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Mr. Grey watched a broad range of facial expressions meld into one collective, approving look. He watched robes of myriad patterns - butterflies, wagon wheels, clouds, shoes, socks, lanterns, torches, bugs, birds, everything ever existent under boy sun or daughter moon - rustle with applause. All those people strands sucked into the dome from the outer plaza, now formed an enormous Wine Medo host. As one they rose from alternating bean-cushion and flower-cushion seats. Their applause rattled the glass. Some stamped their feet. Some even shouldered their neighbors. The faces, and the robes, and the cheering, stamping, clamor; all of it bloomed under the humid, tart light streaming through the grassglass globe.
Ahead of Mr. Grey, on the central stage of pale reeds, the performer thus acclaimed bowed low and long. He wore a crinkled tinfoil robe and a crinkled tinfoil bandanna, and carried a shiny, curvy fiddle. He waved the fiddle in one hand and the foil bandanna in the other for a final flourish. Then he strode, crinkling all the way, and disappeared down the stairs on the opposite side of the stage.
Two performers stood ahead of Mr. Grey. The next one in line mounted the stage. The applause returned to a budding state. The performer set a cat skull on the pale reed floor - his grand treasure for the piece - and began to play.
Mr. Grey held his violin out stiffly and slowly. He inspected both it and the bow for perhaps the hundredth time. Anything to avoid the eyes in the people sea.
But Mr. Grey had so much more to look for in that dense throng! His eyes turned away from his fiddle. He tried concentrating on the current piece. His ears attended this newest performer. The notes were good - beautiful - but they could only hold his ears. Mr. Grey returned to the eyes, almost against his will. The grey orbs sorted the faces; tossing aside the unfamiliar, seeking those he knew.
Here was the puckered mug of an old man, with caterpillar eyebrows crawling across his forehead. This small-voiced elder had hired Mr. Grey to play at his epoch-ly yard sale. He’d paid Mr. Grey with his thanks, plus a handful of shiny pebbles. There was the gaggle of old women from the stove house. They wore their diverse robes of candlesticks, poetrees, garden rakes, and Sourbeak Hoppers respectively. In another fragment of the crowd, Mr. Grey picked out lord Pygmy-Footed-Snake’s single eyes. Around him sat the accompanying soldiers and attending doctor. They reclined in their flower-seats beneath comforters and blankets.
Mr. Grey hardly had time for a mechanical wave to these familiar faces and an immediate relocation of his eyes, when another former client waved for his attention. It surprised him to find so many of his small-gig patrons attending the concert. Surely they couldn’t all have come for him? Not every low-paying job had gone well. Yet all who knew and saw him smiled.
Mr. Grey sprung his eyes from the trap of another friendly set. He ran them up the auditorium stairs, along the scrolled iron handrail, towards the back of the theater. There the eyes stumbled into Ms. Maysey.
The valetudinarian perched atop a bean-sprout seat. With one hand she applied antiodor perfume; with the other she held her smoking pipe. The mice in her hair flinched alternately at each new note in the performer’s enchantment. Her eyes caught Mr. Grey’s. She smiled. He waved. Their eyes flicked apart.
Mr. Grey’s eyes hustled down a row of back seats. The eyes moved cautiously and steadily past the audience without knocking into the watchers’ knees. The eyes hurried past silken robes and corduroy robes and reclaimed-robes of plastic and used tissues. The eyes avoided uncomfortable lingering with any one face. Mr. Grey’s eyes wandered; stumbling against familiar eyes; cringing from new ones; two lost, restless grey orbs.
Then Mr. Grey’s eyes landed on his big-eared, big-nosed, no-eyed teacher. Nesting-Inside-Pots.
Pots couldn’t see him, of course. And she’d have no way of knowing he saw her. At some point after finding a flower-seat, she must have asked a neighbor where Mr. Grey stood. Pots now faced sightlessly in his direction. She maintained an unbroken, friendly smile, with two thumbs pointed at the grassglass roof.
Mr. Grey closed his eyes. He breathed through his nose. He straightened out his hair, mustache, and robe. When he opened his eyes again, they were grey and still. He let them rest on amiable Pots for a moment more.
Then he heard the performer on stage reach a trilling, crashing stop; the conclusion of another grand piece. The faces had so distracted Mr. Grey that he’d missed the enchantment’s effect. The respectful silence once more broke into a ringing wave of cheering, stomping, and applause. Mr. Grey looked, calm and aimless, over the confusion.
Mr. Grey’s eyes rolled along the upper boxes. They caught suddenly on another set. The cold, grey eyes attached to a cold, translucent pair. The latter sat in a head with fog hair and fog beard.
Lord Blushing-Inside-Snow looked on Mr. Grey from his high, private box. He wore the same robe of ivory feathers; it gave him the dinner-contemplating air of a snow owl. He fluttered his pale face with the four-gumdrop-patterned fan. Each little wave of air - like each new flake of snow on a mound - added chill to his mien.
Their eyes connected for a fraction of a tock. Had the look lingered, it might have devolved to a battle of stares; the kind of battle Mr. Grey never lost. But Lord Snow kept his eyes from lingering. He looked away, but he also inclined his neck. Mr. Grey just caught the slight nod amidst the morass of cheering surrounding the lord. Lord Snow had nodded toward the next contestant.
Mr. Grey turned to the performer. The woman was just mounting the stage as the crowd sank back to their flower and bean seats. She was the last in front of him; the last to play before Mr. Grey faced the crowd.
Mr. Grey saw few of her physical features. A fox mask with a hundred whiskers hid her face. Her robe was fur - of the same creature - and its long sleeves covered her hands. Only her fingers, wrinkly and pale, showed below the cuff. She curled them over the handle of a Clydesdale-hair bow, and around the neck of a violin in the shape of a goose. On the pale reed stage she placed her grand treasure; a bottle of octogenarian tears.
Mr. Grey soon forgot all consideration of her mask or her hands. Mr. Grey, like every favored soul under the grassglass dome that day, had his sense stolen by her playing.
Mr. Grey’s eyes ceased their aimless roving over the crowd. He watched every push and draw of the bow across the strings. He watched - treasured, admired, was awestruck by - every subtle pounce of the fingers. He watched the shaking vibrato of the hands; at once sublime and horrible; a seizure dance. He watched the fox woman dance too; swaying in time with her music; her body somehow matching her hands, as though the swish of a sleeve or the nudge of a hip were integral parts of the piece; the masterful passion of the enchanter given necessary release in dance. And his eyes danced with her.
Mr. Grey’s ears danced too, but with cascades of alternating low notes and high notes. The notes sounded at once improvised and intended; creative and orderly. As the music persisted the notes formed into architectural shapes, building a melodious palace, from its bass foundations to its trebling pinnacle. The goose-violin purred, slow and soft, like a cat. The goose-violin bellowed in a sudden dragon engine sprint.
And then there was Mr. Grey’s nose. Undefended by cologne. The black-sheep of his senses. Dull beside the others. Slow on the draw.
What a tale that nose told after!
This master’s enchantment dealt in smell. Mr. Grey’s nose - the noses of the audience - absorbed an olfactory cannonade. The diverse notes hopping through the air carried a pungent panoply. When the notes were quiet, Mr. Grey smelled a country home, a baked goulash of apples, cinnamon, and nutmeg seeping from an oven. When the notes were quick and high, fresh laundry and lavender saturated the dome’s atmosphere. Slow notes were sometimes caramel, sometimes chocolate, sometimes peanut butter, but always sticky and fuddling on the brain. And when all these notes melded together, in rapid, strange combinations, the diverse scents melded too.
The aromatic promenade held the noses’ attention. And the player held the eyes’. And the music held the ears’. Only their tongues were spared. And throughout the performance, not a syllable was said.
The octogenarian tears evaporated. The fiddling master ended her overtures with a long, low, quiet note, and the smell of a harvest field.
Mr. Grey understood victory wasn’t possible. He’d expected some truly grand enchantments at this contest. He’d realized nobody would be shaving faces or tying shoes. In the performances before this fox-masked woman’s, he’d witnessed remarkable effects: blocks of ice shaped into miniature castles, assistants vanishing from crates without hidden doors, combining and dispersing of shadows to create spotlights. But Mr. Grey had never known, from experience or story, an effect so perfectly suited to contests. The combination of dance, song, and smell captivated the crowd. Mr. Grey understood why Lord Snow had pointed out this master. Any hope of victory collapsed against such an obstacle.
As the crowd rose in their largest cheer yet, and the fox-masked player bowed before her exit, Mr. Grey searched the crowd. He looked for Tom’s whiskered face. Mr. Grey hadn’t seen Tom before, and didn’t see him now. He saw Pots, alternately clapping and giving him the double thumbs up. He appreciated her support, but it seemed somehow lesser now, with his forthcoming loss.
Mr. Grey considered how he could escape unnoticed. He forgot Lord Snake’s treasure gift, and his promise to play, and the advice of the boot Ogur, and the support of Pots. Mr. Grey wanted only not to follow the fox-masked woman’s enchantment.
And then he noticed a patch of sitters among the standing crowd. They were a cluster of young girls and boys.
At their center sat Honeydew.
Mr. Grey singled her out with her robe of sunflower-eyes. One of the students stood to applaud, but Honeydew set a hand to the child’s shoulder and pushed it gently back to the flower-seat. She caught Mr. Grey’s eyes in her dark ones. She didn’t smile, or wave, or give a supportive thumbs-up. She gave him one nod; like Lord Snow’s, but for him alone.
Mr. Grey took another steadying breath. He searched for a comfortable thing to remember. His ticker was still in Honeydew’s care. He hadn’t had time to get it from her. But the violin in his hand felt smooth, familiar. He focused on it, felt its comfortable weight on his shoulder, the tightness of its strings.
The fox mask woman in the fox fur robe left the stage. The applause faded. The people sat.
Mr. Grey mounted the stage with six quick steps. He walked over and stood in its exact center. He turned to face the audience. He set the old boot - no longer an Ogur, still a grand treasure - on the floor before him. His grey eyes remained open, but he didn’t see the crowd’s eyes. He saw Honeydew, back at her wheelhouse, accepting his vacation invitation.
Mr. Grey plucked at each string once to check its tuning, brought the bow to the strings, and played.
This has been In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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