Imagine a little house on a quiet street in a quiet town. The house is comfortable like a thread-bare bathrobe, a fixture in a wildly changing world. Imagine a mother and a father for this house; the mother shall be described as a porcelain ballerina, forever graceful, eternally turning around and around, arms raised. Imagine the father of this house to be a tired man, a bespectacled, intelligent man, forever sitting at the kitchen table and contemplating the secrets of the universe. Imagine the house in silent, unchanging stasis - mother turns lovely endless pirouettes, Father grows more leaden with every click of the clock above the sink.
How, then, would it be for the child of this household? She walked on eggshells, sharply aware of the fragility of her parents; she was angry that they were uncaring and unloving and alone. She would have been lonely. The girl, a bird too long trapped in a cage, gathered energy, gathered, gathered, until at the first opportunity she burst forth: a shining, soaring dove -Sparrow! - shooting forth from the rooftops.
~
Sparrow was beautiful. She walked lightly, sprightly, and when she ran she did not lose an ounce of grace. her arms moved the air as though it was water. She appeared to float. With elegance like Sparrow's it did not matter that her eyes were too far apart, that her lips and cheeks were too taut, that there were five small hairs between her eyebrows.
When Sparrow's arms went up, the world paused to await direction. When Sparrow danced, when she disappeared into a golden, gleaming swirl, the tides of the universe took care to echo her motions. Sparrow became motion. The girl with the brown hair, with the invisible wings, was the world's secret conductor.
~
Sparrow, around whom the world turned, approached the boy with the red-rimmed eyes. "Do I know you?"
The boy scowled through a curtain of blue-dyed hair. "No," he said, like a sulking child.
A pause. For a moment the world-dance lacked its center polarity. The universe was a satellite with nothing to orbit. Then Sparrow spoke again. "Then why were you watching me?"
He looked at his black-painted fingernails. "Just thinking about the vapidity that has become of celebrated norm in American public education."
Sparrow smiled a smile that could have powered a city. "Okay, then. See you around..." She searched for a name.
"Ian."
"Right." And she was gone, back to a glorious life at the center of it all.
~
Flourescent hallways were her stage. Classrooms worshipped her. She had friends -oh yes, such wonderful friends - and they spun a heady fast-track around and around her. Sparrow, a golden arc, liquid motion, artfully illustrated the universe.
~
Failing English. Ditto math. Ditto chemisty. Acing gym. Sparrow had no interest in the dry, disconnected world of acedemia. For her, that richer, sun-drenched world known as Freedom.
~
For longer pauses now, the world lacked its central dancer. For longer pauses she was just a girl, just somebody trying to do the right thing. She was just the daughter of a stationary household. When she and the blue-haired, pale-faced Ian slipped with giddy grins into the janitorial closet, when they settled onto overturned buckets in the dark, Sparrow was just a kid with a heart and a dream, and Ian was just a boy.
~
"What is beauty?" she said.
He: "Beauty is that which inspires.
Sparrow: "The Holocaust inspired the world to address anti-Semitism and stuff, but it wasn't beautiful."
Ian smiled; in the dark, his wasn't a great luminous smile, but a happy one, a simple one. "Beauty is the product of inspiration."
For a tiny instant the air inside their shared dark space flittered away. In that millisecond, Sparrow vanished; she because a principle of motion, a glistening evolution of gold, dance incarnate. She was greater than her physicality, more emotion than could fit into one girl-body. She was the sweeping, rolling center of the universe. "I've got to get to class," she muttered into the once-more-air-filled space. "Bye, Ian."
And with the rebecoming of the dancer, the universe was in order again, and the caged adolescents had their idol, and they rotated around her, their gleaming sun, Sparrow.
On the outside, beyond the swirling disciples and whirling acquaintances, the boy with the red-rimmed eyes dug his fingers deep into his pockets and whispered almost reverently, "Sparrow."
~
Her world was not perfect. Oh, not perfect. When the parties were over, when the once-sun-warmed sidewalks turned cool with dusk, the secret conductor traced a line of spider's silk to the small house on the quiet street. Silently she skirted the peripheries of her parents' unchanging lives, watched from a ducky distance as hee mother shed a porcelain tear, as pensive Father decayed into convalescence. And then she slept, flat on her back, eyes squeezed shut, barely breathing.
Oh no, certainly not perfect. Sometimes on the long, cold walks home she would stop, paralyzed by some nameless emotion that welled up within her like a cancer, choking everything in its path. Sometimes her thoughts veered off to dark meanderings. Strange, heavy, dripping forests filled the spaces between waking and sleeping; leering faces, beastly grins, grotesque laughs followed her down corridors of sleep.
But she always woke up. Every day she got out of bed, slipped past pensive Father and porcelain mother and convinced herself to smile. She willed herself to motion, willed herself to fill that empty hole at the center of the universe.
~
"What is love?" Sparrow asked in the familiar dark of the janitorial closet.
"I can't be sure," Ian said slowly. He flicked his head to clear the hair from his eyes. "But I think it might feel something like this."
The stillness of the closet was made alive by the her glory, his adoration. The air was as sharp as ice on skin. Sparrow laughed, and all of creation rejoiced.
~
Sparrow died on a Wednesday.
~
This is what Ian said to the wooden coffin, which was the color of her hair:
"I'll miss the way your fingers danced even when you were sitting. I'll miss the way you listened. I'll miss that you didn't judge me, and how kind you were. I'll miss your weird taste in shoes. I'll miss how gentle you were. Goodbye, Sparrow."
~
On that Wednesday, the day they found her dangling from the chandelier, they also found a note. This is what it said:
"Dear Ian: Thank you."
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For anyone who read my 12:04 piece, this is not the same Sparrow. I have a name thing. The names just express emotions, so a lot of my characters who are symbols of the same emotions have the same names.
). 
