Author: Morgan R.
Email: [email protected]
Rating: G
Summary: Some Max-ness. Nothing much.
Feedback: I'd be delighted.
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Max hums sometimes. In the moments when he is totally focused on something else, a string of unconnected notes will pass through his lips. He has always needed music, not because he is an especially skilled musician, but because it opens something in him. Turns a key-
There was an afternoon once, as he sat on a low wall outside the school, his sister's backpack next to him. It was before he had gotten his driver's license, and they were waiting for their mother to pick them up. Isabel was laughing with some of her friends, and he hummed, not noticing as the notes lined up, becoming something new. When the recognition came, he almost went blind with the fearful wonder of it.
The same tune, not hummed by his half human mouth but embraced by some otherworld symphony, and he was remembering the processional as surely as if Earth was nothing but a far-fetched fairy tale his subjects told their children. Pomp and majesty and a collective decision to forget about the ravages of war for the sake of one sacred ceremony. His sister glowed in the light of that other star, but she was simultaneously she and not-she and it was all too much for one fifteen year old boy to take in.
A different language, a different music, and then his mother's car pulled up.
"Max? Are you coming?"
For a moment, he wondered what 'Max' was supposed to mean, what language she was speaking, why her face made no sense.
But Isabel was wearing blue jeans and he knew what they were, and Max was the only name he knew by experience, and the song was gone.
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Max hums sometimes. He doesn't know the words, doesn't know the language or the reason, he just knows that the music rests somewhere behind his borrowed eyes. The melody travelled with him, stayed inside him. If he can find it, then maybe-
"What station do you want?" Isabel asks, switching the radio on. Music of the most mediocre variety fills the jeep, and he has no choice but to fall silent. She sings along, smiling in the afternoon sun, and all her brother can think is that the sunlight is fainter than he can stand.
****
finis