“Home,” she said, still not looking.

“Well, so much for the old saying.”

“What?”

“You know… ‘you can’t go home again,’ and all that,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “As far as I know, that’s true.”

“But you said you’re going home now.”

“Yes,” she said. “For the first time. It’s always for the first time. That’s why you can never do it again.”

“It’s a caterpillar,” she told him. “They implanted it in my leg when I was little so that one day I could turn into a beautiful butterfly.”

“I’d like to be there when that happens,” he said.

“I couldn’t imagine it happening any other way.”

He stepped on it, of course. This was what one did with bugs, particularly in the kitchen. Particularly if it was a pest like an ant, not something beneficial. It looked like an ant, though it was hard to tell with its body all smashed up. He had only begun to wonder at a single ant found so far from any window, door, or even an externally-facing wall when he spotted a second one coming up about a foot behind it. Intact, it looked a bit less like an ant. It was ant-ish, but… squarer. Everything about it, its abdomen, the shape of its head and mandibles, its legs, were more regular and angular than an ant’s body.

Termites? he thought. That was what popped into his head when he thought “like an ant, but not”, though he couldn’t say they looked like what he pictured when he thought “termite”. As he squished the second one, he made a mental note to look up what termites looked like, because where there were two there could be others…

And in fact, there was a third one trundling along about half a foot behind the second. He stopped to look around and see if there were any others… and saw that the first one he had stomped on was up and moving around, and the second one was sort of pulling itself back together. He had seen some tough little bugs in his days, he had seen spiders and insects survive smashings that he was sure would have been fatal, but this was something else again. The squished torso looked like it was re-inflating itself, the legs and antennae were straightening themselves out… and now that he was looking at those legs closely, he realized that they couldn’t be termites. Termites were insects, like ants, and that meant six legs. This thing had four pairs… four pairs, and a stray one in the back. Nine legs? He looked back at the third one to make sure he wasn’t just seeing some lingering result of damage to a tail or stinger, but the third one also very clearly had a ninth leg in the rear, articulated and supporting weight and moving with the rest.

He realized that while he’d been staring, the first bug… if it was a bug… had almost reached the base of the kitchen counter. He didn’t know if it meant to climb it or vanish beneath it, but he wasn’t about to let either one happen. The soles of his slippers weren’t exactly hard, so he stomped it and then ground his foot against the floor, twisting and dragging to make sure the bug was mangled. When he lifted his foot, not only were bug parts spread across the tile, but there was a noticeable yellow-and-red stain on the bottom of his slipper.

He repeated the process to the second and third, then got a paper towel and cleaned up the mess. It was disconcerting how much the central masses of the smashed bugs managed to twitch. He was no longer interested in a midnight snack, and went back to bed where he slept fitfully.

It was still early in the morning when he got up and decided to do a search on the internet to see what exactly his nocturnal visitors had been. The image of them was already jumbled up in his head. He went to the kitchen trash can, intent on fishing out the paper towel and seeing if the remains were recognizable enough to aid in identification.

Then a pair of images came to him: the way the abdomens of the bugs had twitched following their destruction, and the way they had pulled themselves back together following his first attempt at killing them. He opened the garbage can and quickly tied off the bag, then rushed it outside and down to the curb with the trash he’d left out the night before.

When it came down to it, he really didn’t want to know that badly.

“No, honey,” her mother had said in a very tired voice. “Those are just lights. Street lights, cars, lights in buildings. Nothing special.”

“Oh,” the girl had said, disappointed, and she’d turned her attention away from the window for the rest of the flight.

On this flight, though, she had been able to see the green and brown of fields and the gray strips that were roads and the tiny-looking buildings, at least for the beginning of it… but as the plane had climbed higher and higher, eventually it had broken through the ceiling of clouds hanging over the city and now when she looked out, clouds were all she could see… a vast and snowy expanse of them.

At least, she thought they were clouds. She was enjoying looking at them, and wasn’t about to ask her mother, just in case they weren’t.

I looked around at the apartment that had never felt like home, at the things I had never wanted in the place of things I’d never thought I could have… I looked at the all things I had never truly owned and that no longer owned me. I looked back on the years that had not so much passed as piled up on top of each other, an unruly, untidy mess of time that I had told myself I would definitely get around to cleaning up, you know… one of these days.

“Because I was never really here,” I said.

If it was hard for her to hear it, it was just as hard to say it.

I was in the hospital, for a muscle biopsy. They put a mask over my face and told me to breathe deeply. The air inside was like nothing I’d ever known… heavy and sticky and sickly-sweet. Things got fuzzy right away. Vision, feeling, the sounds of the doctors’ voices…

Not all the sounds did, though. The “beep… beep… beep…” of some monitoring machine cut through the growing brain fog as clear as a searchlight, and it was the last thing I heard before I drifted off.

It wasn’t the last thing I heard before awakening, though.

That was The Song.

The Song was like nothing I’ve ever heard before, like nothing else I’ve heard since. It seemed to grow from the simple rhythmic pulse of the machine, but it was so much more. There were words and notes and colors and shapes seemed to flow naturally out of the music.

I awoke with the pure and certain knowledge of The Song in my heart, but without a single note of it in my ears. I couldn’t remember how it went, though I had the distinct impression that it was something I’d heard before… possibly years before.

I’ve heard it again twice since then. Once when I had another biopsy a year later, and once as an adult when I was put under after dislocating my arm. It’s been the same song each time. I recognize it. I remember recognizing it, though I don’t remember how it goes.

When I was younger, I was so sure that it was a real song… as in, one that existed out there in the world I knew… that I looked for it, listened for it, perked up my ears every time I thought I heard a snatch of something that might have been it.

I was forever disappointed, of course. The Song might be a real song, but it isn’t going to turn up on the radio some day.

This doesn’t mean I’ve given up on finding it one day. On the contrary, I’m sure that I will. Even if I manage to avoid the sorts of circumstances under which I heard it the first three times, I have every hope of hearing it again, perhaps more clearly than before. It is my sure and certain hope.

All things pass. The Song remains the same.

The light from the kitchen illuminated a few feet of bare gray wall on the left side of the stairs. The first two steps were visible, and the two below that faintly so. On the right, there was nothing but darkness. Somewhere in there was the big looming shape of the furnace, which could roar to life with such sudden noise and ferocity that it could be startling anywhere else in the house.

“I have nothing to fear but fear itself,” the child repeated, leaning into the darkness to reach for the switch on the gray wall. Unable to hit it from the relative safety of the kitchen, the child stepped down onto the first step and reached out again to flip it.

The old switch made an audible click. At the bottom of the stares, a bare, clear bulb burst forth with light then went dark with a pop, leaving the child with an afterimage of itself and a jumbled impression of the cluttered basement.

“I have nothing to fear but fear itself,” the child said, with much less certainty.

There was a shelf straight ahead with a great big flashlight on it, three feet from the bottom of the stairs. All the child had to do was grip the handrail and follow it down, then follow the wall to the shelf.

“I have nothing to fear but fear itself,” the child said, moments before taking a big step up and back, closing the door, and backing out of the kitchen.

Fear, it transpired, was scary enough in and of itself.

I told him that I enjoyed moving in the same general vicinity as music. It seemed like the more honest response. Not knowing how to dance is not the the same thing as not liking it, of course… no more than asking someone if they like to dance is the same as asking them if they would like to dance.

None of this directly relates to the dance that we’ve been doing with each other, though it may yet one day all come to bear some magical night when there is music and he is there and I am there and we both feel like moving closer together.

Yes, I like to dance.

Yes, I’d like to dance.

Yes, I’d like this dance.

What a big difference a little difference can make.

On we dance.