Many of you have seen this short scene on my forum (that Yahoo cancelled my login to).
The end of chapter 9 of Rebecca Danced chronicled the discovery of Rebecca's hidden musical talent. Specifically:
"What didn't occur to Tony at the time was that she couldn't just apply her gift to a musical instrument. She could do it with her voice as well. Tina knew she could right from the start. Tina went to church."
I started thinking about how exactly that may have worked, given what we now know of Tina's synesthesia, and this is what I came up with.
It was a perfect lightning bolt.
The soft green line was clean and pure in the middle of so many rough-edged imperfect ones and quite a few that weren't even close to adequate. The perfect line barely hooked back as the notes changed and moved off to another vector in the pattern. It was almost instantly at the next precise place with as little effort as possible.
As she sang, Tina compared it to her own aquamarine lightning bolt. A slightly broader line with imperfections marring its sides. The hooks in the bolts of her voice within the pattern were rough in comparison. Her voice seemed to find the next note, then fine tune it to the perfect timbre. Eventually it pretty much matched the soft green one, but the difference was marked.
This voice danced in the song. Erasing the rest of the pattern in her mind allowed Tina to hear, and see only that voice. She'd never seen anything like it. Even most instruments couldn't duplicate this perfection. The closest were her electric keyboards, relying as they did the principles of electronics to maintain tune instead of physical means. Even those varied somewhat depending on the amplifier and speakers used. No, this was different.
She closed her eyes and reveled in the voice, admiring musical perfection. She allowed the other parts of the pattern of the hymn in one by one. The church organist was the closest, but its player was merely competent. The congregation's voices varied wildly from completely off-key to quite talented. It didn't really matter she thought. God doesn't care.
As the hymn wound down, still with eyes closed Tina found herself turning and again filtering out all the others to find the source of the pure, soft, green voice. When the song completed she opened her eyes to find herself looking at an improbable sight.
There in the aisle between the pews was a girl, no older than herself: a small redheaded girl, sitting in a wheelchair.