I was at a rock-climbing gym, and I saw a woman climbing up a wall. I imagined her climbing up into the underside of an old mechanical carousel made of brass gears and sprockets.
The carousel isn’t moving, and the woman climbs through its inner machinery. One moment she’s reaching for climbing holds, and the next she’s reaching for metal sprockets and springs. She climbs up and up through the machinery and, finally, climbs onto the platform of the carousel and onto a wooden horse.
Yellow light from incandescent bulbs changes the woman’s blue eyes into green eyes. Then, the horse turns its head and says: “You’d better untie that rope from your harness, miss. We’ll be off soon.”
The woman looks down at her harness, and sees that her climbing rope, still tied to her waste, is snaking down through the carousel’s machinery and back into the white fluorescent light of the climbing gym below. She hears a bell ting from somewhere inside the carousel, and she feels that she doesn’t have enough time to pull the whole rope up before the ride starts, so she unties the rope and lets it drop.
“How’ll I get back home?” The woman asks the horse, but the horse, alive a moment ago, is once again a motionless wooden sculpture, chipped in places, its paint fading, and with a startled expression on its face.
The bell tings again, and the carousel starts revolving. Bells start playing from somewhere inside the carousel; the bells play a waltz, and the song fits well with the yellow carousel light. The song, though, sounds incomplete. There are places where the bells stop playing and there’s no sound at all, almost as if some bells are missing.
The woman’s horse rocks gently up and down, and after another revolution the woman hears an accordion playing along with the bell song. In the dim dawn light next to the carousel, the woman sees a woman younger than herself sitting cross-legged on a box, playing an accordion. The woman passes the other woman again and again, and looks at her again and again, but the other woman never looks up from her instrument.
“I wonder how many times she’s played that song along with these bells,” the woman wonders out loud.
“Why don’t you go and ask her?” The horse says in reply.
The carousel and its bell song slow to a crawl, and the woman’s horse stops in front of a set of wooden steps. The woman steps down, and just before her foot touches white beach sand, a wind blows in her face and she smells the ocean and she hears the breaking of waves. She looks over at the accordionist who, now playing odd notes and chords, looks lost in thought.
“How many times have you played that song with the carousel’s bells?” The woman asks.
The younger woman looks up. In the yellow light, her eyes are green, and she’s grinning. “Enough times that I can play along a million different ways and still be playin’ the same tune.”
The woman smiles. “Did you climb up here, too?”
“Did I what?”
The woman hesitates, her smile fading a bit.
“I,” she stammers. “I climbed here,” she says, the words feeling funny coming out of her mouth. “I was climbing at a rock-climbing gym a minute ago, and I grabbed what I thought was going to be the next handhold — but it was actually a big metal brass gear. I kept climbing, and I climbed up a whole bunch of gears and sprockets and then up onto that horse. The horse told me to untie my rope before the carousel started, and so I did. Now I’m here, and I don’t know where here is or how I’m going to get back home.”
The younger woman squints her eyes a bit and, with her mouth slightly open, stares at the woman for several seconds.
“Not the strangest story I’ve ever heard,” she finally says, a new grin forming on her face. “This carousel never does go ‘round the same way twice — even that bell song is a bit different each time. What’s your name?”
“Rosy.”
“Rosy,” she echoes, almost singing the name.
“Rosy, I’m Elizabeth — folks call me Lizzy. Put her there.” Lizzy holds out a gloved hand. Her gloves are knit and fingerless and they’re fraying at the edges. The two shake hands, and Lizzy’s grip feels kind and welcoming in Rosy’s hand.
“I’m guessing you don’t have a carousel coin,” Lizzy says. “Here.” Lizzy reaches into her pocket, and pulls out a golden coin, which looks heavy. She sits up and opens the top of her box and drops the coin in. The coin plonks onto the bottom of the box.
“There,” says Lizzy. “Now, let’s go talk to the fish vendor.”
“The who?”
“The fish vendor. She’s who I first met when I got here a year or so ago. She told me she needed an accordionist to play along with her carousel’s bell song. I have no idea how she knew that I could play the accordion — she just knew. That’s why I think she might know about you, and why you’re here.”
Rosy looks at Lizzy, who’s grinning again. Lizzy looks like she’s maybe 20. She has wavy blond hair that’s tied into a braid that curls down from underneath a beanie that’s knit into the shape of a penguin’s face.
The two trek away from the ocean and the carousel, and they step onto a narrow wooden boardwalk, which they follow over the white beach sand. The boardwalk winds its way through dunes taller than houses, and, after many minutes, the two turn a corner, and in front of them there stands a wall as tall as the dunes. The wall, made of sand, looks like something dreamed into reality by a child playing at the beach. The sand in the wall looks a little loose, and, in some places, there are seashells in the wall.
Just then, two figures push through Rosy and Lizzy’s legs and rush forward. Rosy glances down and sees a pair of penguins, each only about a foot high, waddling toward an archway in the wall. “Sorry, Lizzy!” One of the penguins cries back at them. “But the fish just got in!”
“Oh!” Lizzy exclaims. “That means she’ll be playing soon!”
“Who?” Rosy asks.
“Dawn. No, not the dawn dawn — Dawn! That’s her name. The fish vendor!”
The two follow after the penguins through the archway, and they emerge into a market. The first vendor they see is selling bolts of silk — blues, reds, oranges, and yellows that all glow in the sunlight. Some of the silks are hanging from high poles, and those silks glow and flap in the wind. A pair of crabs scuttle past, and one of the crabs is wearing a blue and green silk hat that’s folded into the shape of a sailboat. The crabs stop at another vendor who’s selling spices as colorful as the bolts of silk.
Lizzy and Rosy move in the direction that the penguins waddled, and that’s when they see her, and hear her. The fish vendor.
Dawn wears a purple baseball cap that’s cocked to the side. She’s sitting on a wooden barrel, and she’s playing the saxophone; the instrument, straight and made of a brass that sparkles and shimmers in the sunlight, is the visible form of the jazz that Dawn’s playing. Dawn plays with her eyes closed, and as she plays fishes hanging from strings that hang from the eaves of her stall wiggle back and forth in time to her song.
“Just a sec’,” says Lizzy, who hurries ahead and plops down on a box next to Dawn. Lizzy starts playing her accordion while tapping her heel in the sand. The penguins, who were busy examining the wiggling fish, start to wiggle and dance, too. Market-goers who’re only just passing the stall start to dance, and they don’t start walking normally again until they’re out of earshot of the music. The crabs from the spice stand go by, and they skuttle this way and that and click their claws here and there up in the air.
“Come on!” One of the penguins shouts at Rosy. “It’s one of Dawn’s best songs!”
“I — I don’t know how to dance!” Rosy shouts back.
“None of us really do – we just move to the sound! We all just make it up as we go. Come. On!”
So, Rosy dances with the penguin, but the penguin is too short for Rosy to reach its outstretched wings with her hands, and so the two dance side by side. A wind blows, and grains of sand bounce this way and that, and Rosy and the penguin and the rest of the crowd dance until Dawn and Lizzy play their final notes and chords. The music fades, the wind vanishes, the sand grains settle, the fish stop wiggling, and the crowd begins to disperse.
“Thank you for the dance, my lady,” the penguin says, bowing so low that his beak touches the sand. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, me and Mrs. Penguin here simply must get some of those fishes hanging from the lines. They’re the best and freshest when they’re still able to dance like that.”
Rosy catches her breath, and Dawn appears as if out of nowhere and hugs her. The hug is strong, and, like Lizzy’s handshake, it makes Rosy feel welcome. “You’re just in time for dinner,” Dawn says, whose hair, like Lizzy’s, is in a braid that snakes down from underneath her hat, and then curls around the side of her head. “The Penguins’s are making their gratin aux fruits de mer in their pot with the fishes I caught today, and if Lizzy and I know how to make dead fish dance, then the Penguins’s know how to make dead fish sing when they put them in their pot. You’ll stay, won’t you?”
“Well, I’m not sure how to get back to where I came from. So, I guess, yeah, I’ll stay.”
“Fantastic! And yes, Lizzy just told me a bit about you. I’ve honestly never heard of anyone climbing here, but when you think about it most everyone’s stories are flat-out remarkable if you know the right way of listenin’ to ‘em. Here, this is for you.” Dawn hands Rosy a coiled rope made of hemp, and Rosy, without lifting the rope to her face, can smell the ocean in it. “It’s from my fishing dory,” Dawn says with a smile. “I’ve never used it to climb anything, but I used it once to lasso a marlin and if it held that storm of a fish, it’ll hold you.”
“What’s this for?” Rosy asks.
“For you to climb back down the carousel and get back on home.”
“Oh, thanks, but like I told Lizzy, after the carousel got going, I couldn’t find the hole I climbed through to get here again.”
“Huh,” Dawn says, looking up at the sky and frowning. “Well, we’ll see what we can do — but after dinner.”
Lizzy appears from behind Dawn, takes Rosy’s hand in her welcoming grip, and leads her to a fire pit behind dunes a short walk behind Dawn’s fish stall. The Penguins’s are already there, and one of them is gutting the fish on a stone table, while the other is stacking logs in the pit. Next to the pit there sits a black cast-iron cauldron with three legs. The sun’s setting over the ocean, the sky’s purple, and the first stars are twinkling. Before long, the fire’s roaring and popping and crackling, and Mrs. Penguin tells Rosy that they all have to wait until the fire forms coals before they can start to cook their stew in the pot.
“That’ll give us time to hear your story,” says Dawn, who, once again, appears as if out of nowhere. “If you wanna tell it, that is. But I’ll admit I’m as curious as these fish were when they heard my music out on the dory at dawn today and swam over to have a listen and a dance.”
They all sit down around the fire, and Mrs. Penguin adds some logs to the flames. “Just a few minutes,” she mutters to herself, before blowing on the just-forming coals.
The fire crackles and spits, and the flames dance their own dance. Dawn sits down and looks into the fire, and she starts bobbing her head as though trying to find the rhythm that the fire is making with its lapping flames. But the fire dance must be making a hundred different rhythms at once, because Dawn’s bobbing never settles into any kind of noticeable pattern.
“Well, where to begin,” Rosy says, who also looks into the flames, the sight of which helps her summon her memories. “I guess maybe the climbing thing is best. Where I’m from, there are mountains, and I like to hike in the mountains, and, sometimes, I climb up to the tops of the mountains using ropes. But when it’s winter and snowing, my friends and I can’t get outside as much as in the summer, and so we climb indoors at gyms built for climbing. It was on an indoor climbing day that I somehow got here. I was climbing with my friend, Sarah, and, well, you know the rest.”
Dawn’s still looking into the fire, and her head’s still bobbing as she looks for a rhythm. She purses her lips.
The coals form, and together the Penguins’s move their cast-iron cauldron, now filled with fishes and colorful spices from the market, over them.
Lizzy leans over to Rosy, and their shoulders touch. “Look at them,” she whispers, motioning at the Penguins’s. “I love watching them cook. Theirs isn’t an instrument that makes sound, but it’s an instrument all the same. They play the stew — do you see how Mrs. Penguin takes a taste every minute or so? There’s a song she’s trying to get out of the food, and she feels the song when she tastes the stew.”
Rosy looks at Mrs. Penguin, and Lizzy’s words focus her attention. What was a moment ago a mundane scene that blurred seamlessly into the wide world becomes instead its own thing with its own life and energy.
“Where’re you from, Lizzy?” Rosy whispers back.
“What do you mean? I’m from here.”
“I mean, before here.”
Lizzy looks at the fire and then down at the sand. “I don’t know,” she whispers slowly, almost inaudibly.
“You don’t know?”
“No. I don’t remember. The furthest-back thing I remember is walkin’ down this beach one day and smiling and singing at the ocean. Then I saw the carousel — but no-one was there and so I walked across the boardwalk to the market. That’s where I met Dawn. She asked me that same question back then, too — but when I went to open my mouth, nothing came out. I had no idea where I’d come from. I just knew my name was Elizabeth, and that I knew how to play the accordion.” Lizzy takes a breath, and softens her whisper even more. “I broke down crying, and Dawn took me to Mr. and Mrs. Penguin’s home down by some boulders on the beach, near where Dawn keeps her dory at the dock, and they’ve been lookin’ after me ever since.”
“Do you wanna learn how to play the bells?” Dawn says aloud, her eyes still on the flames.
“Who, me?” Rosy says.
“Yes, you.”
“The bells?”
“Yes. I have a hunch about something,” Dawn says. “I have this old bell set that’s sitting around rusting. But it’s still good, and if you learn how to play it then I might be able to get you home.”
But before Rosy can respond, Mr. Penguin shouts: “Gratin’s ready! And the first serving, I think, and if no-one protests, should go to our new friend, and my new dance partner, Rosy, if not for her natural dance acumen, then for keeping it together during what has, her eyes tell me, been a most exhausting day.”
“Here-here!” Lizzy shouts, and Dawn pulls out her saxophone from its case and starts to play the same song she played at the market, only slightly differently. (Before, the song sounded like the afternoon, and now it sounds like twilight.)
Rosy tastes the gratin. She tastes it at the same time that Dawn plays notes that sound like a skip and a hop and a twirl. The music mixes with the tastes of the fishes, and Rosy can feel the fishes wiggling a bit in her mouth. Recalling what Lizzy said about the Penguins’s cooking being like music-making, Rosy suddenly feels that she knows what music tastes like.
“I’ll learn to play the bells,” Rosy says.
“It looked like you might want to,” Mrs. Penguin says. “Your eyes started glowing after that first bite, like something clicked in you.”
Nobody there, though, knows how to play the bells, and so Dawn tells Rosy to go to the carousel and to listen to the mechanical bell song and to just play along with it until she gets a feeling for the instrument. “It’s like learning a language,” Dawn tells her. “It’s something the world came ready to give you — to whoever could feel it.”
“I’d love to make dead fish dance one day,” Rosy says, grinning.
“Ah-hah! You’ve seen that there’s still life and music and dancing even after death,” says Dawn, her eyes reflecting the dancing fire. “The music’s like light: it continues on through space and time in its own way, and does things to creatures here and in the hereafter that we’ll never really fully know about. But, for now, I want you to just focus on two things: hitting the bells at the right time, and filling in the parts of the carousel’s bell song where it sounds like bells are missing with your own notes.”
“My own notes?”
“Yes.”
“But how will I know what to play?”
“Easy: Same way you know how to say one word after the other — how you were just talking to me just now. Oh, you’ll see.”
~
The next day, Rosy stands at the carousel, and she hits the metal bell set in front of her with two mallets as she listens to the carousel’s bell song. She hits one bell, and then another. She does this again and again until, steadily, the hitting starts to sound like playing. It isn’t all playing all at once — there’s still an awful lot of hitting going on — but more and more the hitting carries a tinge of joy in it, like when walking becomes dancing, or talking becomes laughter. And when the missing parts of the bell song come, Rosy thinks of what Dawn said about notes and words, and she hits and plays one new note after the other.
While hitting and playing, Rosy doesn’t notice the person sitting on the wooden horse that she herself sat on when she first climbed to this place.
“Rose? Is that you?”
Rosy stops hitting and playing the bells and looks up. The woman on the horse is wearing a climbing harness, just like the one Rosy wore when she first arrived, and she has a frown on her face.
“Rose! What’re you — where are — how did I. Since when did you play the bells?”
Rosy puts her mallets down and takes a breath. “Sarah,” she whispers. “Sarah,” she says, a bit louder. “Did you climb here, too?”
“I did,” Sarah says, her voice quivering as she descends the wooden steps. Walking toward Rosy, she says: “I looked down for a second when you and I were at the gym, and when I looked up, you were gone, and your rope was falling to the ground and you weren’t attached to it. I had no idea where you might’ve gone, maybe over the edge of the wall or something, and so I tied in to your rope and I started to climb. And then, when I reached for what I thought would be the next hold —”
“It wasn’t the next hold,” Rosy says. “It happened to me, too.”
“Rosy,” Sarah stammers, stepping close to Rosy. “Where am I?”
“All I know is we’re somewhere above the climbing gym. Or somewhere beyond it, or besides it, or something.”
“Have you found a way out yet?”
“Oh, well, not yet.”
“Have you looked?”
“I did at first, but couldn’t find a way. And then I met someone.”
“Who?”
“A girl. Lizzy. She was playing the accordion right where I’m standing now. She took me to see the fish vendor, and the fish were dancing, and, oh, I don’t know how to explain it. I feel like I’ve been inside a dream since yesterday —”
“Yesterday?” Sarah interjects. “But you only vanished maybe ten minutes ago.”
“Oh, no, that can’t be,” Rosy says. “I’m only now learning to play the bells instead of just hitting them, and there’s no way I could’ve learned that in just ten minutes.”
Sarah looks at her, confused. “It doesn’t matter,” says Sarah, who shakes her head. “I’m here to bring you back, and we’d better go before time gets away from both of us.”
Sarah takes Rosy’s hand and pulls her back up onto the carousel before Rosy can say anything. Sarah takes them to the horse that they both rode, and to the spot where they both climbed into this world. The empty space in the platform of the carousel is still there, but below the space there’s only white beach sand.
“I could’ve sworn this was where I came through,” Sarah says.
“It is,” Rosy says.
“Then where’s the climbing gym?” Sarah asks frantically.
“I don’t know,” says Rosy.
Sarah goes from horse to horse to horse on the carousel, but the first horse is the only one with a hole next to it.
“What’re we going to do?” Sarah says quickly, looking from Rosy to the horse to the floor.
Rosy starts to say again that she doesn’t know, but then stops and says: “Let’s go talk to the fish vendor.”
“The who?”
“The fish vendor,” Rosy repeats. “I met her when I first got here. She knows about things.”
Rosy takes Sarah to the narrow wooden boardwalk, and leads her over the sand and through the dunes as tall as houses. By now it’s nighttime, and the moon is full and bright.
“Rose, why were you playing bells and not trying to find a way back?” Sarah asks.
Rosy doesn’t say anything at first. “I didn’t know how to get back, and still don’t. Dawn — the fish vendor — gave me a new rope so I could get back down into the gym, but when I got here the carousel doorway shut, just like it was now.”
“And so you just decided to play bells instead? Were you even thinking about me back home the entire day you say you’ve been here?”
“Of course I’ve thought about you!” Rosy blurts.
“But not enough to think that it might be a problem, because it really doesn’t sound like you’ve been trying very hard to find a way back even though you knew I might’ve been worried sick about you.”
“How could you be worried sick about me if it was only a few minutes that I was gone?”
“Because you disappeared into nothing right in front of me!”
Rosy says nothing.
“What is it, Rosy?” Sarah asks. There are tears in Sarah’s eyes now. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Before Rosy can say anything, though, that’s when they hear it — the music. But the music isn’t coming from the direction of the marketplace. It’s coming from somewhere away among the dunes, and the music sounds slow. It sounds like the fish dance song from before, but it sounds, too, like a distant gaze, or twilight, or the feeling of a forgotten friend in an old photograph.
“What’s that music?” Sarah asks.
“It’s Dawn and Lizzy. Let’s go.”
The music guides them. They step off the boardwalk and onto the sand. Rosy feels small seashells under her feet, and when she looks at the sand around her she sees the moonlight reflecting off some of the sand grains, as though the grains are small mirrors. The sand around the two sparkles like the twinkling stars in the sky above. Rosy can’t tell the difference between the stars in the sky and the twinkling sand. She looks at the horizon, and she thinks she’s looking at a star, but when she gets close, she sees that it’s sand and not the night sky.
And that’s when the two see it — the memory. The memory forms from twinkling starlight — or twinkling grainlight — shimmering as a pinprick in the dark. The light shines more brightly and then forms moving pictures. Sarah and Rosy see the first time that they met, on a trail in the mountains, on a day when it was sunny and also rainy. They’re hiking towards each other on the same trail, and at first there isn’t a cloud in the sky — but then gray clouds come, and so does rain and thunder. The two both run for the same tree, and the smell of wet soil and wet pine fills the air.
“Petrichor,” Sarah says to Rosy inside the memory.
“What?” Asks Rosy.
“Petrichor — it’s what they call that soily earthy smell right after it rains.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that.”
“That’s okay,” Sarah says with a wry smile as she pulls out a cigarette. “I only know about it because of my geology classes at the university in town. I’m Sarah.”
“Rosy.”
Sarah smiles again and holds out her hand. In the memory Rosy reaches out her hand, too, but just before their hands clasp the memory flickers away, and all there now is is darkness and the twinkling sky and the twinkling sands.
Rosy and Sarah crest a dune, and Rosy recognizes the campsite from the previous night, and she sees Dawn and Lizzy sitting and playing their instruments in the light of a soft campfire. The two play, and another memory twinkles to life above the campfire. Rosy and Sarah see themselves again, and again they’re on a mountain trail. But it’s a different trail, and Rosy’s crouched down and she’s sobbing. Sarah’s hugging her, but Rosy isn’t hugging her back.
The memory flickers away, just as Dawn and Lizzy finish their song. “I don’t know what it is you saw,” says Dawn. “But you both have novels in your eyes. Everyone sees something different — some see nothing at all. The music does nothing for them.”
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you can also make memories appear from nothing,” says Rosy.
“I can make dead fish dance, and I can make the living remember. But, really, it’s not me that’s doing any of it. It’s the music, and the music isn’t mine or anybody else’s. Not really. When it leaves my horn it becomes as natural as the air, as someone very beautiful once told me, and I can’t really say that the air’s mine, now can I? Nope. No-sirree.” Dawn grins and looks at the sand as if amused by what she just said.
“Sarah, this is Dawn. And that’s Lizzy. They’re my new friends.”
“Hello,” says Sarah, who doesn’t extend her hand. “Your playing — your music. It’s beautiful.”
“Thank you!” Lizzy says.
“Thanks,” says Dawn, who stands up and reaches out and shakes Sarah’s hand. “Did you climb here, too?”
“I did,” says Sarah, and Rosy looks at her, and it’s then that Rosy sees that Sarah’s eyes are again welling with tears. “I just climbed and climbed, and then I was climbing inside that carousel. And then I saw Rose and I was so happy, and I asked her how we could get home. But then I looked at her and I couldn’t tell if she wanted to go or not, and now I don’t know why I’m here or what to do.” By now, Sarah’s crying, and she’s looking at Rosy, who hugs her. “I’m sorry,” whispers Rosy after a long moment filled only with the sounds of the crackling campfire.
“How’s the bell song, Rosy?” Dawn asks.
“I think I’m getting it,” Rosy says into Sarah’s shoulder, her voice muffled. “Even the missing parts.”
“Good, then I think we can get you both back home.”
Rosy looks up. “What? But how?”
“It’s the missing parts of the song. My guess is that you — and you specifically, because it’s your door you have to open — just need to fill the missing parts with your song. But let’s go see if I’m right.”
The four start the long walk back to the carousel. Dawn and Sarah walk ahead of Rosy and Lizzy. They trek through the dunes, and they hear the breakers at the shoreline many dunes away, and they hear the crunch of the white sand under their feet. The air is still and cold, and the beach sand twinkles like the stars above.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Lizzy says to Rosy, as the two trail behind Dawn and Sarah. “And it’s alright.”
Rosy looks at her. “What am I thinking?”
“You’re thinking that you don’t know how to tell me that you’re thinking about leaving.”
“Huh, you don’t miss a beat, even when there’s no music playing,” says Rosy. “You’re right. I have an entire life in the place I climbed here from.”
“But now you can have a life here! With me, Dawn and the penguins — we can start a band!” Lizzy says, almost singing, her eyes aglow. “And you know you can’t really go back. Oh, not like that — of course you can go back, and no one here would try and stop you. But you can never go back to the way things were. No one can. Past things’re past.”
“What do you mean?” Rosy asks. “I only just left.”
“I know, but it’s like that rickety old carousel and its broken bell song. It looks and sounds the same every time it goes ‘round, but it’s not. If you look and listen close, it’s different in almost entirely new ways each time it goes. And I’m sorry but I saw your eyes at the campfire just now, and it looks like you might need a new kind of go-round.”
It’s darker now, and it’s a moment or two before Rosy realizes that Lizzy’s no longer by her side. She looks back, and in the moonlight Rosy sees Lizzy’s figure sitting in the sand on the slopes of a dune. Through the breakers Rosy can hear Lizzy crying, and she goes to Lizzy and sits by her side.
“You can’t leave,” Lizzy whispers through a sob before sniffing a wet sniff. “If you leave it’ll be just me at the carousel again. Do you know what I tell those horses every day that I play? I tell ‘em: ‘Now if you see anybody who looks lost, you let ‘em ride you till they’re safe and we can look after them.’” Lizzy looks up at Rosy. The moonlight turns Lizzy’s tear streaks silver, and the two hug, and as they hug Rosy feels that this moment will one day be a memory that could, given the right notes, be summoned from nothing.
~
At the carousel, Rosy stands at her bells, holding her mallets. Sarah sits on the horse she rode into this world on. Her eyes are on the hole in the carousel platform, and she holds the hemp rope ready.
“We’ll stand with you and play along when the carousel starts,” Dawn tells Rosy. Lizzy, standing and holding her accordion, says nothing.
The carousel starts revolving, and the three start playing. The waltz they play makes the yellow lights on the carousel glow bright, and then, as Rosy fills in the missing bell parts with her own song, all the wooden horses come to life and start galloping their way around the carousel.
“Rose! It’s open! Rose!” Sarah cries as the carousel comes to a stop and the song fades away.
“Be right there,” Rosy says quietly, though Sarah’s already disappeared down the taught rope and through the doorway. Rosy looks at Lizzy, whose eyes are downcast, and then at Dawn.
“You’d better go before the carousel starts up again,” Dawn says. “If it starts without your bell song the doorway’ll shut again.”
Rosy steps up onto the carousel platform, and she finds her wooden horse. She peers down through the carousel’s inner machinery, and sees Sarah down in the climbing gym, looking up at her through the white light. Rosy grips the hemp rope, but does not fasten it to her harness.
“I don’t know what to do,” she whispers under her breath.
“No one does, miss,” the horse says, turning its head. “You just make a choice, and then live with the ripples your choice makes.”
“You mean it doesn’t matter where I go?”
“Oh, it does. But you can’t always know how it matters until later. And if it wasn’t the right choice, then you choose again until you can’t choose anything anymore, and that’s all anyone can really do.”
“But how’ll I know if my choice was the right one?”
The horse, however, is still and wooden once again. A moment passes, and a mechanical bell tings from somewhere inside the carousel. Rosy hears Lizzy drop a coin into her box, and, as the carousel starts moving again, she lets the rope drop through the doorway and she hears Dawn play a low note that sounds like warm honey. 