Dance! -NaNo2010

At first, the crowd only watched. Then one little girl began to bounce and clap her hands. Keary played his fiddle straight to her and she giggled in delight. When he moved back, she grabbed the hands of two other girls and the three spun in a wild circle. The dance spread from there until Keary had to dodge and weave in his own dancing to avoid hitting another of the spinning high-stepping stomping leaping dancers.

Story within a story from chapter 4 - NaNo2010

“Once near the beginning, there was a boy who couldn’t hear the music inherent. When his mother hummed or his father danced or his sister played counterpoint on her pipe, he only heard their half of the melody and rhythm. He couldn’t join in.



“He asked them how they heard the music, what it was like, but their explanations didn’t make sense. His sister said it was like the smell of the ground rain, rising up from below, and she just had to keep her feet bare to hear it well.


His father said it was like the feel of the breezes, sometimes soft and sometimes wild. He heard it best when he closed his eyes.


His mother said it was like breathing, something always happening whether you noticed it or not.


The boy tried his hardest to find the music. He would go out alone and dig his toes in the ground. He’d close his eyes and feel the wind. He would breathe deep and shallow, fast and slow. But the music never came.


And the longer he waited and hoped and searched, the more lost he felt. He knew he was meant to dance and sing. His family pounded drums and sang for him but he knew it was only an echo of what they themselves heard.


So he left.


He left his family and his home and everything except the clothes on his back and the hope in his heart.”

August Song

Paranoid Android



“Did you hear that?”


With considerable effort, I pulled away from my sketches to answer my usually silent friend, “What? The air filter?”


“No,” Joam shook his head impatiently, “The sound that doesn’t fit. Wait a minute and listen.”


I waited. The struggling air filter cut in and out, our cooler hummed in one corner of the room, muted conversation came from somewhere further down the hall, nothing that “didn’t fit”. “Joam-“


“Sh.” He held up a hand. His face was tense with concentration.


Annoyed, I stayed silent but my mind began to turn back to the assignment I had been working on. How could I lower the energy needed to Slyman’s limit? Maybe if I-


My thought process slammed to a halt. What was that? Now that I heard it, I wondered how it had escaped my notice before. It was mesmerizing.


Joam raised an eyebrow at me.


I nodded but didn’t speak. The noise reminded me of a pre-storm wind but more delicate and piercing with a mathematical precision to its movement up and down in pitch. I felt an absurd urge to cry.


“What is it?” I whispered.


Joam opened his mouth to speak but the sound stopped abruptly. Ponderous curiosity changed to confusion on his face. Then an alarm began to shrill.


Air breach, dorm seven. Air breach, dorm seven.


I scrambled to grab my oxygen mask as the door to our room sealed and the air filter cut off completely. The warning sirens shrilled in my ears even after I had sealed the bulky mask in place but the haunting sound from minutes before replayed in my mind. I had to find its source.

I Will Rise

-May song story from Chris Tomlin's "I Will Rise"-





When I step through the veil, everything changes.


The incessant buzzing stops so suddenly, the silence is like music. I take a slow breath and the air tastes free. I want to open my eyes but then the anticipation will be over. I wait.


Softly, music does begin. An oboe beckons with a sound at once so far away that I take another step forward and yet so close that my spine tingles up to my ears. How can it be both at once? I don’t know.


Other instruments join, drums, piano, guitar. If I focus, I can hear the individual melodies in the harmony. Each tells a different story. All entwine into an epic so strange and familiar and romantic, I start to laugh.


A breeze, scented with lilac and cinnamon, swirls and spins around me. It teases my face. The grass tickles my toes.


Do I dare step in further? Do I open my eyes?


A low rumble moves through the music. The light against my eyelids remains as bright as ever but now gentle raindrops fall. The wind catches the rain and tosses it about so it falls up as well as down.


Already dizzy with laughter, I spin in the rain.


I don’t know how or when it happens but the ground disappears from beneath me. I am rising, flying.


It is nothing like swimming or falling or floating or anything else I ever imagined flying might be. I’m dancing and the centre of gravity has changed. I am not drawn up or down, I am drawn further in.


The rain ebbs. My feet touch down on warm mossy rock. Mixed in with the music, I hear the laughter and murmuring of other people but the place where I wait belongs only to me and one other.


When I open my eyes, my heart knows whom I will finally see.

Lament

Key: A minor
Time signature: ??

A C C B G A


These 6 notes are haunting me. I started singing them while reading about the 2005 Pakistan earthquake and they keep looping back over again in my mind. I don't know if they are a remnant from a song I've heard or the opening of a song that wants to be written.

Only 6 notes but they call forth the brush of a desert wind, the ache of unshed tears, the letting go of a desperate loss.

Strange.