People Music

I hear it for the first time, coming from the woods. They warned me about it. My father was about my age when he first heard it, and I don’t think his father was too much older. It happens to all the men in the family, and even though I haven’t been thinking about it recently, I’ve known somewhere deep down that it would come to me soon enough.
I watch the wisp of wintering snipes, late to the party, fly south over the roof of my cabin, dodging the billows of smoke from my chimney as I make my way to the treeline. I don’t bother with my boots, letting the sting of the snow on my feet transform into a numb burn as I duck below the bramble and march onwards. The music grows louder as I approach, but as the thicket spreads around me, I’m left with only slivers of moonlight to guide the way.
The hum of the strings and echo of the drum begin to fill my head and I see it now, up ahead in the clearing. The tent, sheer sheets of off-white linen cast over a skeletal frame. They’re dancing inside. I can feel it in my chest now too, the people music.
I become a corpse.
I die beautifully. My body, the host to an ecosystem. Moss and lichen and fungus first, then the bugs and slugs and critters from the floors of the forest. I sit back and watch my own consumption, the creatures filing out from their tent one by one, taking their music on the road. The ground squirrels and rodents carry the melody, gnawing at me until I’m devout of flesh and something with sturdier teeth will need to get the marrow from my bones. The elk are next, providing percussion with the clopping of hooves and making way for the foxes and yotes to deal with the rest of me, howling all the while. Once they’re finished, and I am almost nothing, the last of them come from the tent.
They stand over the blood-soaked earth I laid upon, the women in my family, and they sing deep, rich low notes from the depths of their bellies. They pluck their strings and cry their tears into the space I occupied and they sit in my shadow of blood. When Mother’s voice hits its lowest point, they cease - all of them.
I join their tune now, not in vocal contribution, but within the arrangement. I find my place within the tangent of notes. I occupy a space between octaves, below my father but above my older brother. When the forest begins its people music again, I wait patiently for my turn.
And when my note comes, I shine.

***

Duncan Rivers is a fiction writer whose work is published/forthcoming in venues like Wilderness House, Marrow Magazine and Sinking City. He lives in Toronto, Ontario, where he can usually be found struggling to walk his lazy dog and working on his debut novel.