There is no moon to lighten her pallid face, nor stars to guide her to sleep as she waits for the light footfalls that would soon make their way toward her. Her body betrays no emotion even when the bed frame creaks and the mattress shifts as the featherweight of a girl climbs up next to her. She continues to stare blankly out of the dark window into the black sky as her daughter once again begins to beg to hear the song.
Some children have stories told to them before going to sleep. A few need kisses and hugs, maybe they want mummy or daddy to check for monsters under the bed. She wishes that the angelic girl kneeling at her back would ask for something like that, something she had the power to give. She would walk to the end of the earth if that’s what her beautiful daughter needed to finally rest. She could do anything except what her daughter is asking of her.
“Mummy?” she knows the girl is kneeling with a pleading look in her blue eyes, “Mummy, please? Just once, I want to hear it. Please, I can’t wind it up, please, I need you Mummy...”
She refuses to turn over and look at her daughter in her long white nightdress. She can’t bear seeing it again, the music box she knows is in those young, milk-white hands, and so she curls further into herself, away from the pleading child and the overwhelming guilt that threatens to crush her, clinging onto the twisted sheets like a lifeline in a storm.
On the other side of the house, far from the dark bedroom, her husband also sits in silence, his head in his hands. He knows that there’s no point trying to elicit a response from her motionless body that seems to be swallowed in the vast, empty expanse of covers. No one has been able to shake her from the dream-like trance she falls into nightly. He’s asked her why she lies like that but she only talks about her daughter coming. No matter the fights they have about it, she can’t explain and he can’t understand why she talks about their daughter. They’ve visited the lonely grave— no daughter of theirs is ever going to wander these hallways except in their dreams. Still, no one can offer explanation for or respite from the haunted look that enters her unresponsive eyes as she lies alone in the dark, empty room with only a broken music box for company.
He had understood when the doctor said sorrow was to be expected, that he shouldn’t worry if she seemed to be consumed by grief. He had been assured that crying is part of the healing process, and he was to let her deal with the loss as she needed to. Yet, in all that time she hadn’t shed a tear. She only did what she had to, in a robotic manner, and then, come sundown every night the house fell into a haunted silence. She would resume her place curled in the bed and he sat down in a different room, almost in a different world, to wait until she finally fell into a tortured sleep. All through it, the house held its breath. The air seemed to be pregnant with expectation as he and she both waited for some resolution, feeling as if they were suspended in a fall, not yet hit the ground.
And so she lies in her room, alone, unable to tune out the pleas of her daughter even as she feels disconnected from everything else around her, floating in a moment that has existed deep in her since the last time she touched the faded, cracked music box.
***
She had been standing in the nursery, the room so fresh that she could still smell the leaf-green paint on the walls. Standing between a white crib and a changing table she couldn’t stop smiling. Giddy with expectation, she had cradled her swollen stomach when she was struck with a memory of a music box that she knew was hidden somewhere in the dusty attic.
A quick search had left her covered in a thin layer of grime, and now as she held the old, painted box her grin widened and her eyes couldn't have been brighter. Fiddling with the flaking paint well-worn with her childhood memories, she slowly wound up the spring that would send the dancer she knew was hidden under the wooden lid spinning to the tune of her favorite lullaby.
Her heart was jumping in her chest as she again cradled the box close to her, about to open the lid for the first time in years. Finally, with a deep breath she pulled the clasp open and lifted the lid— to silence. The plastic dancer in her garish pink attire smiled up at her serenely but did not begin to spin. She felt her stomach drop as if she had missed a step on a staircase, or lost her balance. Her insides seemed to rise within her and she felt her face begin to flush as she panicked, winding and winding the crank, but to no avail. She had to see it spin, it had to spin, it had to dance for her daughter, just as it had for her. Her breath came in sharp gasps as she tried to turn back time to when she was still sure everything was okay, but the plastic figurine seemed to mock her desperation as it resolutely refused to move. Suddenly, but not surprisingly, she felt a sharp pain rip through her as she doubled over, gasping, clasping her stomach in a vain attempt to hold together the life she knew was no longer inside her.
In that moment of pain, she was a child again, vaulted over the handlebars of a bike, knowing the ground was coming but powerless to stop it. Suspended in this moment of falling, she had collapsed on the floor, lying in a pool of red that was slowly staining her clothes. All through the emergency room and back home again, she was frozen just above the cold, hard ground. This moment took her through every night as her daughter came to beg her to wind the music box, to wind it one more time so she, so they both, could finally rest.
***
Even as the night stretches on, the little girl does not move from her mother’s side, all the time begging, “Mommy, please, I just want to hear it play…”
Her mother, if she can truly call herself a mother, tries to ignore the childish pleas but each one feels like another knife being slowly driven into her, twisted and turned into her sore stomach as her daughter asks to hear the music box just once, please, just once.

She can’t bear the hopelessness and sorrow that she can feel in that plaintive voice and for the first time, she begins to stir in her cocoon of sheets. Rolling over, she pushes her aching body into a seated position facing the little girl who has not left her alone since the day the broken music box had announced, with its silence, the inevitable tragedy that had been fast approaching. For the first and last time, she leans towards the girl and looks close into the bright blue, innocent eyes. Her trembling hands envelop the tiny, cold hands that still cradle the music box.

“... It doesn't—” She stops to cough, to clear her dry throat. Inhaling roughly, she continues, “it doesn't work, I can’t I don’t know how to fix it, I’m sorry, oh, honey, baby, oh I’m so sorry…”

The delicate light of the appearing crescent moon glints off of the tears that finally stream down her face. She cries, cries as she sits alone in the empty room, her sentence forever broken off as she finally falls. She cries out the heartbreak and sorrow as the house settles around her, home again to only two. The salt begins to wash her wounds and in her cracked, scraped, bruised hands that she had finally held out to catch her in her descent, she cradles the broken music box.

It will always hurt. There is no way to stop it, only to embrace it or deny it. But we all find, in time, that we can no longer pretend that that dancer, that beautiful lie of a dancer, will ever spin again.