symphony

The first strains thudded behind eyelids not quite closed, to have them blinking, half-fluttering with surprise. She was something of a musician, in no way a composer. What was this music stealing up on her sleep? The melody drifted out from a violin, picked a woodwind in counterpoint, and set horizontal stripes undulating past the oboe's radiating cone. Entranced, she no longer budged an eyelash. The bass put its floor under the exotic, odd theme, nothing she had heard before; then brass punched up in harmonic intervals, poked striations between the notes. With a trip and a beat, the sound lifted and opened like a porthole widening to let in the sea. She had to fight the temptation to stop her dizzy free fall before the original melody righted itself, resounded profound and rich, then split along four voices in a fugue that chased, dived, and burst through the registers like porpoises and flying fish.

The first strains thudded behind eyelids not quite closed, to have them blinking, half-fluttering with surprise. She was something of a musician, in no way a composer. What was this music stealing up on her sleep? The melody drifted out from a violin, picked a woodwind in counterpoint, and set horizontal stripes undulating past the oboe's radiating cone. Entranced, she no longer budged an eyelash. The bass put its floor under the exotic, odd theme, nothing she had heard before; then brass punched up in harmonic intervals, poked striations between the notes. With a trip and a beat, the sound lifted and opened like a porthole widening to let in the sea. She had to fight the temptation to stop her dizzy free fall before the original melody righted itself, resounded profound and rich, then split along four voices in a fugue that chased, dived, and burst through the registers like porpoises and flying fish.	As the sum of instruments swelled, she wondered at the craft in her head imposing no limits to that great arch of sound, and promptly turned transparent to somatic impression, vanished in the aural float. Emotion, like bells of pure colour, traced out saturated tones, ran thinner, shimmered iridescent and paled at the cusps before lapping out to dense explosions that burned gossamer fine in the far reaches. Percussion's spinning and violas' shrieks, barrel-voiced cellos' notes and bassoons' hoots mixed, snarled together like savage cats while bass lines modulated keys and shifted mood as deftly as coupling lovers. The dynamics spiralled until single sounds echoed to match complex resonances, to wind woody, hollow notes about precise silences which made her sensibilities vibrate and stop... tingle and stop... ring, quiver, answer... and stop. Stop.

When she woke, the sun dripped prisms into her eyes. Impatient knuckles rapped Saturday morning at her door. "Coming," she called to the boyfriend out there to fetch her as promised. She kept her head on the pillow, and laughed. Even with last night's private symphony having diffused all through her, she couldn't remember a note. Patience. That's enough grumbling from behind the door. Yes, she should keep this boy she decided as she searched for her robe, and needn't bother getting dressed, should open the door, grab him by the shirt and throw his astonished person into that sunny bed over by the window where the music would still be playing.