I'm starting a new exercise, explanation of freaks.

Sangeet Speaker
The night of her exodus floods with dragonflies. Their bittibat wings crack-snap the hot evening, aligning air into bursts of small release and tumble. Stars sweat and blur against the vacuumous backdrop, and in the distance, Sahere can see only the promise of hills she knows, a sky singed black from cobalt.

A small light flutters in the window of her home on the left, her father reading, his arm pushed against a raw cedar desk, glasses pushed askew by his hand. His lips will be moving in order to catch up to the running ink. Outside, grasses and poppies, red heartbursts, the hum of an empty second, a blank standstill of time, an immobile frame holding chickadees as they chirp-chip into nests where eggs will soon warm their round bottoms.

Coming in from her thought-stalk, Sahere runs into a dragonfly, or it runs into her, and she feels its honed paws bounce off her and an armored body fall into spiral. She holds out her hands and catches the dragonfly as it rebounds, catches it upside down and grudging. Its wings scratch along her palm and she thinks of the fortuneteller who said the rivers of Sahere’s hand spoke only of source, and not of estuary.

“What source?” she asked the fortuneteller, who didn’t ever smile.

The fortuneteller’s head tilted up and accepting eyes looked through a hole ripped into the lid of her tent. The sky outside a damp grey, cool, and Sahere could see nothing followed by a thin slice as a crow passed quickly through nothing. The fortuneteller asked Sahere if she had ever heard of adbhuta, and Sahere said no, still looking at the grey against ragged tear, long threads and fabrics dangling.

“This is your source and you walk in it every day.”

“What is adbhuta?” Sahere asked, but received nothing direct.

“Nothing is foretold, nothing is certain.”

At that moment, a flutter in the room with the fortuneteller, a small swishhhhhsha of moth feathers. Sahere heard the sound and it made her laugh, because for her, laughing was the only thing to do while trapped in a tent with an untold future and a baffling source. The old woman’s mouth smiled back and Sahere saw a tooth broken into two, a hairline fault separating dental halves.

“Ah,” Sahere said, “So what do I do?”

“You listen.” The old women’s voice swept out like half-sigh, half-death, the last sound a turtle makes as it basks on a bank under the sun, before it decides to slide into water for a passing fish.

And the memory fades, seven years ago, a fragment set aside from a sweeping rush that disappears in between. And the memory comes back, the fierce beat of a dragonfly trying to right itself in her hands. The sound of a rattle chuckling by firelight. Sahere tilts her ear closer to it and listens. Then she lets the sound go.

Raising her head, her sight crosses disappearing grasses to her father’s light, sees his eyes closing behind his tilted glasses, hears the reeds of his breath blowing. And Sahere knows her adbhuta, goes into the home to kiss her father on the lips, and tells him she's leaving.