Section Eight – Anna Meadors
Sophie has taken form on the couch beside me. She slopes across my lap in the flicker of the television. She has a shape, her arms and legs gathering weight as her body rests upon mine. I drop my hand to her head, her hair beneath my fingers. I listen to her breathing. I can’t see her face but I don’t think she’s crying.
In a few minutes she rises up again, sliding back into place beside me. My hand drifts from her head, following her spine down her back, coming to rest in the open space between us. Her hands are turning gently in her lap, her palms upraised. She takes a deep breath.
“I think I want to go back to the studio, Doug.” She turns to look at me. “Will you go with me?”
I nod. “Of course.”
“I don’t think I could go alone.”
“Do you want to paint?” I ask, trying not to press her, trying to want nothing.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t think I will know ’til I’m there.”
She takes my hand and places it in her lap, kneading it between her warm, damp palms. “Do you mind?”
I shake my head. “I’m off on Wednesday. Want to do it then?”
Her fingers lace into mine. She’s staring straight ahead.
“I know it doesn’t seem like it,” she tells me, her voice low and distant, “but I’m trying to find my way home.”
She turns, our eyes meet, and I’m startled. It seems so long since we’ve seen each other. She says: “I know my trail of breadcrumbs is around here somewhere.”
“Damn birds…” I reply.
“…always eating my breadcrumbs.”
She leans in and kisses me, placing her palm on my chest. It’s a soft, quick kiss, her hand both an intimacy and a barrier.
still/flutter Written by Anna Meadors
Performed at at the Nief Norf Summer Festival, Knoxville, TN, 2016,
recorded by Kevin Eikenberg of Four/Ten Media
Sarah Compton, violin
Sophie Chang, cello
Chelsea Villanueva, Bb clarinet
David Floyd, bass clarinet
Jordan Curcuruto, glockenspiel, snare drum
Colin McCall, vibraphone, snare drum
Anna Meadors has received commissions and performances from ensembles including Rhymes With Opera, UNCG Percussion, Red Clay Saxophone Quartet, Echo Chamber and Isaura String Quartet. She has been a fellow at Yale School of Music’s Norfolk New Music Workshop, the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, So Percussion’s Summer Institute at Princeton University and the LA Philharmonic’s National Composer Intensive. Anna is an active performer in the punk-jazz fuzz-rock trio Joy on Fire, which has toured extensively throughout the east coast and recently released their second album on Procrastination Records. She graduated from Peabody Conservatory with a B.M. in saxophone performance, and from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with an M.M. in Composition; she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Music Composition at Princeton University.
The Cloud Diary Music Project
We sent musicians a synopsis of Cloud Diary and a randomly chosen scene from among 12 scattered throughout the novel and asked them to respond to the scene, musically or aurally. The piece could be of any genre and any duration. It could be music already recorded, adapted, or written specifically for the scene. Find more information here.
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