if the duck were a songbird

"That's not Brighid," Addam said, obviously, as he dropped into his seat and removed his reed from where it'd been held between flat-pressed lips, folder now set safely on the stand.

"No, it's not..." And Addam wasn't only being sociable, or else nosy, when he made the remark, because sitting behind Brighid for some count of years had made him consistently and unconsciously adjust the angle of his chair such that he could even see between the peaks of her massive, idiosyncratic half-updo, buns twirled in twain.

For the principal oboist to have changed from bright indigo tresses in floor-length dresses to fine, hay-blonde hair in a sensible homemade skirt was not just obvious, it was incriminating - because the other two principal reeds, apparently, hadn't even known that it was happening.

Whatever Jin thought, he kept to himself. He'd no sooner have warned them, via gossip, of the impending change than would he have glared at the conductor if he didn't get a bow, even for Prokofiev.

But it was Prokofiev they were playing now, and it wasn't the symphonies. Maybe that was why Brighid had, apparently, taken off, just like the tone poem's characteristic bird?

"You've seen her before?"

"Never," confirmed Flora. "Nor even heard of her. Why isn't Pneuma sitting there?"

Whether or not they were truly offended or just baffled to have been kept in the dark, they didn't really know. There were other ensembles with actual damning choices for second oboe (and for first, for that matter), so it was neither that Pneuma was being prevented from her rightful throne nor that a poor-tonguing scourge had been headed off.

It was just...odd. Flora didn't go in for insisting that you installed a substitute player for every string absence, or even the principals (just get the associate to slide on over, yeah?), but she never remembered reacting half so harshly to a foreign face in that adjacent sea.

She licked her reed. She twisted her joints. She waited for Maestro Tikkaram to intone, "Shall we tune?" and for someone else to volunteer, "And thank you to Yui for filling in."

Yui. Flora let the brass go first, considering...Yui.

One thing about Brighid that everyone in SASO just took for granted, by and by: she tuned sharp, just the slightest hair, and you didn't wait for her to come down, you just changed. You abandoned whatever tuning you'd come with, from other ensembles or chamber or weddings or, heaven forbid, practice, and you pitched to the pinpoint that Ms. Ladair had offered. She, whose wife was tone deaf, had no reason to change. You, at the risk of courting her to play with her eyes open, had all of them.

Her tone pierced, and then it settled. Certainly, it was beautiful, in a...tartly severe sort of way. But the point of all this contraband in contrasting was to illustrate that from Brighid to Yui was an astonishing and astonishingly brief journey, replacing definitional clarity with mysterious sombriety - and, also, 442 with true 440.

But that was about Brighid. Let's make more about Yui. (But to do that, we must start with Brighid.)

Brighid's eyes, serenely lidded, served her to make unique concentration apparent. Yui didn't close her eyes when she played, but she might as well have, for all the charming, sleepy quality she gave off - and then, too, her secret ability to appear suddenly startlingly awake.

Flora wondered what it was that she did for a living. She wondered, momentarily, as she always did, if Yui might not be a teacher, because she had that telltale glimmer in her eye that said she was all-knowing and all-seeing, where certain mischiefs were concerned.

Also, she could be a healthcare professional of some kind. Maybe a surgeon. Maybe a receptionist. She could be a research scientist. She could be an unlikely engineer (which was to say, good on her for defying all stereotype, if she meant to go out and build bridges). Or she could sell candles out of a trailer in her backyard, and do scarily well with it.

And then, because Flora went terribly in-depth when she wondered these things, about people, such that it came out looking like she just knew them (the things and the people), Flora attempted to ascertain if Yui might or might not be married.

There were rings on her fingers, of varying sizes, starbursts and moons and false opals, if not the real deal, which all meant nothing, really. Flora could easily accept that Yui, the omnipotent with the uncanny slice of a smile, might be witchy.

But then one considered how an oboist might tend, if they - if she - were a little bit craven-crazed. Her notes would be perky at odd times - indeed, at odd intervals - and her phrases would countermand the standard cadence(s). She'd be neither late to the beat nor hardly ever early, but she would create some kind of bizarre gravity about her bell that would bend their ears just the same.

Flora had long borne witness to cellists who began their bar-odd principal solos as if God themself were waiting for them to enter. Yui didn't do this. Yui existed in her very own continuum, and she was truly always right.

(She wouldn't be here if she was a bad player. She was too old, the community too dense, for her judgement to have come only now.)

Neither was her vibrato particularly idiosyncratic; no signs of dystonia waggled her embouchure. Sometimes Flora felt as if looking at Yui face-on would destroy the illusion, and that when observed she acted and sounded so different entirely.

But Flora could only choose what she did, and how carefully she stepped around her new black-barrel compatriot. She had no control whatsoever on or of when or how Yui would come a-calling.

Flora stayed in her seat at the break, pretending to fixate on a low C-sharp below the break of the instrument itself, or something like that. She was an effortless person, traditionally, but if she did have to show some weakness occasionally...well, then she would. She was pragmatic, too.

She kept fiddling, fussing, and frowning, determinedly oblivious to all movement around her. Oh, let the time pass. There would be other spans of fifteen minutes. Even if there were tea and cookies to be had, woodwinds couldn't indulge in them, of course. She'd once heard high-school players cite it as the promise to "blow chunks"; this, Flora could do without, in many ways.

Addam was capital at leaning his instrument into one crook of his elbow as he excused himself into the private world of his phone. Flora, not so much. She just had to stare straight forward. That red-haired blur would be Lora coming to pester Jin, the blue-jacketed flash Godfrey getting up to greet Perun.

She actually couldn't tell if it was Vess or Yui looming somewhere to her front-right, until a voice she'd never heard before called her name.

"You have a lovely range, Flora."

Blinking and head bobbling, Flora looked up. So maybe it was both Vess and Yui, and probably Vess who'd told Yui her name, which didn't necessarily mean that Yui had asked but didn't not mean it either.

"Oh, well, thank you," replied Flora, silently bluffing that the flush in her cheeks was purposeful cheer and not flustered overwhelm. "I hope you're having a nice time playing with us?"

"It should be a lovely concert," Yui said, not answering the question and echoing a seemingly canned sentiment about the overall niceness of everything they had here, in their humble little (pretty big, even when cut for children's fare) group. Another vestige of Vess?

"I've never heard your name before - it's not one I'd forget. Your last name...?"

"Uzuki," Yui provided. "My husband took my surname, so you won't have heard another one."

Oh, and wasn't Flora good at teasing out these clever tidbits? A very modern woman, too - Flora couldn't imagine giving Hentisane to anyone, though she couldn't imagine what she might take, either. Flora Uzuki? Well, it didn't sound horrible...

A bit of stern self-talk got that thought banished, because even if she did mean it as an academic curiosity, Flora was never safe from her own internal condemnation of free whimsy.

"I'll keep that in mind," she produced, at length. "Makes hiring you easy, doesn't it?"

Yui's expression grew peculiarly firm. "I'm not only for hire."

Flora frowned despite herself: had she said something wrong?

"Of course not." She made sure her own voice was inarguably pleasant. "One can only be so in demand without it getting difficult to manage, I imagine."

This was a pattern of self-effacing language that Flora didn't mind, among enthusiastic amateurs. Better not to directly imply that you were a slouch or a hack, but instead to stand yourself up just at the borderline of your capabilities, and imagine yourself so.

Yui nodded. "It depends who's asking, of course. Always, people talk, and they come to know more about your schedule than you thought you did yourself..."

As she said these cryptic things, Yui held her oboe at a slender sixty-degree angle, as if she were posing to be photographed for a bio as either a pedagogue or a prodigy. She blinked with a beguiling regularity, too. Her eyes, some shade of golden hazel color, as indescribable as her shimmering hair. By her unrapt attention, she removed Flora into another sphere - one with analog spies and floating islands under cloak and dome.

Flora tried to fit herself into this space by offering, "Easier to keep track of two than one, I suppose?"

Yui cocked her head, except that she didn't. "How do you mean?"

"Your husband? I thought you'd mentioned-"

"Oh, that," Yui said dismissively. "He lives halfway across the country, if he lives at all."

Most people would have inserted an "even" to fully sell the hyperbole of the statement, but Yui seemed perfectly content to let it as it was, prim possibility. If she seemed at all.

And yet, Yui was not making an invitation toward open relations when she said this. Her concern was with the fact that Flora thought it so defining of her, that she had a husband. Other pursuits than romantic ones had to do with it, she thought. Things about a more spiritual entanglement, and who was expected home at night (or not, apparently), and how much stepping out to ensemble was tolerable, when there were experiments to be brewed.

Alright, so Flora thought Yui was a bit of a nutjob. But she was a pretty nutjob, and fascinating, and she played awfully well.

"I think I like her," she whispered to Addam, while the timpani were clattering around with merely the empty melodrama of cartage for melody.

"I know you do," the bassoonist whispered back. "She's your type."

Type? What type? Surely Addam and Yui, for instance, were not of the same type?

"That's not what I meant." Flora scowled - and only Addam could ever make her scowl. Maybe (probably, definitely) it was him she'd gotten it from. "I just like her playing."

Flora, whose playing was melifluous, rarely had the chance to observe that she thought others' tone colors would meld well to hers in chamber playing. She usually had other things to focus on, like blending in the moment, clinging on by desperately clenched keys. But this...this was interesting.

Addam shrugged. "Suit yourself, I suppose. But it's not only you who've got common sense. Just keep that in mind, yeah?"

Oh, she'd keep. She'd keep and keep until her ears burned with it; she'd burrow up her own new advantage, just so Addam could keep an edge.

"What do you think, Brighid?"

Flora squinted into the spring sunlight, clipboard held overhead, as Brighid calmly regarded her through the passenger-side window, cranked.

She'd not inquired into the reason for the substitution, even still; all that would come in due time. She didn't wish to get distracted. What she needed to know was what planet Yui had issued from, and how often she returned there (perhaps, by which transportation method).

Though it wasn't strictly professional to maintain personal friendships with students' parents, no matter how involved they were with the district, Flora defended that she'd known Brighid from their shared outside commitment completely independent of their shared inside address.

"Clearly, you should keep talking to her. You need a challenge."

Did she? Did she even need such unabashed words of encouragement, to continue throwing herself into the path of crazy fair-haired people with double reeds?

(Type...what type?)

"I have a challenge. It's called the clarinet."

Brighid scoffed. "No challenge, for you. You need something that confuses you."

Someone that confused her. Well, Yui was that, alright.

"That seems ridiculous," muttered Flora to just herself, because to try to catch Brighid peeling out of the parent pick-up lane was a fool's errand at any time of year.

But if Yui was interested in her, then she'd keep coming back, and that was the real test.

Flora hid her eyes with the clipboard, pretending that she could see through it like Yui doubtless could.

"I couldn't make the rehearsals," Brighid was saying airily to some wide-eyed violists with wild hues of hair that only approached, approximated, the woodwind woman's irrepressible style. "Goodness, no, I'd never schedule another concert over this. That would be...unprofessional."

She smiled slyly, then, at her wife, whose stance was not quite relaxed, at her side, as she encouraged their daughter to shuffle out from behind Papa's pants to wave hi to Gala and Haze, a harmless duo except when they'd soli in their hands, at which point beats could sometimes summarily be dismissed and forgotten.

"You have a keen sense of timing, Brighid," said Yui, because suddenly she'd appeared at Flora's elbow, nearly making the - just slightly - shorter woman jump even while Yui's oboe remained at that perfect angle, once again.

"We're musicians." With Mòrag at her side, Brighid seemed to puff out her chest. "Of course we have." If Mòrag was offended by this inference, she made no display, instead remarking, "It seems that the company Flora keeps will do the ensemble well. Sena, you're going to listen for the cat and the duck, remember?"

The company that Flora kept? What, and nothing of Brighid? In other words, Yui was to be solely her responsibility?

And there was no way Mòrag didn't know about all of this. She peered through her dark, low-slung part at the pair of players with some knowledge that they clearly lacked, regardless of own non-musicality.

(Wasn't she some sort of police affiliate, detective or district attorney or some such? Didn't she know how to step to?)

Suddenly, Flora realized that it was she who'd been caught witless among the most extraordinary women she'd ever meet. Where had all of her confidence gone, to be stood stammering while the queen pieces preened?

"Yes," she rejoined, addressing Sena, "you'll hear lots of characteristic sounds. If you've ever heard your mama play, you know exactly where the duck comes in. Then, the cat-" subconsciously, she began fingering her part "-is low and tricksy, maybe a little overconfident."

"Well," Yui glanced artfully to one side, "the cat knows her territory. The cat is the ruler of all things that lurk in the grass."

"Not the wolf, surely?"

No longer did Yui stare through Flora's gaze; instead, she was met, and handily.

"The wolf may be so clever as to catch, say, the duck. But, if I recall, the wolf never comes near the cat."