I hear the singing of the singing of the cursed girl.

My little sister, Sarah, took good care of all the dolls, but she didn't sing to any of them the way she did to this one.

She gave each one of the dolls a name and what one might call a theme song.

Just a silly little ditty about how pretty they were and how they would be best friends

forever with a hair of silk, eyes of gold, heart of rose, things like that. She was five years old after all, but this one doll of hers, this

old doll she named Amandine had a different song, much different.

It took her a while to come up with it, or should I say, it took her a while to learn it.

It started out as a hum and then a bunch of la la la's before she started muttering symbols that almost made up a language but remained unintelligible to everyone who heard her.

But the melody was always the same each time, an anchor for the chaotic

randomness of the words. It sounded like a folk song or a nursery rhyme. It had a distinguishable stanza and a refrain, a recursive

melody and structure but no meaning. Not yet.

Everyone else in the house knew that melody by the end of the first week of her picking up on it.

She sang it to herself incessantly when she thought she was alone, in a room in the garden,

while distracted from her coloring books or while waiting for an egged

a bowl in the kitchen. Then she started adding words, but none of us understood them as words.

We thought it was a lot more nonsense syllables, which is strange since

she did not have a propensity for that sort of thing. She had learned to speak at two years old and hadn't said anything nonsensical since.

Even if you consider her dolls a fair bit of nonsense, she was very proper about them.

She'd make up rules about where they sat around a little painted wooden tea table in the

nursery where they had a tea parties, and she took to scolding them like a mother for being

rude to each other or for being messy with Eskons.

What's more, none of her other dolls had gone through this discovery process for their own songs.

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