Hiding It · The Long Way Down to Morning · Pulse Beat
She did not stop. She told Lindqvist she had a cold and Mira that the doctor had said rest, and then she locked herself in the practice room with the window painted shut, and played, softly, so no…
She did not stop.
She told Lindqvist she had a cold and Mira that the doctor had said rest, and then she locked herself in the practice room with the window painted shut, and played, softly, so no one would hear the third finger lag. She told herself it was not lying. She was resting; she was simply resting at the instrument.
The neurologist had told her what to look for. The finger curling. The tone that went grey. The scale that dissolved in the middle like sugar in tea. She watched all of it happen and played on, with the grim attention of a woman watching her own house burn from inside it.
She lost eight kilos that winter and did not notice. She stopped answering her mother's calls on time, and then at all. Mira slid notes under her door: come to supper, there's soup, I miss you, anika please. She read them, and put them in a drawer, and went back to the wardrobe-sized room where the only thing that mattered was that she had not yet been caught.