Stories of the Island
(Siren Song)
The song was just a song.
No matter how she tried, she couldn't find any secrets hidden in its rhythm, any stories waiting to be told in its bass line. She stood outside the tower for hours on end listening to it but it was just a catchy tune.
Sometimes she screamed and slammed her fists into the walls waiting for it to start up again. Sometimes she couldn't bear to listen to it and plugged her ears with cotton like it was a siren song trying to lead her ship astray. But most days she just stood there, listening to it.
The town was empty when she got there. She couldn't have known that all its inhabitants had flocked to the huge tower standing straight in the air like the hand of a fallen giant. But yet she walked the same paths they had walked, her footsteps shadowing their own, to the base of the huge protrusion on the face of the land, staring up at its single window.
And then the music had come and broken her spell, opened her ears and her eyes and brought her to her knees where she knelt before it praying to it like her god. The music, the music- it was her magic and nobody could take it away. She listened day in and day out as the sweet sorrowful chords of the singer melded into the guitar, which juxtaposed onto that ever-seductive bass line and the steady rhythm of the flowing hip-hop, over and over with the cry of "feel-good" like a promise, the vow the song took that it would make her feel good.
And then one day the song became nothing but a song.
She dwelt in the limbo it left behind, neither in that bass line nor in that sweet guitar solo, no part of it at all but all of it, the dry and empty land around the tower being it that she had left. The melancholy town where they never smiled was what she had now. She wanted desperately to move on, to be condemned to either heaven on the island or hell in the tower and not stuck as a ghost roaming the limbo that they had stretched out between the two. She haunted the vacant buildings and homes, watched the helicopters swoop by like giant dragonflies with stingers, stared up into the sky at the sun until her eyes watered with the tears she couldn't cry over her fate. And so she was a bodiless soul lingering amongst the barren tombstones of the land that jutted up into the sunset, naught but a specter of what she was.
"Which one are you for?" asked a voice one day. She looked up into eyes that weren't eyes at all but hollow shells of vision. (Like mine, she mused.)
"Neither," she whispered, "or both. Any of them at all would be fine just to give me some kind of closure… to let me rest."
"I was in there-" he whispered, pointing up to the tower that jutted out like an ugly tumor on the horizon. "And I thought if I got out of there I could get on THERE," and he gestured up to the sky so she understood where he meant. "But I dropped right through- ka-splat!" He made a smacking motion with his hands that brought a smile to her face. "So now I'm neither here no there. What 'bout you?"
"I'm all alone," she whispered. "I just wander."
She watched as he puzzled over this for a second, tilting his head at just that angle, lifting and dropping his shoulders just so. He pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it up. The Smoke around his face made him even more ghostly.
Finally he asked what she'd prayed to the music he'd ask, he heart pounding out the song's rhythm in her chest with hope.
"Wada ya say we wander together?"
What do you think? Is this one a good way to make a comeback? Hello there devoted (not!) readers! I am BACK after who-knows-how-long! That's right, even though I've neglected any stories I've been following AND this story for much too long, I'm trying to get back into the swing of things! Having a social life really deters you from whiling away the hours on the internet, and trying to write original fiction really takes your mind off of fanfics. Ah, well, I'm returning now to my best-ever fanfic (one of the very few I've posted…. I need more!) The stories of the Inc! Only now I've changed the title to 'stories of the island.' I figure this way I can incorporate El Manana into things, too. Anyhow, this was a new concept that popped into my head. I wasn't planning to go in this direction with it; the first paragraph was just me expressing my writer's block. And then I thought, "When something loses its magic then the very essence of life has dried up and what are you left with?" I really liked the last line of this one.
Rah, look at that. My ramble is quickly becoming as long as the story itself. Well I'll tie it off before you fall asleep and your head hits the keyboard and accidentally sends me a bad review. Anyhow, I look forward to opinions. Please review even if it's just to say "welcome back", and thanks for your time! JA ne and daisuke!
