Reality's Escape: a collection of short stories

A Musician's Place to Fight

Sooo... I looked up on YouTube if you could play a record without electricity. I seen a really neat video that uses the paper cone technique; I don't know if it really works or if it was faked, but that's why it's fiction, right? Enjoy! This is another worrying prompt from blog.reedsy.com

War. When it first started, all I heard was Beethoven's 5th. Urgency. Terror. Climax after climax.

But then it sunk in. It stayed and festered as families separated to march on alone. We were cursed to keep moving on while the air was saturated with Adagio for Strings. I watched my father leave in his uniform, his old gun clutched tightly in his calloused hands. My mother kept the house in the country, opening it for people to send their children to when the bombs came. I had a little sister and brother who stayed with her and helped despite being children themselves.  My other brothers... they ran away.

I knew they hadn't run from the fight. They were embodying Ride of Valkyries, chasing honour and adventure on the battlefield. Alex refused to sit back while his family and his country were in danger. Philip would follow him anywhere, and so they were gone.

They were both under aged, but they knew as well as I did that the identification systems were down to avoid hacking, and once they were on the battlefield, no one would complain the having of a few extra young men.

The army never complained about having extra lives to put on the line. They had taken my friends. Hallie was on the front, dragging half-dead bodies from decimated wastelands. Sara was in the stealth force somewhere with the first eleven seconds of Lacrimosa Dies Illa mirroring her every calculated move. I didn't know where the others were. Marian was probably a Sergeant already.

They had left me alone. A few musicians were supposed to keep the spirits up at home. We played on the streets, and occasionally did concerts for the few who had enough money to pay. We played Op. 314 of On The Beautiful Blue Danube the most, trying to keep everyone in the mindset of grandness, trying to instil perseverance into the weary souls. It wasn't working. They had left me alone, till now.

I turned the letter over in my hands, walking down the hallway to my apartment. Mrs. Topua eyed me sympathetically as she unlocked her own door. I shot her a wry smile and, "Well, rent here was too expensive anyways." She didn't respond, just shook her head and went in, shutting the door. I felt so bad for her. She was so tired, so worried, so tired of being worried. Just like everyone else. Not that I wasn't, but not to the same extent. I knew that God had a plan in all of this, somehow, and I was going to hang on as long as I could to see it.

I headed into my little apartment and allowed about four seconds to look around and miss it, then Radetzky March, Op. 228 started up in my head. I packed up my few belongings. I wrote a note to my mother and shoved it in the front pocket of my bag. All my extra rations I brought to various nieghbors, knocking on the doors so they would find them before the thieves did, then stopped by the post office and dropped off the note.

The taxi only took me a little ways into the woods, and then I got to hike. I didn't mind, it had been a while since I had been under the trees. The address brought me to a little shack surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. There was a man in full military uniform standing on the other side, hand holding a rifle, hip sporting a pistol, boots planted firmly in the dirt.

"Name and business?" he demanded.

"Dyck. Reporting for assignment."

"Identification?"

"Aye, sir." I handed him the documents.

He looked at me strangely, but opened the gates.

From the inside, the shack looked like it would survive a fair amount of bombs. There was a uniformed woman inside. She repeated the questions, then, "Fourth room on the left." She pressed a button just inside a cracked bowl on the dusty table, and a trap door lifted.