THE SONGBIRDS CAGE

Wren's POV

The pain starts in my left hip the way it always does a low, patient ache that wakes up about an hour before I do, like it wants a head start. By the time I've pulled myself upright and swung my legs over the edge of the bed, it's already climbed all the way down to my knee, settling in for the night's work.

I don't fight it anymore. Fighting it just makes it louder.

I wrap my hand around the cane leaning against my nightstand plain, black, no decoration, because decoration invites questions and I stand. There's a rhythm to it now, after six years. Weight on the right. Cane forward. The left leg drags itself into line like it's still deciding whether it wants to cooperate tonight. Some nights it does. Some nights it makes me pay for every step between here and the door.

Tonight, it lets me go easy. Small mercies.

I don't look in the mirror on my way out. I know what's there, a woman who used to move like water and now moves like something being poured out of a cracked jug, careful, uneven, always a little afraid of spilling. I stopped needing the mirror to remind me a long time ago.

The walk to The Blue Note takes eleven minutes if my hip is kind, closer to twenty if it isn't. Tonight it's kind, so I let myself notice things the smell of rain that hasn't started yet, the flicker of the streetlamp outside Mr Anwar's shuttered grocery, the particular blue-black colour the sky goes right before a city finally decides to be quiet. This is the only hour of my day that belongs entirely to me, the walk and the two hours after it. Everything else belongs to survival. This belongs to breathing.

The bar doesn't have a sign anymore, it fell years before I got here and nobody bothered fixing it, which tells you everything you need to know about the kind of place it is. Low ceilings. Low light. Low expectations from everyone who walks through the door, which suits me fine, because low expectations are the closest thing to safety I've found since the accident.

I don't call it "the accident" out loud. Not even in my own head, most nights. It's just before and after. Before, I could run. Before, I didn't flinch when a man raised his hand too fast near me, because I trusted my own legs to get me out of the way. After is this body that keeps a ledger of everything it can no longer promise me, and collects on it daily.

Marek's already got my seat at the piano wiped down and my glass of water poured when I come in. He doesn't say much. Does not ask why a woman who once allegedly, according to the two or three regulars who claim to have heard rumours,  could've played concert halls chooses to play for drunks and dealers and men who leave their guns visible under their jackets like it's a fashion choice. I like that about him. He lets me be exactly as unexplained as I need to be.

I sit. The bench creaks the same complaint it always does. My hip screams once, briefly, in protest of the angle, and then settles, the way it always does once I stop asking it to hold weight and start asking it to be still.

And then I put my hands on the keys, and for a little while, I am not broken anywhere at all.

I don't know how to describe what happens when I play to anyone who hasn't felt it. It isn't escape, exactly,escape implies I'm running from something, and this isn't running. This is my arrival. This is the only place I've found since (after)where my body isn't a list of things it used to do better. My fingers don't limp. My voice doesn't drag its left side behind it, apologising. When I sing, I am simply a woman making something beautiful in a room that doesn't deserve it and doesn't ask why.

Tonight I play the Rachmaninoff piece first, the one that hurts in the good way, and then I let my voice slide into something older, something my mother used to hum over the stove before she left the memory of herself in a hospital bed and never came back to it. The bar goes quiet in that specific way it goes quiet for me not the respectful hush of a real audience, but something rougher, more honest. Men who kill for a living stop talking mid-sentence. Nobody claps. Nobody has to.

For eleven minutes and forty seconds, I am not the girl who got left on a sidewalk to bleed while three men laughed and walked away. I am not a cautionary tale whispered about by people who think I can't hear them. I am just a voice, and a room that believes it.

It's the last song of the set, my fingers already slowing toward the final chord when I feel it.

A shift in the air near the door. The particular quality of attention that makes the hair rise along my arms before my mind catches up to explain why.

I don't stop playing. I've learned not to stop playing, not for anything, because stopping means looking, and looking means being seen looking.

But my eyes lift anyway, just barely, just enough to catch the shape of a man standing just inside the doorway who has absolutely no business being in a bar like this one tailored, still, watching me with an intensity that has nothing to do with the music and everything to do with something I can't name yet.

He isn't smiling. He isn't reaching for a drink.

He's looking at me like he already knows exactly who I used to be and like he's been waiting a very long time to find out who I've become.

The last chord dies under my fingers.

He doesn't move. Neither do I.

And somewhere behind my ribs, some old, buried instinct I thought the accident had beaten out of me for good starts screaming one word, over and over.

Run………