I sit here looking out the window at the ocean below. What will become of me?

I hear a sharp scream behind me. Then a gasp. "I… I didn't… he tried to… " The sound of commotion. A woman yells, "Get his hands!"

"Oh my God!"

Grunting, screeching, shouting. I jump up along with everyone around me. We're all probably thinking of the same thing. Terrorists, 9/11. I whirl around to see what's happening. It's a sight to behold.

There are five men piled in the aisle. Two of them are dark-skinned Africans; one wears a white caftan and there is bright red blood smeared on it. One of them is Asian, he wears a black suit with a golden dragon pin on the left breast pocket. Two of them are white men; one in jeans and a t-shirt, another in a navy blue suit. They sit on, hold down, and punch a young white man, mashing his head to the floor. The young man's wide eyes water and he sweats profusely. His face is beet red. He's breathing heavily and babbling, "Get me off this goddamn plane! I want to get off! GET ME OFF!"

In the seat before them, a woman lies in a man's arm. She coughs, her hands to her throat. A yellow number two pencil protrudes from the side of her neck. Blood spurts and dribbles down. The man holding her, an old Igbo-looking man in Western attire, looks absolutely lost.

I look at my hands. I don't even hesitate.

Swell by Elizabeth Bear

Of course you notice the blind girl.

After you've packed up the merchandise table and started clearing the stage, she lingers, beached with small white hands wrapping the edges of her little café table like bits of seaweed dried there. She clings to scarred black wood as if something might sweep her adrift and drown her.

The crowd breaks and washes around her, flowing toward the door. The wrist loop of her white cane pokes over the back of her chair like a maritime signal flag, in case you somehow missed the opacity of her face-wrapping black shades in the near-dark of the club. And still she remains, a Calypso on her tiny island, while you coil patch cables and slide your warm mahogany fiddle into its case, while the café staff lift chairs onto tables and bring the house lights up glaringly bright, until you start to wonder if whoever she's waiting for is coming to assist her.

The tall redheaded bartender polishes glasses, her apron tossed over the Sam Adams Boston Lager draft handle. Up in the crude timber-built mezzanine, institutional stoneware makes flat clicking sounds and sticky food smells as someone piles it into a washtub. Your sweat's turned cold with the stage lights off, and your flat shoes reek of spilled beer. You're just packing the fiddle pickup into its hand-cut foam when you see Little Eddie the house manager (little to keep him straight from Big Eddie the redheaded bartender) come through the kitchen doors and notice the blind girl.

He starts forward, turning sideways to miss skinny dreadlocked Clara as she pauses with the washtub full of plates, but you set the pickup on the closed fiddle case and hop off the riser so you can get to the girl first. Nobody needs Little Eddie at the end of a bad night. You've had enough bad nights here to know.

He sees you coming and lets his steps go purposeless, turning to stack the glasses on the worst table in the joint-behind the pillar, next to the kitchen-so he can keep a hairy eyeball on you. You come over to the blind girl's table, careful to make some noise, and stop four feet from her.

"Miss, do you need some help?"

She doesn't lift her chin to seek your voice, which makes you think she's been blind since birth. She does tilt her head, however, a vertical crease appearing on her brow.

"You're the singer," she says. She sounds like the cold outside has gotten into her sinuses, her voice rough as if its nap caught on a sandpaper throat. "Has everyone gone home, then? I like to wait for the crowds to clear."

When she lets go of the table-edge, you can imagine you hear her flesh peel free of the wood. It wobbles as she releases it, rocking back and forth on crooked coaster feet for a moment before settling down with a little list to the left. House left. Her left. Your right.

"Everybody's gone," you say. "We're closing up. Do you have somebody to help you get home?"

"Oh," she says, "I can manage."

She's plain, with bland colorless hair to go with the transparent skin, but even stuffy and hoarse, her voice lifts the fine hairs on your nape like a breath.

Dubiously, you glance at the light jacket draping her chair, the summerweight, girl-cut t-shirt stretched over her bony shoulders. Even more dubiously, you glance at the door. Each time it opens, the cold washes into the café. Each time, it takes two seconds for the cold to cross the open floor and curdle on your skin.

Of course, she can't read your body language. So you clear your throat and say, "You know it's January out there."

"I know my way home." As if to prove her point, she stands and gathers her red-tipped cane and jacket. She starts working her way into the latter one sleeve at a time, but the cane gets in her way. You'd offer to take it, but there's no way to catch her eye.

"Sure," you say. "But I can drop you. I'm parked out back."

"You want me to get into a car with a stranger?"

You laugh. "What's going to happen?"

"Sometimes serial killers have women who find victims for them," she says, and you'd think she was totally sincere if the corner of her mouth wasn't turning upward just a little.

"You can call home before we leave and tell them I'm bringing you. And everybody here will see us leave together."

She's on the hook, but it's not set yet. She chews the inside of her cheek.

"I'll even warm the car up before I bring it around," you promise, and just like that she says, "Okay."

She moves toward you, cane swinging, and you stand aside. She taps expertly towards the door. You follow her from the music hall, thinking that it's weird that after all that she didn't give you a chance to go and fetch the car. She's still going to have to wait while you load your gear.

One nice thing about a blind girl: you don't have to be embarrassed by the un-vacuumed state of your ride. Or the fact that it's a Corolla with a quarter million touring miles on it. It used to be red about six years ago.

You know you shouldn't ask her, but who can resist? After she gives you directions you ask, "So how did you like the show?"

Her silence is enough warning to brace yourself for honesty. But then what she says is thoughtful, and not as bad as you were expecting. "You still sound like everybody else," she says. "But that won't be forever. You'll find your voice."

You nod, and realize again that she can't see you. You know you're generic. Everybody starts off generic. All garage bands sound the same, as a girl you used to know liked to say. So you're generic. But you're still growing. It's a slow, painful process, though, and there's always the fear you'll die before you finish.

Evolution is the most awful god of all.

"That stuff you sing about," she said. "You really believe it?"

"I believe it's important to say it out loud," you say, because you have to say something. She makes a little noise of consideration or disapproval, like a thumped violin, and you're afraid to ask which.

You can't really talk, so you just reach across the center console and touch the back of her hand, lightly, with two fingers. The side road whirs by under the Toyota 's wheels, the verges studded with bare trees burnt-bone stark against dirty snow. The blind girl's not wearing any gloves. You don't think she had any. Her hand is cold.

Cold flesh, not the surface cold of human chill with the sense of warmth under it, but cold to the bone.