A Frolic of Children

by Robin Dalton

  * * *

  Guitar music woke Mallie from her slumber. It was such a bright night that moonlight had crept all the way across the room she shared with Tallie, and yet the faint sounds of guitar music filtered in through the open window.

  Slowly, cautiously, Mallie got out of bed, crept towards the open window, and leapt onto the sill to see.

  She could not see, even with all the light scattered across the night sky to aid her eyes. There was no sign of who might be playing. The fact that someone was playing was undeniable, however, with the sound of music gliding through the world like a great, colorfurl bird.

  The song was powerful and intoxicating, free and light and merry. It reached into her semi-conscious mind and touched something deep, something hidden, but something nevertheless impossible to ignore. Mallie strained, torn between the desire to go and the knowledge that she had to stay. The song seemed to wrap her up, and though there were no words it whispered in her ear.

  Dance…dance…dance…

  “Move over!” said Tallie, wriggling up next to her. He looked at her and she looked at him, together on the windowsill in the moonlight.

  “Mother will punish us,” he said hollowly.

  “I’m not tired anymore,” said Mallie, folding her arms. “You can stay if you want. You’re the good brother.”

  He smiled wanly. “Not anymore. Let’s go, Mal.”

  She grinned, and hugged him tightly. “You got it, Tal!”

  Together, paw-in-paw, they leapt from the windowsill and landed lightly on the cobbled street. As soon as they felt the ground beneath their feet, Tallie released her paw and twirled away. His feet beat out a tattoo on the ground as he danced. Mallie quickly found that her own feet were doing the same. They grinned at each other and laughed, as they followed their feet and danced. They leapt and twirled and skipped in their night clothes on the lonely streets.

  Except that the streets were not so lonely. Mallie saw more dark figures crawling out of windows or inching out of doors. They were all small, all children. They were all beginning to dance.

  Perhaps most importantly, they were all dancing in one direction.

  Mallie realized where they were all being led before they were led there. That didn’t make the sight of the plaza with its little fountain in the center any less of a shock. All the same there was the fountain, and there was the girl. She still sat on the fountain’s edge, but her back was bowed over a guitar. Her eyes were still closed, but she did not need to see as her fingers strummed out the enchanting melody.

  Then, so suddenly that the last note hung in the air lost and forlorn, she stopped. Mallie stumbled to a stop, and Tallie tripped and fell. Mallie stared at the girl, and she was not the only one. Other Long Eared children stared at the stranger. Their huge, tired eyes gleamed with reflected light and undisguised hope, but the girl was still again. Still as a statue, and perhaps that was all she’d ever been.

  Mallie felt her lower lip start to quiver. Gone was the magic. Gone was the melody. Gone was the dance. She felt abandoned, adrift, and plain.

  Slowly, the guitarist got to her feet. Still balancing on the edge of the fountain, she slowly opened her eyes and looked at them all. She smiled dimly.

  You came.

  Her mouth never moved, the words were never said, but Mallie remembered hearing them anyway.

  Quick as a flash, she struck a note on the guitar. They all tensed, but nothing followed. She looked at them again, almost curiously.

  You came. You came when I called.

  Another note. They tensed again.

  Thank you.

  This time, the note was followed by another note. More came after it, and then more still, and Mallie’s feet were tapping again.

  Thank you all.

  Tallie was starting to smile again, and there was movement all throughout the crowd. The melody was faint and not as quick, but it was still causing a stir of anticipation and delight.

  The girl smiled radiantly at them all. The guitar strings almost seemed to glitter like stars with how fast they were being played.

  How wonderful. Shall we dance?

  They did.

  Mallie’s recollections of the remainder of the dance were hazy. She remembered images and sensations, rather than motions, perhaps because the motions were unending.

  She remember Tallie tripping and falling flat on his nose more times than could be healthy, falling as the beat sometimes became too much for his small body to keep up with. But she also remembered that her brother never stopped laughing.

  She remembered her best friend, Binnie, flipping and spiraling up into the air, higher and higher until she was silhouetted against the moon, eyes closed in a countenance of absolute peace.

  She remembered aches in her paws and a blaze of music in her mind.

  At point during the night, she remembered the girl with wings, the stranger who had started all of this, materializing in front of her. She did not hold the guitar anymore, but the melody continued to beat out its tune and pull their strings as it strummed its own

  “Who are you?” she remembered asking.

  The girl smiled at her, before kicking up her feet and beginning her own dance. It was a wild dance, with feet beating and feathers flying. And, as Mallie watched entranced, she remembered the girl speaking.

  I am no one. I am not a person. I am not a ‘Long Ear’. I am Dance. That is all. I am The Dance!

  The next thing Mallie remembered was being flat on her back, staring at the sky as the world spun around her. She managed to turn her head, and when she did it was to see Tallie curled up next to her and peacefully fast asleep. Others were collapsed all around them, spread out in a disorganized heap all around the square. They were all exhausted, all asleep.

  Mallie blinked muzzily, before she realized what had awoken her. Sunlight was streaming down from on high. The deep blue of night turned the bright, almost fuzzy pink of morning. She squinted and wriggled her nose in agitation as the light continued to creep over her face, banishing sleep away.

  The sun was rising. It took some time for even this simple idea to fully process in her muzzy mind. The barest traces of urgency came with it, but still proved enough to move Mallie up into a sitting position, drawing her paws across her eyes to rub away the sleep. The sun was rising. The sun was rising, but none of them were in their beds, where they had been put safe and sound by their parents last night. No, they were all here. They were outside, and exposed, where they were not supposed to be.

  “Tallie,” she mumbled. She reached over and shook her brother by the shoulder. “Tallie, wake up.”

  He mumbled something unintelligible. He rolled over onto his back and in doing so was forced to scrunch up his eyes against the sunlight. Still, he did not properly wake. Mallie, who found herself coming more and more mercilessly awake by the moment, shook him harder. “Tallie! Tallie, we’re gonna get in trouble!”

  Tallie opened one eye. The mention of “getting in trouble” was enough to rouse him. It always was, for her good and sensible brother that Mother secretly favored. “M-Mallie?”

  Mallie managed to make it to her feet, though she wobbled precariously in doing so. Her legs felt like jelly, except she imagined that jelly did not ache so much. She reached down, grabbed her brother’s paws, and heaved. She pulled and struggled, and finally yanked Tallie upright. “We’ve gotta go home,” she whispered, casting an anxious glance around the square. There were so many others, so many other children, all still fast asleep. “We’re gonna get in trouble,” she repeated, because it was something to say that would keep Tallie awake.

  Tallie frowned and managed to go from a sitting to a standing position without much more trouble. “Trouble,” he repeated, muzzily. “We’re gonna get in trouble?”

  Mallie nodded, still gripping his paw with her’s. “Mother won’t be happy if she sees us out this early!” she whispered fiercely.

  Tallie nodded, and she could see him coming more awake n
ow as well and knew she had nothing more to worry about in that regard. Her little brother turned his gaze towards home. “She won’t,” he agreed, and his voice was stronger. “We’ve gotta go home.”

  “We’ve gotta go home.”

  Paw in paw, they made their way through the square, past huddled forms of other sleeping children. Even in their exhaustion, the brother and sister knew that they should run, should fly over the streets to the window they had clambered from the previous night. But they could not. Their paws ached terribly. Every step made them throb in pain. Those aches and pains from a night spent dancing and a morning spent sleeping on hard-packed clay seemed as though it was their price to pay for what had happened last night.

  She still couldn’t help but think that it was worth it.

  All the same, Mallie frowned, trying to think through the exhaustion. She tried to remember just what had happened last night. She remembered the music. She remembered the stranger. She remembered the dancing. Though she knew it had all happened, however, the events of the night were all still a haze, all still a blur. She still couldn’t recall just what had drawn her out last night to meet the Stranger at all. She had no idea what she’d been thinking, which would be unfortunate when Mother demanded as much if they didn’t get home in time.

  They reached the window. Mallie balanced Tallie on her shoulders, then once he had clambered safely onto the windowsill he reached down and pulled her up beside him. They touched down safely on the floor, then went to their respective beds and crawled beneath the blankets.

  It might have been hours or minutes before they heard the curtain pulled forcibly aside. Mallie sat up again, rubbing at her eyes. Her mother was standing there, wooden spoon in one hand and an expression of deep-seated worry on her face. Her father stood slightly behind her mother, brow furrowed as he stared in at them.

  “Oh, thank heavens!” said her mother, letting out her breath in apparent relief.

  “What’s going on?” Mallie asked, fighting back a yawn.

  “Just took a look out the door to check on the washing up,” said her father, folding his paws across his chest. “And we saw the strangest thing!”

  “Children!” added her mother in a hushed voice. “It must have been every child in the village. All fast asleep, right out there in the open where anything might have happened to them.”

  “’Course, we weren’t the only ones who noticed,” said her father, nodding. “People were already coming out to retrieve ‘em, poor little things.”

  “But we just had to make certain that you weren’t out there with them,” Mallie’s mother hurried over and hugged Mallie tightly to her chest. “And here you are, safe and snug. Oh, Mallie dearest!”

  Despite herself, despite her exhaustion, Mallie smiled. Dearest had not gone unnoticed. It seemed that now that all the other children of the village were hopeless delinquents, her mother liked her better. Not as much as Tallie – never as much as Tallie – but her mother like her better. That was fine by Mallie, though she could scarcely believe that something good might have come of their little excursion last night, that aches and pains might be all she had to worry about.

  Now Tallie was stirring, pushing upright and rubbing at his eyes. Just like that, her mother left her to go scoop up Tallie in a tight hug. Mallie got out of bed and padded to the window. She peered outside against the glare of the rising sun.

  There were indeed so many other children scattered around outside. Some she knew, and some she didn’t. There were some adults outside now, too, taking the children that were theirs’ back to their homes. Some looked stern, others worried, others simply relieved. Mallie really couldn’t blame them. The desert was always full of dangerous things that loved tasty children to eat.

  Tallie joined her at the windowsill, along with her mother and her father. Her mother and her father were looking at the children. Mallie and Tallie, however, found themselves looking at something else entirely.

  She’d acquired a cloak, now, with a hood to pull over her head to hide her long, sharp horns and tuck away her arms that were also wings. As she picked her way along the outskirts of the crowd, however, on the other side of the square, the stranger looked back at them and Mallie saw the sunlight reflect off of startlingly dark blue eyes, blue as the sky the night before.

  Then one eye closed in a wink, and the Dancer was gone. Someone else should have seen her, someone should have noticed the stranger who so obviously did not belong even as she was leaving their midst. With their heads bowed to their work, however, or else still closed in sleep, no other Long Ears lifted their heads to look.

  No one ever really spoke of that night again. The children weren’t really punished for being out of their beds at night. The adults accepted that whatever had lured them outside, whatever had brought them all together all at once, was clearly a thing beyond their control. There were discussions of sending for a warlock to put up protective wards around the town, but no one ever did. Mallie’s mother bragged to her friends for a few weeks about her children, her wonderful children, who had not stirred from their beds that night. She bragged for a few weeks, then she let the matter drop and never mentioned it again.

  Mallie and Tallie never mentioned that night again, at least not out loud and certainly never to their mother or their father. And their mother and their father never really seemed to notice the way Mallie skipped when she went to gather water from the well, or how Tallie’s paws would tap out a beat as he chopped vegetables for dinner. The Dancer never returned to that town again, never returned to play her strange music for the children to tempt them from their beds at night. However, it soon proved that she did not have to. For years and years after, Mallie could simply close her eyes and remember. Tallie could do the same. Billie and Shillie and Millo and Mallo and all the children who had danced that night could simply close their eyes and remember the music, remember the way they’d danced that night.

  The Dancer never returned, but she never had to. She’d left the music in their mind. She’d left it as a gift, or perhaps a curse since words to describe it somehow always escaped them. That night remained nothing more than a memory that nevertheless resounded through their bodies, tempting their paws to tap and spin.

  The Dance went on.

  ###

  Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed! If you liked this little story, or maybe if you hated it, perhaps you could do me the honor of leaving a review of your experience with whatever retailer you happened to find this at. A good author always likes to hear that they’ve done well and likes to hear how they might improve even more. Whatever your thoughts, thank you again for taking some time out of your day to read these words of mine. I hope you will take the time to look at and perhaps even enjoy my future works to come.

  --Robin

  Discover Other Titles by Robin Dalton

  Everyday Dangers

  Tea for Two, Justice For All

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  About the Author

  In her downtime from schoolwork, Robin Dalton enjoys writing fanfiction and original fiction alike. In her downtime from that, she enjoys video games, jogging for fun and health, spending time with her friends both online and off, and handicrafts of all kinds. She particularly likes small fluffy animals, especially cats.