Microfiction--E Minor

The six strings across the guitar are innocent; innocent and blind, laying helpless in hands that know the sound but not where it comes from. The nineteen frets are paving stones making up a long, unexplored path. The one sound hole is empty.

Teach me something, he says. The request is enticing: teach me anything. But I know what he wants to hear. He must have heard notes fit together in chords before; magic because it seemed to drift out of nowhere. Teach me something, he says—teach me to be God. I know that when the chord is played, he will stay the same; it is the mystery that will fall.

I wind the pegs at the head of the instrument, letting the notes sharpen and loosen for a few moments as the strings align their pitches to the air, to each other. Bring it out into the cold and it’ll go out of tune, I warn him.

The strings across the guitar are so vulnerable, but so beautiful when they are corrupted that it is always a pride to teach the first chord. I maneuver the instrument so that it lies on its side in his arms. E Minor, I say, the easiest chord there is!—one fret, two strings. He looks at me when he presses the strings down; is it so simple?

I smile and sigh, and he strums. And the easiest chord there is floods the room in shades of grey; such innocence tainted so quickly, so effortlessly! The notes fall through the air in twisted braids, like smoke; E Minor, unspoken sorrow. It broods, a despair clinging to sound only for the promise of vengeance.

He listens, astounded; the woeful hum fades. But I could put my ear to the sound hole and it would still be there, reverberating endlessly in the darkness around the guitar’s core.

The strings across the guitar are the strings across my heart; of sound, of sentiment.

You can play a song if you know G, I say, and quickly take the instrument away. My fingers bind the humming strings back down in a different pattern. G is a carefree but suspenseful combination, diluting the dregs of E Minor that I can still hear echoing in the air. The two chords battle with each other even as they fit cleanly into the same dimension. One after the other in a constant pattern, they build the first song I ever learned:

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we’re born, into this world we’re thrown,
Riders on the storm