“What d’you suppose this is?” the professor asked. The slide changed to an image of a series of shapes, faintly tubular, encrusted with dirt and obviously fragile with age, bound together in a series of staggered lengths.
The students in the dimly-lit classroom made no move to answer.
The professor sighed. “Come on, put your thinking caps on! Look at it from an artist’s perspective. Why was it given this shape? What was it for – was it practical or ornamental or both?”
Tobias raised his eyebrow at the notion of thinking caps, because they were in Art History 101, not second grade. He glanced up at the slide, and then he felt something in his chest tighten. He knew that image instinctively, from some place buried deep inside of him. He raised his hand.
“Yes, Andrew,” the professor said, and the name ricocheted down to the soles of Tobias’s feet.
“It’s a set of pipes,” he said, “carved from the antlers of the deer driven on the steppes by the people who roamed Russia back in those days. It was tied with a strip of deer hide and used both to play music and also as a signaling device for hunters to communicate across long distances.”
The professor blinked at the eloquent answer. “Yes...that’s a very real possibility.”
Tobias knew it wasn’t a possibility – he knew it was the truth, because he’d played those pipes himself. He could close his eyes and see Asia – no, Kana dancing to his songs. If he had those pipes in his hands, he could breathe life and magic into them, he was sure of it.
But then the lights came on, and the lecture was over.
Tobias wondered what other skills were sleeping just beneath the surface.
(295 words)
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