Spillmannsgasser

A Spillmannsgasser is born twice.
The first birth is quick and red and loud.
The second is death.

It takes no breath, spills no blood, but doors that would have opened for you in ten years time will not. Spielmannsgasse is found by the harbor, where storms sometimes throw their spray as far as the first steps, and the stones keep a salt-pale sheen even in dry weather. It is the prettiest street in town, no one argues that. It bends a little as it runs along and one never saw its whole length at once.

The houses stood shoulder to shoulder, painted in saffron, teal, and milk-white, each with a shop below and with living rooms tucked above. Small balconies pressed forward on carved brackets and lines of washing hung like festival decoration between them.

Even on overcast days, colour lived here stubbornly.

The air held several scents at once, and between orange peel, damp rope, hot sugar, paint, and salt from the quay, various bells sounded as people went in and out of the shops. Three clear notes from the ribbon-seller’s, a soft clatter from the toymaker’s, a thin silver chime from the shop where mourning brooches were painted by hand. It had the closeness of a stage, that street. A passer-by could not cross from one end to the other without catching a scrap of melody from an upper window or stepping aside for a boy carrying a tray of cooling sweets dusted in pearl sugar.

Apprentices often dared each other to run its length at midnight and come back with a purchase: a few sugar fruits, a glass fish with real silver scales, anything for proof, only to hide the thing for years in a drawer they do not open ever again.

I had been in a drawer, too, wrapped in linen that smelled faintly of varnish and rosewater. The midwife had marked the hour. The harbour bells had marked it too, because bells marked everything in our town if given the chance. But by noon, the news had walked the quay, crossed the market, climbed the steps to the square, and come down again by the fish stalls:

Another Spillmannsgasser.

By evening, I had died, and I knew nothing of it. I had slept, no doubt. I had cried, as infants do. I had clenched my small hands at the air. Yet in the more respectable streets, all the doors had swung shut. Shopkeepers would one day weigh my coins a little longer than necessary. Mothers would draw their children a pace closer, not in fear, but in caution, I was told.

I did not at first understand the distinction. To me, Spielmannsgasse was warmth and colour and the clatter of bells. It was the ribbon-seller who slipped me ends of silk too short to sell. It was the toymaker who let me hold the unfinished marionettes and warned me not to tangle their strings. It was sugared fruit, still warm, and the lamplighter’s long pole lifting small suns into place one by one. Beyond the curve, the rest of the town seemed dead by comparison. Its houses stood straighter, its doors thicker, its windows less inclined to gossip, and laughter thinned. I crossed into those streets rarely, for errands and deliveries, always counting the bells, and never without the feeling that I had some brightness left clinging to me because people there always noticed me. A glance lingered too long. A hand hesitated before touching mine. Once, a woman who had bought ribbons from our street all her life wiped her fingers on her apron after taking change from me.

They said we Spillmannsgassers could not help but watch ourselves from the corner of our own eye, arranging gesture and tone the way our neighbours arranged wax fruit in bowls so convincing, one forgot it could not ripen.

I did not know if this was true. What I did know was that the the first time I saw the other side of the Spielmannsgasse terrified me more than any tale the apprentices had whispered to each other as they ran the street, clutching their proof.

It had happened in winter, when the harbour had frozen in the shallows and trade had thinned. Bells rang less often. Colours dulled under a skin of frost. I had been sent with a covered dish to the mourning-painter’s rooms, three floors above her shop, where the windows were always kept curtained. She had not opened for two days, which, in the Spielmannsgasse, was telling enough. Something was serious. Bad, even. After all, we were a street of open doors.

Inside her room, the air had gone stale with varnish and sleep. The curtains were half-drawn. Portraits leaned everywhere. She lay in her chair by the table, head tilted back, mouth parted slightly, as if she had meant to call someone and forgotten the name. One hand still held the brush. The other rested palm-up on her apron, fingers curled as though around an absent coin.

She seemed tired, if not for her face. It wasn’t that she looked sick but… wrong. Empty of the street. Her features had fallen apart from one another, as though what had held them in place had been taken away. I stood there with the dish cooling in my hands, searching her features for something familiar, but I could not find it.

Downstairs, the doorbell gave its thin silver chime. Someone entered the shop. A voice called up, but I did not answer. I could not stop looking. Then she moved.

The brush slipped from her fingers and tapped the floor. I watched the street come back into her face as plainly as dawn enters a room. The mouth gathered. The lids lifted. The hand turned, palm down. By the time she saw me she was herself again: composed, tender, almost amused.

“You’ve brought me something,” she said and I couldn’t say anything at all; just nodded, handed it to her, and left. That night, when apprentices dared one another at the bend and fled with their proof clutched tight, I understood the darker dare none of them named: to look, without flinching, at a Spillmannsgasser for longer than it was necessary.

I did not go back to the mourning-painter’s rooms for many days. When I passed below her windows, I kept my eyes on the shop displays: the ovals of the remembered and the tiny gold hinges catching the light. I waited, without naming it, for a sign that what I had seen might have been mistake or dream.

But after that winter day, I began to notice other things: The moment when a shopkeeper’s smile did not settle in time before a customer entered. A dancer’s painted mouth sagging in the dark. The lamplighter, thinking himself unwatched, lowering his pole and letting his shoulders fall so heavily they seemed to unhook from him. Small instants, gone as soon as seen, but heavy enough to stay in my memory. To be all that I see.

I did not speak of it. One did not speak of such things in the Spielmannsgasse. We spoke of craft, of trade, of light, of colour. We corrected one another’s collars and smoothed stray hair. We counted our bells and kept our doors open.

But I watched. And once you begin to watch for what the street conceals, you cannot stop. Slowly, however, I realised the watching was not mine alone. Others had begun to watch me.

The ribbon-seller adjusted my collar when she passed me and held it a moment too long between her fingers, eyes narrowing briefly. The toymaker, who had always laughed when I had tangled the strings, now untangled them without meeting my gaze, only to tell me to be more careful.

I grew cautious, sought mirrors more often, which wasn’t hard to do, because the Spielmannsgasse was full of them: A multitude of small panes nailed beside doors, square ones in shopfronts, tall wavering sheets in the glass-blower’s window. They were everywhere.

I stood before them in passing, in shadow, and in lamplight, waiting for the inevitable. For the same thing that had happened to the mourning-painter. For something they must have seen already, for they were treating me differently since that one night in the mourning-painter’s room. But at first I saw nothing amiss. My face was my face. My mouth was my mouth. My eyes had light, my skin had a rosy colour, my lips were the same pale red as always. The fear, however, remained and soon, I could not endure the bells.

They rang as they always had; three notes, five, the thin silver chime, but each sounded like a cue missed or a step taken too soon. I walked the length of the Spielmannsgasse at dusk and felt the light settle on my face like paint. Heavy, suffocating.

I decided, then, to leave. And to tell no one because one simply doesn’t leave the Spielmannsgasse. At dawn, before the lamplighter’s last wick went out, I walked the curve and kept walking. I kept my eyes ahead. The bells of our street faded behind me, one by one, until there was only the dull creak of the fishermen’s boats and the slap of rope on mast. I passed the last painted house, the salt sheen left the cobblestone, the air thinned to ordinary cold, the view blurred into ordinary houses, ordinary streets, and I told myself I was free at last. Away from the mirrors, the bells, the narrowed eyes, the lingering gazes.

Then, without warning, my step shortened. My foot simply did not fall where I intended. The ground seemed to tilt, not beneath me but within me, as if some inner measure had altered. I took another step. The other leg answered too late, too far. I stumbled, caught myself, laughed once in breathless irritation and heard the laugh come out wrong. Dull, somewhat muffled even, as if it was coming through cloth.

But I caught myself and went on. Silly me. But maybe the ground here was different. Maybe Spielmannsgasse had thinner ground. That was what I told myself, as one tells a child that the shadow in their room at night is only furniture.

My next step fell short again. My heel met nothing, like my weight refused it, sliding backward through me with a sickening ease, as though my bones had lost the habit of bearing. I lurched, caught at a wall, and felt the plaster give under my palm. I snatched my hand away and turned, desperate for any reflection. A shuttered window nearby offered a dull pane and I staggered there, feet heavy, body even heavier. When I reached the window, my throat closed. The face in the pane was already… wrong. My mouth had slipped half down the bone, the corners failing to remember their place. One eyelid drooped while the other eye had fallen inward, and my cheek on one side held its curve; the other, though, sagged. I watched, paralysed, as the features drifted further apart, as though the invisible threads that tied them to me had been snipped one by one. My shoulders sloped away from me. My arms hung too long. When I lifted them, the joints bent beyond their measure.

The skin loosened next. It slipped over muscle with the same slow treachery I had felt in the cheek. My breath hitched but my chest did not follow the movement. It lagged a beat behind, expanding late, collapsing early. I could not tell where inhale ended and exhale began. My throat gaped and the sound that came was a wet, sliding rasp, as though passing through a tube not fixed in place.

I looked down.

My torso had twisted within the skin. The sternum pressed forward on one side, sank on the other. The ribs moved under the surface like fingers under cloth, each seeking a way out. I could feel organs shift. My heart thudded too low, then too high, knocking against bone that was no longer where it had been. I tried to call out but my jaw hung and the cry slid from the wrong corner of my mouth. I stumbled away from the window, lurched forward, and dragged the misaligned mass of myself after me, one shoulder slipping down the arm, the hip sliding under the skin like a knot in wet cloth.

Someone turned the corner ahead.
A woman with a basket.

I reached for her but my arm lengthened as it went, elbow bending backward, wrist rotating too far. She saw me. I know she did. Her gaze struck the place where my face should have been but she walked around me without breaking stride.

“Help,” I tried, but the word came apart between my teeth; didn’t even make it past my tongue. She went away quickly, her steps coming onto the stone harder than when she was in front of me. Soon, there were more people. A man with ledgers. A child. Two apprentices I had seen running the Spielmannsgasse at night. I reached out, dragged myself towards them.

They did not see. Or refused to see me.

My chest sagged, the heart beat against no fixed cage. I could feel it roll, a warm weight seeking its place and finding none.

Gasse; a dead end. What an odd thought to have in this moment, but soon after, I remembered the children who would not play past the bend, the mothers who measured our errands, the elders who taught us to count bells without hearing them. The town beyond and its thick doors and closed windows.

I did not know how I made it back. Or that I was going back at all. Only when my face slammed back onto bone and the rest of my features snapped into place at once did I notice the teal and saffron houses and the salt-washed paleness of the cobblestone. My skin tightened, my organs leapt to their spots, and my limbs shortened to proper measure.

I collapsed, gulping in air, feeling the burn in my lungs, and was, in a rush of bells and colour and scent, finally whole again.

I did not leave again after that. For some days I told myself it had been illness. A fainting in the cold. A seizure of nerves. The body, after all, was capable of strange betrayals. I kept to my room. Someone brought me a covered dish and I wondered if now, after me, they also learned to see it.

If they would also set out in fear and learn to understand it.

A Spillmannsgasser is born twice.
The first birth is quick and red and loud.
The second is death.