This short story was the First Place Winner in the “Historic Fiction” group of the NYCMidnight Writing challenge. Limited to only 500 words, the judges had this to say about the piece:
“It uses the motif of music expertly”
“The writing is beautiful, vivid and poetic, with a sharpness.”
“I found the twist to be clever and arresting as well ”
” It makes the reader feel still ever hopeful. “
Here is the full, winning story:
The air tastes of iron and ruin. My mind drifts where the body cannot.
I see the fields again, before the flames, before the silence. Cane rising like cathedral walls, shadowed vaults whispering their prayers to a god who never came. And there – a girl. Barefoot, her steps unburdened upon the dirt, her presence all motion, all joy. She is frolicking through the stalks, chasing the dusk as though it were a playmate. In her hand, a length of music wire glints, scavenged from some discarded banjar, its slender thread catching the sun like a blade made of light. She brandishes it as treasure, not refuse, and her laughter carries further than the birds.
That refrain – bright, unafraid – lives deeper in me than drums of war or cries of loss. It is the one note that oblivion could not smother.
I remember the turning. Men who had bent into furrows straightening into spears. Women singing in tones that made the breeze itself tremble. The river moving swift and sure, as though it, too, believed in deliverance. For a moment, it seemed the whole of our being belonged again to us.
We rose because even in bondage, the heart remembered it was never meant to kneel.
I was Berbice when we nearly toppled the masters of the coasts.
But famine crept in where steel could not. Quarrels splintered hope. And then the masters returned, cloaked in thunder, voices sharpened into law. They did not kill swiftly. They arranged us into spectacle. Men wrung upon the wheel until their bones mimicked shattered instruments. Women hung in rows, their skirts swaying like unwilling banners. And children – forced into dance, their innocence hollowed into mockery.
Even now, the memory claws. Yet, louder than the cruelty is the girl’s cry – silver, piercing, unconquered. Perhaps she escaped into the jungle’s green embrace. Perhaps she fell where I could not see. I will never know. But I carry her still, strung through me like that broken chord’s vein she once clutched, a fragile line binding me to what should have been.
The earth around me darkens. Shapes blur at the edges. My thoughts stretch thin, weightless, like smoke pulled skyward. And then – tightness. A cord pressing deep into the neck, the spine jolting. I understand. These visions are not wanderings of a restless soul. They are the final chorus before the solemn hush.
The expanse recedes, and I feel myself suspended, the noose voicing its last hymn around my throat.
Yet in this narrowing world, I hear her again – her untamed echo, sharp and unbroken, ringing through the hollow of my chest. It rises beyond rope, beyond pain, beyond empire. A ballad forgotten by history, but not by me.
I was Berbice. But if sound endures after breath has failed, then let it be hers.
Brian Brijbag 