Track 05
Axel finished eating and was impatiently waiting for me to end so he could show me all his music. I was excited too, but I really couldn’t compete. I wolfed it down for him as he started telling me about some of the bands he listened to. When I was done he surprised me; he took a deep breath and leaned in close to me, placing his headphones snuggly over my head. I thought he would just unplug the cord and let it play by speaker so I was very surprised and tense when he made that move. As if I weren’t red enough. Why’d he go and do that. I soon learned why.
“Daa~” The first sung note struck through me like a lightning bolt. I instantly forgot all my prior worries, the thoughts died away from unimportance in comparison to the sound that punched my ears. Daa daa daa-ah, da.” The voice ascended ever so slowly, then drooped. Lyrics came; real and authentic, meaningful lyrics. Lyrics you’d never hear on the radio; a song that wasn’t about love, or money, or drugs, or girls. The song didn’t consist of one repeated phrase sung in different techno waves. It wasn’t a song made for fame or fortune, you could tell, the tune wasn’t meant to be played at some bar where the listeners were all too drunk to care for music quality. This was poetry in the form of a melody. A song the singer’s soul was steeped into.
“[insert symbolic, life-changing, world-building lyrics about the sky]” was a line/verse that stuck out to me. The lyrics came from my left side and the ascending daa’s rose and fell on my right. I don’t know if it was a conscious decision on the maker’s part, to feed me the lyrics through the side closest to my heart, but it worked. The words reached my heart stronger than any song I had ever heard before. I didn’t know headphones could be so powerful, now that I think of it… this was the first time I was listening to music through headphones.
“That was beautiful.” I whispered. I was so lost in a music-brimmed world for the entire duration of the song that I forgot where I was and who was there to listen. When I opened my eyes, I saw Axel giving me another wide-eyed grin.
“I know right? Here try this one.” He scrolled down with many sped-up thumb swipes and tapped his screen for a new song. I think I was developing a new found joy for seeing his amusement. While the headphones began conjuring some more magic into my ears I managed to sustain eye-contact with him as he fanboyed to me about the amazingness of this masterpiece. It was hard to connect this boy before me to the same one who sword-fought a terrorist, “Did you hear the guitarist there? It sounds like there’s another but he’s just using a two-neck guitar flawlessly. That reminds me, there’s this one song where the guitar sounds like a saxophone! He switches over from generic electric guitar sounds to the saxophone one throughout the song, but wait before I show you that one-” somewhere along the line I stopped listening to his voice and kept watching his changing expressions until more music was thrown back on.
The first song he showed me was purely soul music, and the rest were all interesting combinations of different genres; rock tied to classical, festive music slid into blues, some type of a sparkly-sounding jazz, and ‘modern punk with an orchestral accompaniment’ as Axel put it - that one sounded like it belonged in a dramatic, flying car movie. They were all so new, so exotic, and strange to me, but I couldn’t express to anybody how much I loved them. Every bar, every beat, every unforgettable moment.
“And this one is gentle metal, you’d probably really like the melody in the background, since you liked...”
“Whoaa, you’re right!!! I especially loved the…”
“Yeah, not many people notice that, I’m surprised, in that case you’d appreciate this one.”
“Oh my gawd, how did she do that with her voice? It was so soothing.”
We kept a consistent smiling spree going while sharing our views on song after song. For each tune, he’d quiet down as I listened and perk back up the moment I finished. This repeated for a few more songs and after a while we were both fandom-ing about how great the music was. I got so caught up in things that I didn’t notice when he started getting sleepy.
“The violin in that one was so nice; I never expected rock to have instrumentals like that. It made me want to learn violin or piano even!” When I looked up at him, expecting an excited response and another recommendation, I saw his head bowed, and his hand unraveled loosely around his phone. His breathing was slowed and there was a calm air around him.
He fell asleep? How can anyone fall asleep in that position? And so fast?! This song was only around two minutes long and he was definitely awake when he chose it for me. I tilted my head to analyze some of his sleeping beauty, yet something about the sight was unsettling to me. Perhaps it was the trauma of having to yank bloody arrows from his back, or watching him die sometime before that, either way I didn’t want him to stay in this state.
“Um, Axel?” I hesitated.
No response, so I tried again, reaching a hand for his shoulder. I felt bad in waking him up, maybe he was just really tired, but if this sudden exhaustion was thanks to yesterday’s injury, I’d prefer if he were in bed resting than trying to entertain me.
“Axel?” I shook his shoulder a second time, adding a little more vigor. This time he gritted his teeth and took a jittery breath that sounded hoarse like he was breathing through a cloudy mesh. He remained unconscious. My worries skyrocketed. “Axel!?!”
He slumped forward and I quickly held him up. “AXEL!!!” At that moment, the door opened from behind me and as I looked back to see who, the headphones were pulled from my ears. Confused and scared, I watched his mother breeze over to his side and place his headphones back over his ears, and twist the swirly coloured cup over his left ear as she held him upright. This action must have raised the volume because I heard a low buzz of the last melody I listened to.
His mother’s expression was blank and void of emotion. This was such a huge contrast to how I was used to seeing her that it sent chills down my back.
In roughly three seconds after receiving back his headphones, Axel’s eyes fluttered open – just barely open. He immediately re-clenched his grip on his device and started scrolling in slow-motion through his playlist as if he never lost consciousness.
“Axel.” his mother called.
He flinched and slowly brought his squinted gaze up to hers. I don’t think he realized his mother was there in the room until that moment. There was a cold sweat sticking to his temples, his face was pale, and I could visibly see the strain he had in the simple task of breathing.
“You know you shouldn’t have given it away for that long. Four or five songs should have been your limit.”
He looked exhausted, but he still put up a fight for his mom and scowled, “I can still show her one more.” He looked back down to his phone and continued searching for songs.
“I wonder how many ’one more’s it would take for you to consider the danger you placed on your life.”
This conversation was scaring me. What were they talking about? What did she mean?
“Come. It’s time you rest up.” She stooped to a knee and wrapped his arm around her neck, then heaved him up. It looked like he knocked out the moment they were standing. She trudged him over to the bed and peeled the music player from his hand; on it, she played with some settings and rested it on his bedside. The outer design of his muffs swirled into a blue-purple whirlpool (eliminating the red that used to be there). Then she pulled a blanket over to his Adam’s apple and patted his hair. I watched with slight terror.
Did I cause that? Was he struggling to breathe because of something I did? Or didn’t do? Why didn’t I notice sooner? Was he really still injured from that day with the arrows? Maybe that magic I saw back then had only healed the outside of his wound and not the inside. Does that mean he was suffering all this time? And did his mother know about his injury? What did his music have to do with any of this? I didn’t really know anything about Sell-souls. What should I do? What if...
My hands were shaking violently under eachother. Flashes of his bloodied body shot over my vision like the AMVs on the internet that were made to evoke tears.
What if-
“Come with me for a sec,” His mother interrupted my freak out, “…Um, what was it again?”
“Wh- huh?”
“Your name?”