and formed her lips into a grotesque circle over her decayed teeth and began to sing the same note the flame sang, hrhrhr. She slid on the pitch and settled and when she hit the note’s centre suddenly the flame sang again with her, the same note, hrhrhr.

Moll reached across the flame, lifted the lid of Nyssa’s hurt eye, and with her thumb and forefinger plucked out the eye-stone.

Moll said, Music comes from the shadows, and she looked into the injured eye. She said, Music is a kind of practice for death.

I don’t know, said Nyssa.

Nyssa! called Norea through the door.

Wait! said Moll. The girl’s still healing.

Nyssa listened to the flame. She could hear from far away the high-pitched cries of ocean birds and from deep below the earth the shifting and turning of mud-puppies. Nyssa asked, Can you hear all those sounds too?

Don’t ask questions! She thrust a cup at Nyssa and said, Here’s medicine.

The girl took a drink, coughed a little, and took another. She asked, What is it?

Hurt wine, said Moll.

Nyssa drank down all of it, the deep blue juice staining her chin.

Moll poked her and said, Out of the way! Awake! You’re better and Nana’s waiting.

Then she pulled her sweater over her head and said through the neck, Moll’s in a pitty-hole. Leave her bide!

Nyssa slipped out the door, her head thick from the strong drink and she took Norea’s hand. She led Norea home and the old woman told her to slip in the back way so Dagmar wouldn’t see them. They went inside and up to Norea’s loft.

Nyssa said, Nana, I don’t feel so good. I’m going to the porch.

She took her queasy stomach out for air. Norea followed her, and when Nyssa felt her stomach heave, she leaned unsteadily across the railing and flipped over like a fledgling falling from