Inner Room

We were in a mall, shopping for canaries to decorate our new house with. It was a bright Saturday morning, and we all had our carp-carts full of saltines and canned snake bits. We were wearing pale red aprons over our kilts.

There was a jazz band playing on the sixth floor. We could hear them as we rode up the disappearing escalator, while the little boy who held my hand, all of five years old, began to sing Strange Fruit in tune. When we finally saw the band, we were surprised to see that they weren't using their instruments. The saxophone was quiet, lying placidly on its masters' lap. The trombone stood on its wider end, beside the very large drumset that no one was playing. The musicians were simply whistling, but instead of the hollow, chirp-like sounds we ordinarily hear when we whistle, real, full-bodied notes came out of their mouths. Our voice boxes have more strings than usual, they'd said after one performance.

Or you hear music in the most ordinary things.

I love you, Ed.

And so it ends, with a short declaration, in this mall-dream that I wished I'd had the courage to live out while you were still here.