Been months since my last post, but doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing. Move into a house with young, busy children and some things go to the wayside.

I recently finished a draft of a novel best described as The Goonies meets National Treasure at a Tiffany Mall Concert in 1985. It needs a bit of rewrites, edits, and reorganization. But I love it. Not every draft gets my full attention immediately after completion. This one will, similar to About My Dad, my main series of posts.

The below post is a section from a deleted scene. It’s our Mall Concert Star — Heather Grant — remembering through analogy what inspired her to get into music.

Once upon a time there was a little girl who couldn’t stop tapping her feet to the sounds coming from the radio in her parents’ kitchen. Tap, tap, taparoo she went, this little girl, until the tiles cracked under her feet. Her parents were not angry. They did not want to discourage her from exploring her interests. So she kept on tapping and dancing, her shuffling feet scattering the shattered tiles, laying bare the original hardwood subfloor. 

She could have stopped there. It was a gorgeous, dark, weathered hardwood flooring that would increase the value of any home. That was not her intent, making money for her family. When the music played, she had to move her feet.

She kept dancing, twirling and spinning, wearing a yellow dress that looked like a dandelion when she twirled on one foot, her other bent at her knee like a ballerina. The grounded foot spun so fast it dug into the subfloor like a drill bit, boring a hole through and into the concrete foundation, where it didn’t stop, it chipped and spit up concrete dust that filled the kitchen. 

Her parents had to open every window in the house to get fresh air. The plumage of dust evacuated the house but made it look like a fire raged inside. That brought the neighbors over to rubberneck the scene. They saw a little girl buried up to her waist in their kitchen floor, dancing and singing now, playing the music on her own now, the radio sitting on the counter, covered in concrete dust. Once they saw, they talked, waving passersby over, encouraging them to watch the little girl perform.

The little girl didn’t act like she was performing. She acted like all she knew how to do was dance, no matter that it meant she was now inside the ground, amongst the tree roots and worms and soil. 

During this time, she remembered why she had started tapping her foot in the first place. She suddenly grew sad, but she didn’t cry. The little girl who couldn’t cry but could dance and sing remembered that her mother had passed away. One day her mother was okay and spinning the little girl in circles, making it so she could fly, and the next she was sick and coughing and she went away to get better and came back better for one day and one night. Her mother gave the little girl a square piece of cardboard with a hole in the side. When the girl reached inside, she pulled out a black plastic circular disc with grooves in increasingly bigger circles carved into it. Her mother showed her how to put that disc on a machine with a metal pin to hold the disc in place and a button to make it spin. There was a metal arm that had a needle at the end that hovered over the disc. The little girl watched as her mother pushed a lever that lifted the metal bar, delicately moved it over the farthest edge of that black disc, right before the grooves began. When the arm reached the edge, the disc began to spin, like magic. Her mother didn’t press the lever. She asked the little girl to press it. Like this, her mother showed her, miming pulling the lever towards them. The girl was nervous and excited. She could faintly hear the disc spinning on that flat table machine. When she finally pulled the lever, the metal arm descended slowly, lowering the needle at its end to the spinning black disc. There was a scuffling sound like ruffling fabric from speakers connected to the machine. The girl was too rapt to notice them. Then, like more magic, the world opened up, sound burst from the speakers, a piano and something like the xylophone they played in music class, only more vibrant, and then drums. The voice that came, and then voices backing her, over the speakers, from that black disc, were angelic. The little girl and her father were not religious but she knew the voice of an angel when she heard it.

She danced for the first time with her sick mother that evening and into the wee hours of the morning, the two of them twisting and singing and laughing until they couldn’t stand. They made scuff marks on the tiles in the kitchen floor. Her mother left just after sunrise, kissing the little girl on each cheek and asking her to never change, to always be true to herself, to dance to the music and let the magic flow through her. That way she would live a wonderful life, remember her mother and the night they danced, and the Supremes, and after a long, long, long time of living a good life, the little girl could see her mother again.

Have fun. Be happy.

So the little girl cried in the earth but she kept dancing. She danced until her father was taken away and put in a jail cell and then into what one of the neighbors watching her called a rehabilitation facility. She danced and sang and watched people watching her. Most of the people watching her were happy because her dancing and singing made them feel that way. Many of them danced and sang along with her, tapping their feet into the ground just like her, burying their toes in the grass outside the house, anchored in, staples in her life. 

Some of the people were not happy. A small segment even looked afraid, not of her and her singing and dancing, but of something else, something hovering above and behind her, all over her it felt, as if she couldn’t separate it from her singing and dancing, and when their screams began, she couldn’t stop them or help because she couldn’t stop singing or dancing. And like that, those people disappeared. The one that remained dropped to the grass and laid at the feet of the neighbors and their friends and new strangers, unmoving amongst their tapping and stomping feet. 

The girl kept dancing and seeing the face of the girl who fell, of the strangers who disappeared. She danced and sang, but it felt warped, like how the black plastic disc sounded after it was left out on a table in the sunlight. Playing it afterwards made the pleasant, soft lady voices sound demonic. 

One day the little girl stopped. She shouldn’t have. She was not even halfway burrowed to the other side. Of where she didn’t know. Only she could know, and where she dug was dark and damp and the only light she had used to see the path forward, a torch lit by her mother with cloth and sparks added by the constant drum of her dancing, had extinguished. 

She reached her hand out into an expanse of open space. Where there had been thick roots to steady herself was only cold air. Even with the torch extinguished, enough light emanated from the pinprick hole miles above for her to make out shapes, the definition of a fountain, of the sound of flowing water, of storefronts and a stage and the echoed memory of microphone feedback as speakers were moved into place and soundcheck was about to start.