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Garbage Music
Contents:
The Beginning
Home and Music
She Played
Back Again
Connect with S.A. Barton
By S.A. Barton
Copyright 2014 S.A. Barton
In the dark, the notes of her playing floated up like sparks from a campfire that could not be seen. The notes were old, and the instruments were old. She lived in the oldest of the garbage mines, a pit dug down in the top of Taylors Road Landfill, one that had been dug only a few years after the Last World War. It had fallen into disuse when the passages beneath the garbage-laden ground grew too twisting, too long, too prone to collapse. The bones of many of the miners of old Wurrengourne lay in some of those collapsed tunnels, now one with their more distant ancestors from the hard days before the Last, when the One People had been two and at war with themselves.
She was the last alive who had broken ground there to dig out the treasures in the things the past had thrown away. There was a story behind her uniquely long life, but what it was, was lost to the centuries since the War.
Jacinta Jaara sat beside the wide, fat-trunked eucalyptus that grew beside the ancient pit, listening to the rising music. In Jacinta's long, young fingers was a flute, hand carved and then carefully smoothed with handfuls of fine wet sand and then lacquered again and again and again. She fingered the instrument uncertainly, trying to anticipate the notes that came up from the wide hole in the Earth. She failed in some places, succeeded in others, still learning. But fail or succeed, she did not blow her breath into the bamboo to bring her own music to life.
She was too busy listening. Music was the only language Neyerneyemeet used, had ever used in living hearing. Jacinta's grandfather said his grandmother had told him that her grandfather claimed to have heard Neyerneyemeet speak. Nobody knew if it was true.
Jacinta played silently as the full moon slipped down to, and then below, the dark horizon. As the sun touched the horizon with its faint glow before rising, Jacinta's head nodded down, once, twice, and then stayed down, resting her chin on her chest. The flute slipped from her fingers and rolled in the grass.
The music rising from below faded, faded, finally stopped as the first rays of full sun slipped over the edge of the Earth to brighten the topmost branches of the trees. Neyerneyemeet emerged, a harp twisted together from scraps of garbage in one hand, a clean gray blanket over one shoulder, light against the rich night-black of her neck. Her deeply seamed and scarred free hand lifted the fallen flute from the grass, placed it gently in Jacinta's lap, and then draped the blanket over her, tucking the edge under her chin.
Then Neyerneyemeet turned and disappeared back into the Earth. Her music began to rise again, softer, gentle, an even older song than before, the sound of the harp replaced by a drone like the wind and the tap of feet on a log drum. Jacinta did not see it, and heard it only in her dreams. She dreamed of dancing to it, around an aromatic fire of boughs and herbs like all of the families did sometimes, like the people did when the One People were two before the Last World War, like the First People did even before the Second People came. Below, Neyerneyemeet played a wind drone made from wood that had once served several families as desks and chairs and shade for their yards, and what her feet tapped was made of plastic and metal that had once been part of an automobile and a television and two strollers in which blonde haired and blue eyed children rode, children who had grown old and had children of their own who had children themselves, children whose old bones now lay in the Earth, becoming one with it again.