Anna

Dionysius Eckhart was an accountant in 1760's Weimar who worked for the prestigious Hanoverian accounting firm Rolte and Kluse, and whose wife had died in childbirth leaving him alone with his beautiful daughter Anna. The precocious girl became an amazing pianist and by the age of 7 was already giving small concerts at the homes of Herr Eckhart's friends and business associates, one of whom, Herr Wieland, a distant relative of the talented inventor of the popular Bildungsroman, had gifted her with a strange gift, a completely black polished mineral orb, he called "a composing stone". Supposedly it had been originally owned by the great teacher and composer J.G. Albrechtsberger. Herr Wieland did not say that the stone had been given away due to Herr Albrechtsberger's belief that the stone was watching him as he slept, and had caused some upset in the household, Herr Albrechtsberger being of a rather nervous disposition. Herr Wieland simply saw the stone as a lovely gift, and a windfall, and something that a young woman of talent might find interesting or inspirational. For several years, the stone lay inert on a shelf in Anna's bedroom, one of many gifts and trophies she had received as a celebrated amateur pianist, overlooking her small practice piano, but when she had reached the age of 19, she too began to feel distant and slightly alarmed when she pondered it.

One night she had a dream that she was suddenly awake within the confines of her beloved bedroom and that everything was gone, everything that is except for the stone and her and the fireplace which had a comforting fire burning. She was sitting on the floor before it, facing it, and the stone was between her and the flames, and the stone began to grow. And then she awoke.

Several times the dream recurred, but Anna being a very astute and rational person paid no mind to the events, thinking them 'curiosities of the night'. One night however, the stone was much larger, 10 times, then 20, until it completely filled the space of the fireplace, and it was then that stone began to move and change. To her surprise the stone blocked the fireplace hearth opening and began to squeeze deform open and round the hole until the smoothly cut stones began to conform to the spherical body, and then the sphere passed through and into the hearth leaving a round and bubble-like black mineral opening.

Anna was curious and crawled inside the hearth which was completely black yet still warm. She felt with her hands and sure enough the entire surface was smooth and spherical, and warm in the darkness. She decided the hearth had become an entry into the stone and so she entered it, and still the stone was growing so that she was able to stand up as if in another room, but there was no other room on this side of the wall, for the wall was an external one.

It was then that she began to hear a curious tinkling sound, a sound like small pebbles bouncing off all sides of a thin glass sphere, a strange and abstract music. The music somehow comforted Anna, for it registered with her as a 'natural abstraction deformed by the ideal'.. She was rapt now and wrapped as well in the superlative darkness of the spherical stone. The hearth hole had closed, and Anna was smiling, but unseen by anyone in an absolute and complete darkness, and then the tinkling grew louder, louder until it was deafening, and then it happened, the bubble popped.

The force was violent and alien, and Anna's clothes were torn from her pale body, millions of black pebbles of darkness surrounded her completely like a fluid, but still Anna was in rapture. She was breathing, she was swimming, and somehow dancing in a way she had not known that bodies could dance, part flying, part swimming, part dancing, and all of it, in complete darkness, but after awhile Anna's mind began to question whether or not this was actually a dream or had somehow become real. It was in that moment of reflection, that the pebbles began to press down on her, and the more she worried and pondered her position, the harder the pebbles began to press into her body until she could not breathe at all, until she struggled. In her struggling, there came to her a joy, a rapture renewed, and she danced and swam again. And she then began to test this character of the stones, and she discovered that she could move freely and pleasantly as long as she did not question the darkness, as long as she enjoyed herself, as long as she remained enraptured with the divine strangeness of her being in motion. Then suddenly she became something she had always been, namely, spontaneous.

She took a pebble in her hand and held it so that it lay between her middle finger and thumb, and then she snapped unexpectedly, and the pebble turned into a short black rod which she wielded like a wand, but it did nothing. And so she made another wand, and clacked the two together in an X and they both doubled their length, and each time she clacked them they doubled, unless she held them side by side and touching, at which they would shrink to half, and so Anna began to dance and build herself a staircase of darkness in the dark, and she worked and built thinking of nothing.

After a time, she learned that constantly changing her facial expressions created a bulb around head. She learning that kissing a pebble would make it 'sticky' and so she was able to clothe herself, and that once she was clothed in pebbles she was able to move faster, much faster, in short, frighteningly fast, until one day she shot out of the orb, which she now saw was enormous, the size of a small planetoid in fact. And she saw. She saw! She was floating in a pure white void clothed in pebbles of darkness.

It was then that Anna stood upon her dark world, with her dark staff, and the pebbles dropped away.

(tinkling)