'Changing The Tunes'
Once upon a life time ago, in a forever far away from here…
He used to read fairy tales to his sister. No, when he pauses to recollect, he realizes his sister read fairy tales to him. Or rather, she told the stories and he would read them. She never told them correctly, always straying from the stories as they unfolded on the paper. He used to tell her that she couldn't keep changing the stories, even if she didn't like the way they went. That all seems years and miles away from him here, even in this same garden they read those books in.
It's aged along with him, tumbled with long grasses gone to seed. The flower bed is overrun with weeds, arching over the trellises with proprietary arrogance. The trees have changed little: to him they were always enormous. They curve protectively, or possessively, or aggressively over the garden like a mother would over an infant…or perhaps a snake over prey. And there is something wrong, because mathematically speaking, the dimensions make little sense. The trees are too large and the space between them seems a little like a deep chasm, although it is flat, grass-covered ground. How can a path cast shadow on the trees?
His sister is standing in a white dress in the lane, playing on a bright red piano and smiling. His sister is four years old, and he knows instinctively that he is as well, although he is also acutely aware that he is thirteen and so should she be, in an ordered and logical universe. He knows he is dreaming as well, and wishes his subconscious had allowed him the comforting weight of a stopwatch in his hand. The song she plays is haunting and lilting, but it too is changed from what it had been, and suddenly he is seated by her on the black leather piano bench, pumping his hands on the keys and unable to touch them and reorder her music into a more pleasing tune. She's laughing at him, Kozue is, pearly white baby teeth flashing at him and her eyes wickedly amused.
"You have to ask the wolf to teach you, big brother," she tells him, and the music is getting more intense, "Because only the wolf knows how to play this song." Her voice is a far away whisper beneath the pounding of the keys. When he tells her he doesn't want to learn the song, he wants to make it stop, she smiles and tells him the song never ends or changes.
And he can't change a fact just because he doesn't like its existence.