o ugh Music Eye-level with the blacksmith’s bench, his daughter picks through the mess of nails and bolts to find, clean amongst the grease, a silver gleam. The ball-bearings flash from her fingers, skitter, comet-bright, across the concrete floor. She scrambles after the little balls of light until the chase becomes a game, a race from forge to yard, as laughter cracks the grip of her father’s craft, the striking and shaping. To silence her the blacksmith hurls a hammer. It does not reach its target, the daughter he dashes after – down the garden, his face an anvil. Still she remembers how she jumped into the lilacs to escape. How his hand reached through the blooms and grabbed the roots of her hair. How she rolled up in the dirt like a woodlouse. How she turned into a pillar of salt, hands clamped over ears and eyes squeezed tight to deflect whatever loud, bad thing was coming: the furnace-red gape. She remembers late that same day she sat and held his rough hands. Each nail a half-moon of dirt; his knuckles scarred, callused, burned. 15