Nocturne in E Minor
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money, don't sue.
A/N: Don't know where the hell I'm going with this one. We'll see.
E minor: Naïve . . . lament without grumbling; sighs accompanied by few tears; this key speaks of the imminent hope of resolving in the pure happiness of C major.
from Christian Schubart's Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst (1806)
OCTOBER
There is a breeze that edges through the space where the window-wood has warped with age -- the candle sitting on a small table in the center of the room dances once, twice, then goes out. The young woman sighs and leans over the thick textbook in her lap to reach for a book of matches to re-light it.
The room is small, and sparsely furnished. There is a small kitchenette in the corner, where upon moving in Anne was dismayed to find that the water from the tap ran rusty and brown. The tiny bathroom has a toilet, a tub, a sink, and a makeshift bed-sheet curtain strung where a door ought to be. The only furniture in the main living space is a creaky futon and a coffee-table, which sit side-by-side.
The last match in the book breaks in two in her hand, and she curses, then jumps a little as one of the other doors in the hallway creaks open. She hears voices from the room next door, muffled through the thin building walls, and grabs the candle, and starts for the door.
Anne knows little about the men who live next door, apart from their fondness of beer and proclivity towards foul language. She supposes they're nice enough -- none of the Midwestern courtesy she's grown up with, spending twenty-two years in Minnesota, but certainly receptive enough when their drunken antics disturb her study habits and, frustrated, she pounds a fist against the wall they share. Two weeks ago, after becoming particularly irate, she rapped on the wall for half a minute before their shouts faded to whispers, then, after a moment, the door next to hers opened slowly. Footsteps approached her door, then there was a knock, more footsteps, and the neighbors' door creaked shut again. When she opened her door there was an unopened bottle of beer resting on a scrap of paper on which someone had scrawled, "Peace offering? --Connor."
It's Murphy, with a cigarette dangling lazily from his lips, who hears the knock first, and slurs, "Whoozayre?"
"Anne," says a small voice, "from next door."
Connor peeks around the door to see a girl with dark hair held in a loose knot by a couple of pencils, clutching a thick gray cardigan sweater to her body. He smirks. "Aye, so the little mouse next door finally decides to come out of her hole. Is there anything we can help you with, then?
She loosens her grip on the sweater and holds out a candle. "Out of matches. Help?"
"Oh," he says, "then you ought to come in, and we'll find you something. Murph, get your fuckin' feet off the table." Connor flashes her his most charming smile, ushering her into the apartment, and she blushes. "Want to stay for a drink, then?"
NOVEMBER
Three weeks go by and she's neither seen nor heard from her neighbors, until the night when she is awakened by the sound of muffled screams and sizzling through the wall. Concerned, she creeps into the hallway and peeks through a crack in the door, which has been left open. The stench of burning flesh causes her to take a step back, but what holds her gaze is the sight of the two brothers, covered in blood, pressing a hot iron to each other's skin to, she assumes, cauterize the wounds. Connor, seeing her out of the corner of one bloodshot eye as he wields the iron, turns his gaze to hers and mouths, "Go."
Back inside her room, Anne bolts the door shut. She kneels on the bathroom floor and retches till her throat feels hot and raw. She sleeps fitfully, and her dreams are all blood and hellfire.
A sharp rapping of knuckles against wood wakes her early the next morning, and a voice. "Help -- " she hears Connor say with an urgency she's never heard before, " -- it's Murph." He's pale when she unbolts the door, arms braced against the doorframe. "I didn't know what to do," he says.
Murphy's in a bad way when she sees him, sweating and shivering. She runs a hand over the fresh burn-scar on his bare shoulder and he convulses. "What did you do to the wound before you did this?" she asks, and Connor shrugs. "I think it's infected," she tells him, "and if you get him to a hospital he'll be fine, but if you don't do that now, he could die."
The hospital is harsh and sterile in a way that Connor doesn't like. He sits by Murphy's side until doctors, wearing plastic smiles and freshly-ironed white coats, tell him his brother has to stay overnight for further testing. "It's best if you come back in the morning," they say, as they shoo him from the room, and Anne pulls him outdoors and they walk the eight blocks home.
The apartment is colder than Connor remembers it being. It's the first night he and Murph have spent apart since God-knows-when, and the separation is at once too much. He takes off his shoes and cries, for Roc, who shouldn't have been sneaking into the Yakavetta's in the first place; for Da, and the way the three found each other and were separated only two months later, not by bullets, but by the old man's tired heart giving out; and for Murph, for the whole fucked-up mess things have become. He and Anne sit together on his bed he turns his face into her shoulder. "What if," he asks her, his voice muffled against her skin, "What if one day one of us doesn't come back? What if one day it's not things that can be fixed with tests and medicines and needles? What if one day one of us is really gone?"
And it's late but he's shaking so badly now that it doesn't seem right to leave him, so she blows out the candle she set on the kitchen table when she came in and lays them both back on the bed. She runs the fingers of one hand across his arm, tracin the jagged scars there, till his breathing grows slow and even, and the shuddering stops.
She isn't sure how long she's been lying there, the warmth of Connor's sleeping body pressed against her back, but she opens her eyes to see sunlight filtering pale through the window and spilling across the floor. With great care, she disengages herself from his arms and bends down to brush her lips across his temple.