c 1990  Angelia Sparrow

 Christina Rossetti was wrong.  Perhaps, in the halcyon, pre-Raphaelite
 days, it was a market.  Now it is a dance.  The music is unearthly and
 the dancers perform gyrations no mortal can match.  The memory capers
 even now behind closed eyelids, but is not translatable to any Laban
 chart, that modern butterfly box in which to capture and pin the dancer's
 steps for eternity.  The music twists in my brain like a serpent,
 poisoning my thoughts and will.

 Daily, I grow more distracted, remembering to do fewer of the necessities
 like eat or sleep.  I crave the sound of the music that tortured me for
 years.  Knowing I will never hear it again is an even more unbearable
 torture.  But I am no delicate, pre-Raphaelite blossom to pine away at
 the window, watching for small crooked dancers I will never see again.
 Nor am I a Lovecraftian hero to blow my brains out at the first sign of
 insanity.  Yet, as I sit here, my gaze is drawn more and more to the
 window, and on the desk before me is an array of perfectly legal, yet
 completely lethal toys.  They will be used if my last hope fails.

 I heard the goblin music first when I was thirteen, on the night I became
 a woman.  The shrill pipes twined in the cramps like fingers of wire, and
 the odd, variable count drums matched my heartbeat.  I lay in my narrow
 child's bed, already too short for my rapidly-growing frame, and
 listened, wanting to dance more than I had ever wanted anything.

 After that, they played every full moon.  I spoke of the music to my
 mother, but she laughed at my imagination.  My stepfather beat me for
 lying, and my father insisted I was only trying to get attention.  One of
 my friends laughed at the notion, and the next day it was common
 knowledge at school.  Only Laura understood.  She heard the goblin music
 too on the full moon.  She said she planned to dance with them next
 month.

 I warned her not to, citing Rossetti and other authoritative sources,
 reminding her that time flows different for the Unseelie Court than for
 us.  She knew all this anyway.   On the next full moon, we listened
 together, holding each other back.  We tried taping the sound, but all
 that came was tape hiss.  Under the full moon. crooked shadows leaped and
 danced on the green lawn.

 So it went for five years.  The temptation never waned, but with its
 regularity, I learned to anticipate it and resist it.  When I left for
 college, I thought I might leave the goblins behind.  The song was
 slower, older and somehow richer in the Ozark hills, but it came none the
 less.  My room-mate was a dull, pragmatic girl who disavowed all forms of
 the supernatural from organized religion to ESPer powers and especially
 goblins.  She did not hear the music and thought me slightly mad.  I
 thought her deaf.

 I considered perhaps only my virginity caused me to hear.  I remedied the
 situation only to find the song louder and changed in a subtly sensual
 way.

 The night after my last exam, the last night I would hear the Ozark
 variant for a time, I went.

 The goblin dancers led me far afield, to a wild forest clearing under the
 cold December stars.  The music was louder than ever, seeming to come
 from the huge bonfire, and I truly watched the dancers for the first
 time.  Cautiously, once I had sorted out the pattern of the dance, I
 joined them.

 The dance was old; older than humanity, older than the mountains we
 danced among, older than time itself.  Wildly frantic, yet beautiful
 beyond belief, the images are beyond my capacity to describe, yet they
 play endlessly on the movie- screen of my mind.  My field is mathematics,
 and the equations of the dancers' movements elude me.  My hobby is dance,
 but I cannot choreograph their steps.

 The January full moon came and went, with no music.  I was puzzled, but
 relieved.  In February, again there was no music, and I worried.  March
 was a blue moon month.  The first came, and I panicked.  The second is
 tonight.

 As I write, I hear Laura's knock on the door.  I have rigged the keyboard
 to an approximation of the goblin pipes and created the variable beat
 pattern for the rhythm pad.  Laura's field is music.  If anyone can bring
 the goblin song back, it is she.  Looking through the window, I see the
 same dark circles and hollow eyes as my own.  She fumbles with a stack of
 Laban charts as she knocks again.  She, too, has danced under the full
 moon and the music is stilled for her as well.