Mythos (Dylan Kempton)

Mythos is a collection of short stories that all invoke a fantastical creature/person in their narratives. Each story in the collection is intended to unsettle certain societal norms that deal with gender, success, failure, relationships, and home, respectively. The use of fantastical creatures was an attempt to come at these important issues in a lateral fashion; once the assumptions about the reality of the world are unsettled, it becomes far easier to unsettle other implicit assumptions about the reality of our society. That, and it’s fun to tell stories about the impossible. But don’t let the fantastical elements fool you into believing these works are intended to exist at a remove from our own world. After all, I have tried to put as much of myself as I dare into my work; I hope you can tell.

 

Transcript:

The following is an excerpt from “The Chaconne”, a piece from my collection Mythos.

 

~*~

 

The night is deep and I am awake. More than that, I am prepared.

I steady myself with deep breaths until I’m ready to begin. I never learned this ritual from my mother, nor from any of my private lessons. Somehow, it just slipped into my mind, bypassing the usual steps of teachers and practice and memorization. With a sharp paring knife I took from our kitchen, I chip at an old block of rosin, dislodging chunks. With the bottom of the handle, I grind the rosin into a fine dust. Normally, I would just gather the rosin dust that accumulates on the strings and the neck of the instrument, since it was saturated in my sound. I don’t have the time for that now, so I just pray that quantity would make up for a necessary lack in quality. Gathering the dust in my hand, I let it fall into a small ceramic bowl.

For the next step, I take the edge of the thin rug that covers much of the floor and pull it to the side, beneath my bed, to reveal the hardwood below. Despite my best attempts with hydrogen peroxide, soap, and a sponge, I can still see the brown stains and black burns from my previous attempts. It’s a small price to pay, of course. Anything is.

With the paring knife, I make a shallow laceration horizontally across the top of my wrist. It stings and I hiss through my teeth, but it isn’t altogether unpleasant. At least this pain is clearly external. Drops of blood bead up on my wrist like dew and I catch them in the bowl before they fall to the floor. I stir it together with my index finger, the blood combining with the rosin to form a solution brimming with spent life. Kneeling down on the hardwood, I start drawing on the floor, a ring of symbols that are intimately familiar even though I’ve never seen any of them before. As I sketch each character, it first seems to be entirely alien, but as I stare at it the shape resolves into a sound, pitch, and rhythm in my head. Periodically, I make more thin incisions as I run out of my ink, until my arm looks like an angry score.

I fall into the pattern and before I realize it the ring is finished, a perfect circle of glyphs that curve around to meet themselves. It does look strange, this umber ring on the floor right next to my bed, still covered by the purple comforter with the princess print that I got when I was seven. Since I forgot to grab a towel earlier, I wipe my hand on my jeans, making sure all the mixture is cleaned off. Now comes the most important part of the ritual.

The melody of the circle is in my head, an infinite song, but that’s not good enough. I grab my violin from its case, reverently tighten the bow. Now I’m placing the bow to the strings and listening to the song playing in my mind. The air becomes heavy in the silence before a piece. Then I drag my bow down against the strings and start to play.

[Discordant violin music starts playing]

The piece has no end and no beginning. It’s not in any key or time signature I can recognize, yet there is an order to it that defies comprehension. As I play, the symbols begin to glow with an energy that drains the light from the room. The trophies on top of my dresser lose their shine and the color fades from my wallposters of Itzhak Perlman and Hilary Hahn. I slowly walk around the circle to keep reading, yet when I return to where I started I can’t recognize it as the same melody. Inside the circle, the energy starts to crescendo and the runes are smoldering, releasing white smoke into the air. It gathers in the middle as my playing becomes more feverish, entering a series of rapid arpeggios that send my bow arcing across all four strings, my left hand working its way up the neck with each bow stroke until with a final discordant chord, the music vanishes from my mind, although I know that somewhere else it will carry on forever.

[Music fades away]

The smoke is gone, as are the symbols. In their place, I see myself: a teenage girl, brown hair slightly disheveled, wearing a mid-length skirt and a t-shirt with a logo for a music camp on it. She looks at me with sparkling eyes (mine, I know, are far more tired) and her mouth twists up in sadistic delight. In her hands, she’s holding a violin just like me, although the strings are lying loose against the neck and her bow is missing the horsehair.

“You’re back, then. I had a feeling you’d return.” She has my voice, too, although there’s something missing from the sound that keeps it from feeling fully human.

“I have an audition coming up. Juilliard.” She just stares at me with cruelty and joy, and I can’t tell which one is more upsetting. “It has to be perfect.”

“Of course it does. And I can give you perfection, if that’s what you truly want.” Her tongue dances over her molars. “Of course, you know that there’s a cost.”

“No!” The word rips from my mouth. “No, I won’t give you that.”

She laughs and the sound is so foreign coming out of her mouth. “Well, we’ll see. But surely there’s something you’re willing to trade. You of all people should know that nothing is ever freely given.”

 

~*~