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with her at all was because I helped her sew. I became a better and better seamstress. I could do the most elaborate embroidery and beadwork with my tiny fingers. I could make roses out of silk; they looked so real you hallucinated their fragrance. Women came from all over the city for my dresses. My aunt never let me wear what I made. I had one black frock and a brown one for Sunday church—the only day she let me out of the house. I didn’t mind the hard work, really, or the plainclothes or even the fact that I couldn’t leave and had no friends. But I wanted to dance. I needed it. Dancing was the only thing I wanted. I would do it in secret. With a child’s wisdom I knew never to let my aunt see. She thought it was a sin.”
    That’s like me, Dirk thought. Like me loving boys, not wanting anyone to know.
    “When she went out I pulled back the carpets. It was very strange. Whenever she went out some beautiful music would start to play in the apartment next door. I learned later that it was Chopin. It was like a magical being from my fairy book had entered my body when I heard the music. I felt the strong center of who I was pulsing with the sound of those fingers on the piano keys; it radiated out through my limbs until I became like a giant butterfly or a silk rose, a waterfall, fire. I never saw anyone come out of the next-door apartment but it didn’t matter—the gift of their music made me feel I had finally found a friend. I danced wildly the story of my parents, of my birth, my life with my aunt. I saw worlds beyond the parlor as if I were soaring through the air on a magic carpet, cities twinkling like fairies or the crowns of giants, and forests green and singing with elves.”
    In just the way that Gazelle had seen those cities and forests, Dirk saw, there before him, a Victorian parlor and a slim girl dancing among coffinlike furniture draped indark shawls. She had a child’s body in old-fashioned white underwear but her eyes and mouth were a woman’s. She was spinning as if she wanted to make herself dizzy, falling to the floor where she twisted and turned and tangled in her pale hair, each motion full of longing. Dirk heard, too, the faint strains of piano music ghosting the air.
    “I danced till I was nauseous and sweating through my underthings,” Gazelle went on. “I had to change before my aunt came home. I knew she was coming because the music always stopped in time for me to change and get back to work. But one day even when the music stopped I kept dancing. I couldn’t stop. I heard the music inside of me still. So that when my aunt came into the room I didn’t even look up. I was kneeling on the floor, running my hands all over my body. Then I opened my eyes and I realized there hadn’t been music for quite a while. My aunt was looking at me with scissors in her eyes.
    “She grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet.
    “ ‘What were you doing?’ she said as if she were snipping pieces out of the air.
    “I told her I was dancing.
    “'Do you know what happens to girls like you?’ my aunt said.
    “I saw the mannequin in the corner. The cloth I had covered it with had slipped off. I imagined that the mannequin had needles sticking out of her body andwas ready to shoot them across the room at me.
    “ ‘Girls who touch themselves grow up ugly,’ my aunt said, like a curse. ‘No one will ever marry you. No one will want you because you will be a little monster. You are the devil’s bride. He plays music in your head.’
    “And it was worse than being whipped. It was as if she had broken my legs with that. I never heard the music again. I never danced. I never told my story.
    “When I bled for the first time a few months later my aunt saw the stains on my underthings and said, ‘You see. You see what happens to girls who touch themselves. They bleed like little monsters. But they don’t die. You will wish you died, I think, because you will always be alone.'”
    “Oh my God,”