Learn Everything

Everything a writer learns will help their writing.

First example: after twenty-something years of teaching college students, I’ve learned that classes get categorized in three groups: “I loved that class”, “It was okay”, and “Why did I have to take that class?” The number one class in the third category was Philosophy, otherwise known as “that class where you argue totally unimportant things”. I sympathized with these students because I’d taken philosophy myself. I had discovered the purpose of philosophy was to come up with a internally coherent argument about unseen and unknown things. There’s no way to objectively test if your argument is correct. (in the words of my mother, “What difference does it make if we have free will or not? We can’t change it!”)

When I took philosophy, I said what countless other students said — “what am I going to use this for?” Years later, I started writing novels, which required different skills than short stories and poetry. Because I wrote fantasy, I had to build talents and powers and magic and the like that were internally consistent. (Trust me, Harry Potter fans have convinced me that every single discrepancy in magic will be noted by the readers — Just look up “Elder Wand” and you’ll get an earful.) The jump from internally consistent arguments to internally consistent magic systems wasn’t that big. So now I finally get to use philosophy for something useful!

Another example: Moulage. According to my annual report last year, I am a nationally recognized moulage expert. (This means I’ve been moulage coordinator for two (going on three) of the disaster training exercises for the Consortium for Humanitarian Service and Education.) Moulage, by the way, is otherwise known as casualty simulation. Yes, that means I make ordinary people look like victims for emergency and disaster training. I taught myself how to do this after some lovely people mistook me for an expert, and I keep getting better as I go. But the reason I mention it here is because I have had to study many, many gory pictures to do my art — closed abdominal injury, disembowelments, burns, open and closed fractures, gunshots … If people get wounded or killed in my writing, I either know what the carnage looks like or I look it up.

In short, a writer can’t say “I’ll never use that”, because that most arcane or useless bit of information can, and will, come in handy.
********

If you’ve read this far: I will be taking the train out to upstate New York on Wednesday to serve as Moulage Coordinator for the third exercise in the CHSE series, New York Hope. I hope to have time to write, even on the train. I would post pictures of my handiwork, but it’s … gross.

A bonus — This Unseen Bird

This unseen bird (I think)
leaves me gifts every morning —
a feather heartachingly red,
a pristine moth coccoon.
Or I imagine things —
I’ve never seen the bird,
he may not even be red,
he never speaks to me.

I prefer to believe
this unseen bird
leaves me gifts every morning.

********

This is a rough draft and subject to change, as always. My goal was to write a poem using more everyday language. I read a lot of ee cummings when I was younger.

Writing for Change

Full disclosure here: I am female, cis/het, white (mostly), married, 53, educated, neurodiverse, middle class, and not beautiful according to Western standards. I tell you this not to present you with a set of labels to call me, but to hint at which social injustices I have faced in this society and which I have not.

I also am a member of the Religious Society of Friends (otherwise known as Quakers), and nowadays we’ve thrown off plain dress and plain speech (thee didn’t know that?) but have retained our sense of social justice as something important to work toward.

I carry this sense of social justice into my writing. I carry it imperfectly, given that I have not experienced life as a lesbian, as a black person, as a Moslem, a transgendered person, or a person with visible disabilities. Why would that matter? Because I am an outsider to others’ experiences. I do not experience the small insults others do every day — nobody suggests rape as a solution to my gender preference, nobody calls store security on me while I’m shopping, nobody tells me my religion is satanic, nobody calls me a cripple. Most of us miss these aggressions; others experience these and worse daily.

I want a socially just world. I imagine the world as a banquet, and I want to see everyone at the banquet. I want to feast on gravlax and fufu with palaver sauce, and oh-my-G-d Middle Eastern desserts. I want everyone to feast and to talk to each other and to share. And those who are uncomfortable with the other, I want there to be counselors nearby who will talk to their wounded inner child and their not-okayness and prepare them to sit at our table instead of taking it all away from us.

Full disclosure: I was harassed as a child because I was “different” (i.e. neurodiverse), and female, and fat, and gifted. The harassment accelerated into violence. This could by why I want a socially just world. I don’t want anyone else to suffer. It bothers me that I might not have noticed all the injustice if I had not experienced it.

I have to try the best I can to bring in the topic of social justice into my writing, hoping that I am doing so constructively rather than destructively. Here is what I have pledged myself to do:

1) Don’t be timid about putting people who are not necessarily “dominant culture” in my writing. Admittedly one of my favorite characters is Gideon, an avant-garde Jewish architect who designed exquisite bridges when manic but could not hold down a job when depressed. Less like me, however, is Arminder Kaur, a fourteen-year-old Sikh who dreams of being a “saint-soldier” defending the oppressed.

2) Avoid stereotypes, but thoughtfully include cultural norms for other cultures. One of the sensitive places in writing in this regard are accents. If the only people who have accents are foreigners and African-Americans, you’ve written stereotypes. I can point out that the downstate New York accents I ran into when I taught out there had many interesting pronounciations — “cawd”, “SHU-ah”, “Ant – AUCK – tica”. Remember these if you’re going to put in other accents.

3) Do not make white characters the “saviors” for people of other groups. People who are not white, straight, etc. will be allowed self-determination. Movies from Avatar to The Blind Side feature the “white savior” trope, and it’s really insulting.

4) Dominant culture will not be the standard by which other cultures are judged. An overweight person will not be harassed into losing weight (as if that worked!), Guardsmen will be allowed in a pacifist ecocollective if they lock up their guns while on site.

I will offend someone. I will fall short, because I’m human and because I walk around with privilege others don’t have. We all will offend each other at the banquet table because we’re different. But my responsibility is to write for the world I’d like to see.

My First Big Mistake, or How I Shot Myself with Chekhov’s Gun

In yesterday’s blog, I commented that I didn’t put great store in Chekhov’s Gun, or the principle that one should only include objects in a story that will come into play later in the plot. I learned about the principle at about the time I wrote a novel for the first time (i.e. when my husband remarked that, if I was going to keep writing short stories around the dream I interrogated, I might as well write a novel).

I took Chekhov’s Gun to heart, writing extremely sparse descriptions of people and places, figuring that description would distract from the plot if they couldn’t drive it. Big mistake — I had written 300-some pages with almost nothing but dialogue driving the plot. Don’t get me wrong — I love writing dialogue; I think it’s one of my strong points. But the lack of description turned the book into something resembling cream of mushroom soup — bland, pale, lacking distinction.

And I, being too close to my work, saw nothing wrong with it and sent out a few queries to agents. Sixty-five to be exact. I got sixty-five rejections (I think; not all agents send rejections). I read my work again, and Richard read my work again, and he pointed out that I needed more description. I didn’t know what he meant at first. It took me a while to realize that I didn’t have to take Chekhov’s Gun quite that seriously, and I decided to examine the spirit, rather than the letter, of Chekhov’s Gun.

What I didn’t realize was that Chekhov’s Gun refers to objects that can be used, not all inanimate objects in a scene. The hideous 60’s wallpaper in the protagonist’s living room can set up a lot of information about the protagonist — it may reflect her “living in the past”, it could show that she can’t afford to redecorate her living room or that she hasn’t noticed the outdated decor. But even though she’s not going to USE the wallpaper in the future, it deserves to be described. People deserve to be described (although I get irked by the JD Robb version: “… although she didn’t like looking in mirrors, she looked in the mirror at her eyes the color of good whiskey; her choppy hair the color of deerhide…” This character who doesn’t like looking at mirrors is now sitting in front of one with a thesaurus.)

On the other hand, objects that can be used by the protagonists or others are subject to the Chekhov’s Gun rule. If the writer points out the blender in that kitchen, or the gun in the canister of flour. or the TV remote in the living room, they should use it later in the story. If the character reads a book called “Starved Rock Murders”, the writer should take her to Starved Rock State Park later, preferably when there’s a murder. If the writer singles out a specific landmark, you should use that landmark later, but if it’s part of a large amount of landscape description, not so much.

It was a learning experience — describe, describe, describe; let important objects play in the background; don’t emphasize any old object that won’t be used later. And seek out readers before sending queries out!

Foreshadowing in the Forest

This was me at the library/coffee house at Northwest Missouri State University yesterday, soaking up ambience and writing on Prodigies (and not, as my husband suggested, pierogies.)

Grace has just been — liberated? abducted? by the prodigy Ichirou and his chaperone, Ayana. Not that Ichirou needs a chaperone, because the Ichirou that retrieves her from her dorm room has grown five inches and grown rather kawaii (cute) in the nine months since Grace last saw him. After officially withdrawing Grace from Interlochen Academy and helping her pack, the three embark on a tense van ride where Ayana refuses to discuss the reason they’re fleeing to a secluded cabin.

The three talk around the “elephant in the room” — or rather, van — which leads to discussions of cultural differences between Grace’s blunt questions and Ayana’s indirectness; discussions of how religion and death are perceived in Japan; and Grace’s revelation of how she lost her parents.

The most fun part to write was Ichirou’s brief speech about how men in Japan will not eat sweet desserts because they will be thought of as less masculine — while eating a plate of French toast swimming with butter, syrup, and whipped cream.

Obviously this took a lot of research on Google (best search of the day: Japanese death taboos). That’s not what I want to talk about today — instead, I want to talk about foreshadowing.

Foreshadowing is a storytelling technique where the writer hints about a later occurrence in the story. It’s best to do this with subtlety, so the hint doesn’t tell the reader what to expect. Later, when the actual event happens, the astute reader will say, “Hey, wait a minute, didn’t I read earlier that — ?”

Chekhov’s Gun is a related principle of storytelling that advises the writer that any object introduced to the story that doesn’t have immediate purpose should be employed in the story later, and that things not important to the story should be trimmed away. I’m not a strong proponent of this — if Tolkien took away any unnecessary scenery in The Lord of the Rings, the trilogy would be a brochure.

The reason I mentioned foreshadowing, though, is because what seems to be a conversation to develop characters further can also drop in bits of foreshadowing. In the section of my book I described briefly above, there were three bits of foreshadowing. No, actually four. I know where those tidbits will blossom in the book, so I could foreshadow. (You may even remember reading about one earlier.) Wait a minute — that’s how foreshadowing works.

A Different Magic

Never have I had a harder time picking an adjective in my life. There are moments I’ve had in my life that were — amazing? Overused. Magical? Cliche. Wonderful? — It seems we’ve taken the magic out of these adjectives. And in the moment I’m about to describe, I experienced magic, and I allowed it to change me. (Note: I know “Woodchuck” below to be a derogatory term, and I know that I’m showing classism, but I have to write this about the me I WAS rather than the me that I AM NOW. And I’m still learning about how I’m classist.)

******

This incident happened in upstate New York, a place full of thick woods, looming hills, shimmering lakes, and secrets. Washington Irving wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, distinctly American fairytales, about those secrets. I lived in the Upper Catskill region, and the thunder in the hills did sound like giants bowling in hidden places. But at any rate, this was my brush with magic, and it wasn’t what you might think.

I had made friends with the manager of a beer and wine supply shop. I would visit him in the summer when I got bored because I lived alone and I couldn’t hang out at the coffee shop forever. Besides, I thought Scott was cute. I would never have dated Scott because our worlds were too dissimilar: I was a professor seeking tenure and wearing suits; he was what locals called a “Woodchuck” — an impoverished resident of the Catskills who typically lives off tourism in the summer, and welfare in the winter.

I walked into the store that day, greeted by the now-familiar setting — rough-hewn, dark wood; big squared barn windows; two-by-twelve shelves with boxes of rubber stoppers, gaskets, plastic airlocks, bottle caps and corks; a back room with the bigger merchandise like carboys and corkers and spargers. I wondered, not for the first time, if the space had been a stable or a work shed in an earlier life.

My friend Scott stood at the counter, ridiculously tall and skinny. His straight black hair fell past his shoulders in keeping with his Blackfoot heritage and set off pale skin befitting his German and Scottish heritage. He squinted at me through his thick steel-frame glasses and grinned. “My friend’s coming over in a bit. He’s bringing some hopped sparkling mead over to taste. Should be good.”

I made wine and mead, which was how I’d found Scott’s shop in the first place. I knew that mead could be divided into “wine-like” and “beer-like”. I made the wine-type, of course — slightly sweet, not bubbly, sometimes herbal. I’d never had beer-like mead — bubbly, slightly bitter from hops. I decided to stay around, having nothing better to do.

Scott and I indulged ourselves in storytelling while waiting. Both sides of my family treated storytelling as a major ritual in getting to know people, and I honored the oral tradition by exchanging stories whenever I got the chance —

“… I woke up that morning, and my mother was gone. No, completely gone. All her belongings were gone, all the furniture was gone, and she had left me a note that said, ‘You’re responsible for the apartment now. I’ve moved in with my boyfriend.'”

Just as I had recovered from the ending, a stocky, sun-browned man with shoulder-length golden hair and goatee arrived with a bag, from which he pulled out two big brown bottles.

“Hey, Scott, do you have a bottle opener?” he growled, and I noted his leather biker’s cap, wondering how it would look on me. I was not going to ask.

“Ha ha,” Scott snorted and pulled out his bottle opener and three glass tumblers from behind the rough counter.

“Would you like some?” Greg asked, more gallantly than I had expected for a biker.

“Sure,” I replied, and he poured me a tumbler full.

I took a deep drink, and then another. Smoother than beer, scented with honey and fragrant hops, I knew I tasted something rare and rich. I felt a tingle, almost like a shimmer of gold, slide from my toes to my head —

I sat down abruptly, feeling tipsy yet not tipsy. I felt — not vague, but as if a golden mist had surrounded me, surrounded everything. Greg examined his mead against the light from the window, and it seemed that Arthur Pendragon, dressed in jeans and boots, drank of the Holy Grail. Scott limped across the room to look out a window, and I spied the Fisher King who had held the Grail before Arthur.

I excused myself, feeling small against such august personages, and stumbled into the sun, where I discovered that ordinary people had become mighty, and I, in turn, had become ordinary.

Themes — the implied content

How does a story’s plot differ from a story’s theme?
The plot describes the action of a story while the theme describes its soul.

Although themes aren’t the same as plots, plots incorporate themes. A theme of “Family is important”, for example, must feature a plot in which facing adversity makes the family stronger. A theme of “We make our own family” may have a plot in which four unrelated people experience adversity and develop close ties as a result. If the plot doesn’t carry the theme, the theme never escapes the writer’s brain.

Some themes are universal and archetypal. A professor named Joseph Campbell spoke on a universal theme called “The hero’s journey” in a book called The Hero of a Thousand Faces. (Women scholars have argued his Hero is inevitably masculine, and I agree). The hero’s journey consists of leaving home in a naive state, facing a danger, feeling insecure about meeting the danger, failing at meeting the danger, discovering his strength, and overcoming the danger. In other words, growing up. Choosing good over evil is also a universal theme, and if you’ve read any of the Harry Potter books, you’re familiar with the theme. Fairy tales have great archetypal themes — reread them!

Some themes are shaped by our times. One of my common themes is “Acceptance of the Other,” whether they’re a different color, race, nationality, love preference, or species (there are non-human humanoids involved). This theme might not have been possible three hundred years ago. One theme of my current book is “We should choose our own destinies,” again not possible in the time of Calvinistic Determinism. Another is the previously mentioned “We make our own family” (or, in the movie Lilo and Stitch, “Ohana”) .

Some themes are shaped by our culture. The ancient Greeks viewed Eros, or passionate love, as a chaotic force that induced destructive behavior in its victims. How would they have reacted to the “happily ever after” of today’s romance novels?

One of the secrets of themes is that they should not be announced. Stories in which a character explicitly ties up the action by reviewing the theme with other characters — I am reminded of one of the staples of my childhood, ABC After School Specials on TV. “Johnnie, I told you not to open the door to strangers!” (Also, “Johnnie, I told you not to invite the drug dealer in for pizza!”) Your readers will find the themes, even subconsciously, when they feel themselves identify with them.

Themes, rather than plots, may be the way you perceive the world. If someone asks you what the book is about and you say, “It’s about a battle off the coast of Antarctica”, you’re a plot person. If you answer, “it’s about survival in the Antarctic during wartime,” you’re a theme person (see the difference?)

By the way, I’m a theme person. (My book is about a young person who discovers people who share her uncanny talent. Plot people grumble at descriptions like this — but what HAPPENS?)

Writing What You Don’t Know

One of the enduring pieces of advice writers are given is “Write what you know”. There’s a lot of sense to that — a British veterinarian named James Herriot made a second career writing memoirs of his cases as a country vet. (The first was titled “All Creatures Great and Small”, and I loved it as a child.) Ernest Hemingway wrote about taciturn, disaffected males drinking and doing manly things like going off to war. Hemingway wrote what he knew, although he didn’t write enough cats into the plot. Laurell Hamilton writes about vampires and werewolves in St. Louis — I have second thoughts about going to St. Louis now.

I would argue that writers incorporate what we know into our stories, but that our stories contain more than what we know. Otherwise they’d be called autobiographies. And, face it, life so often doesn’t have a clear plot. (“Day 3: Push cat off the kitchen table. Day 4: Push cat off the kitchen table.” Of course, I just got a great idea for a short story in which the cat trains their human to push them off the kitchen table daily as a form of exercise to save the human’s life.)

The thing with writing what you don’t know is that it requires research. I remember reading a Jayne Ann Krentz (romance) novel set in wine country. In one section, the male protagonist walks through his successful winery supervising the process. That’s about all the detail this scene provided, and that frustrated me. I’ve toured several wineries in my life and at one point considered running a small winery in Northwest Missouri. A winery has a production room with big metal or plastic vats and a concrete floor, spacious and white and silver. There’s a small, glass-windowed lab nearby where must can be tested for sugar level (brix) and wine can be tested for pH and alcohol level. For big oaky red wines, racks several feet tall hold barrels of wine for aging. There’s a bottling setup where bottles flow down an assembly line to be filled, capped, and labeled. The crushers and destemmers sit outside, where in season they’ll prepare grapes into must.

The point here is that, if you are going to incorporate what you don’t know into a story, you have to research it. First, as I point out above, readers who know more about the topic than you do will get annoyed at the lack of detail or at wrong details. Second, details can enhance your plot — when I researched the all-night pierogi place on the Stare Misto in Krakow, I got to put in a running joke about a featured dish with an odd name — “Krakow Misalliance” (salmon and potato pancakes, actually). This became not only a symbolic reflection of the misalliance of the antagonists, but later becomes a password that proves the identity of one of the characters.

How to research? I have to admit I spend a lot of time googling. Google and wikipedia won’t help me write a research paper, but they are invaluable in pinpointing details that I want to put in a book. There’s still room for a little substitution — I found a perfect place in Michigan for a future plot twist, but the cabin there is a bit nicer than I’d like, so I have to downgrade it a little in my writing. (I’m also a stickler for detail — the writers for the old TV show The Pretender admitted to creating a Greek Goddess and a deadly virus, while I would have looked up an appropriate goddess and studied the Marburg virus for consideration in the plot.)

I would love to travel to do some research, and I know I can use it as a tax writeoff, but on a professor’s salary I’m not getting to Karlskrona any time soon. Maybe someday.

Why I Write (this blog)

When I began writing this blog, I did it because I wanted to muse. Aloud. Like if Juliet in her balcony scene was a vaguely neurotic mystic — “Oh Romeo, have you ever considered that words shape our destiny?” (I would consider casting Felicia Day, perpetual Manic Pixie Dream Girl, in the movie role.)

Then I realized that I wanted to demystify being a writer. For years, I’ve tried to demystify being a professor to my students, because colleges will run out of professors if students think we’re all like the enigmatic and magnificent Dumbledore. It was easy demystifying professorship, because I am neither enigmatic and magnificent. If I am like anyone at Hogwarts, it’s Sybil Trelawney — eccentric, a little unkempt, and seemingly absent-minded. (For my international readers — Harry Potter references).

Writers cultivate a certain amount of mystery, with their specialized language (plot twist, plot bunny, query, Marty Stu, McGuffin), their rituals (coffee, lucky pen, writers’ retreat) and their bizarre actions (killing their darlings, writing their friends into a story, talking about their characters as if they’re real people). There’s really no mystery here if you can see the world through a writers’ eyes. This is what I hope to do in this blog — help you see through the eyes of a writer even if the writer is writing through down times, lack of inspiration, and not enough coffee.

And then maybe I will get published someday, and you can celebrate with me.

Another excerpt — and a request for help

This is an excerpt of Prodigies (Prodigy?) — probably Prodigies. Our protagonist and her partners are on the run from pursuers who may or may not be from Second World Renewal. They have traveled from Grace’s residential high school (Interlochen) in Michigan to an isolated cottage in northern Michigan. They’re about to leave because Greg has texted an alarm to Ayana that assailants are closing in. (Note that only Grace has met Greg at this time).

Polish-speaking visitors — this is Google Translate’s best effort. I do not speak Polish, but I can see these two characters using Polish to talk over Grace’s head. PLEASE give me more accurate translations, and I will include your names in the acknowledgements if I get published!

******

“Gracie! Behind you!” I heard Ichirou’s voice in the distance, and I idly noted that his voice had deepened since our ordeal in Poland. I turned to look behind me, and –

I saw the man in camouflage up the grassy hill, his rifle to the ready. I turned around and ran, cursing myself as I felt the sharp sting of the bullet as it pierced my back.

Consciousness exploded in an undifferentiated blur of noise, light, blurred images. I shot upright, only to be arrested by a strong grip pulling my shoulders to the ground. I caught a glimpse of camouflage, and I fought –

“Krakow Misalliance?” a low voice swam out of the cacophony of nature. It pronounced Krakow correctly.

“Grze – Greg?” I murmured, wondering why my voice sounded so weak.

At that moment, I heard other voices but struggled to identify them. “Let go of her.”

My vision cleared, and I saw Ayana and Ichirou pointing tasers. “No,” I muttered. “This is Greg.”

“Oh,” Ayana breathed. “Oh.”

I noticed she stared at him.

They wouldn’t let me walk, and I decided that was a good idea. Ichirou and Greg did a two-man carry on me, which didn’t hurt my chest as badly. I tried to wiggle out, only to receive a stern look from Greg and a concerned look from Ichirou.

We plodded up the hill, which looked unusually verdant, toward the log-clad cabin. My chest hurt, but not nearly as much as expected. Still, I felt heavy in body and in soul.

“Be still; we will not let you walk,” Ichirou grumbled when I started to wriggle out of their hold again.

With effort, the three settled me on my bunk, and I heard its metal springs grate as my weight settled into it. Ayana took off the jacket or blanket or something that Greg had draped over me (it smelled clean for all it was scratchy on my arms). She gasped and turned to Greg, her eyes flashing. “To szkoda śmiertelna, Grzegorz! To przeszło przez serce!” I wondered idly how Ayana had learned Polish.

“Pytałeś mnie o moim talencie,” murmured Greg, bowing his head down.

“Oh, żołnierz,” Ayana took a deep breath.”Jakie brzemię ponosisz.”

“Jestem w porządku,” Greg glared, his lip trembling slightly.

I wanted to learn Polish at that moment to know what they spoke of so passionately.

My chest still ached as if I had been punched in the sternum, and after more unintelligible back-and-forth between Greg and Ayana, they gave me a good dose of aspirin and a glass of water, and Greg supported my back so I could drink without choking.

“Food?” I asked, and my voice sounded strained and weak.

“No,” Greg growled, then softened. “You’re on chicken broth and rice for the next couple days. “

I shrugged, even though I felt twinges in my chest. It didn’t matter to me.

Eventually, after everyone had left and I was left staring at the bunk directly over me, I dozed. I dreamed in fragments, starting with the impact and stabbing pain. I pitched forward, but did not hit the ground. Then I sat up and felt the grass under me. I expected the grass to slide through my fingers, but it grasped my hand, which glowed like fireflies in the gathering dark. A rabbit nestled against my leg, something I felt blessed to witness. I idly petted the rabbit.

Suddenly, my heart ached. My grandparents, my parents all dead. Nobody to sit here with me – but then a group of people crested the hill, surrounded by the same firefly glow that I was. They walked at a stately pace, feeling like wisdom, and I hoped they would sit with me. When the huge moon rose, I recognized the long, straightened hair of my mother and the sedate walk of my father, and I cried out to them —

A force slammed me back to light, distorted sound, pain. Life.

I shot upright, sobbing. I had died. I had died when the bullet hit me. I saw my dead parents and grandparents walking toward me —

I had been dead, and now I was alive, aching and confused. Life had taken me from my parents, just as death had taken them from me before.

I huddled in my bunk, letting my hot tears soak my pillow.

Ichirou crept in quietly; I would not have noticed except for his hand touching the arm that hugged my pillow. “Gracie, I’m here,” accented words in a low uninflected voice.

“I was dead,” I sniffled, removing the pillow from my face and treating him to my doubtless tear-swollen eyes. I didn’t care at that moment if I looked ugly – I had been dead. I now was alive.

“Yes, I know. I convinced Ayana and Greg that it was impolite talking in Polish in front of me. Greg – he was the waiter in the all-night pierogi place? – said he had used his talent to heal you. You’d been shot in the heart. You died instantly. He moved your body back to its state just before you were shot. Only the blood on your shirt told what happened.”

I sat up in bed and pulled the blanket away from me. I glanced down. I still wore the shirt – I assume that everyone was too polite to take it off me. A huge, dark red stain bloomed between my breasts. Ichirou looked at it, then looked away quickly. “Chikushō,” Ichirou muttered under his breath.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“It means ‘shit’, ‘damn,’ etc., and I should never say it in polite company or around women.” Ichirou put his hand on the back of his neck and hissed through his teeth. “Resurrec
tion seems like a good time to swear, though.”

Ichirou stayed with me while I dozed – I think the whole resurrection thing freaked him out, and he may have feared I would die again. I knew I wouldn’t, but wished I would, because the vision of my family called me back to that comforting night. I thought I would not tell anyone until Ichirou asked in the middle of the silence, “What is it like to die?”

I closed my eyes and answered thoughtfully. “It’s strange. When the bullet hit me, I felt pain, then no pain. I thought I just blacked out and didn’t remember. But when you brought me in and I fell asleep, I had a dream that I think came from being dead. I sat on that hill in the moonlight, and I glowed like fireflies. I had a rabbit sit beside me. Some people came up over the hill, and they glowed like I did. I saw their faces, and recognized them as my family, and they walked toward me. And I got pulled back here before they could meet me.”

“Your family is dead, aren’t they?” Ichirou inquired.

“Yes. I guess some people see the Light calling them; I see Heaven as a vast green place.” I remembered my parents and how they hadn’t yet seen me.

“That’s a very Japanese way to see things. The moon and the rabbit both symbolize fertility –“

“I’m not having any babies!”

I heard a chortle in Ichirou’s voice. “I’m not asking you to. It’s the concept. The creative force doesn’t have to be …”

I understood where Ichirou was going, and followed his thought to a conclusion: “The vision means it wasn’t my time to die because I still had to create. With my music and my talent. But my parents – do I have to do this alone?” I heard the edge in my voice which betrayed my desire to reunite with my parents, the same parents who kept me locked in music schools. I had always had to do this alone.

“You have us,” Ichirou said. “And you have your rabbit.”