Northern Downpour

The Open Gates (XXXI)

XXXI

Micael and Jack’s playing had passed the sixteenth bar, and the child had just started to rummage on the cabinet. He was digging curiously and tirelessly to find something to offer a dance, and soon after, he found a doll. Though broken, he grabbed the doll, which was close as his size, and held it on its waist and hand, and went on the middle of the hall.

He took a mere five steps before reaching the middle, and there he danced like a free animal of which being illicit was not a thing, and it never would be a thing, at least he thought so. The child’s dance was glamorous and fluid like noodles. He could feel the music eating his very ignorant soul while refusing the fact that he could shapeshift into another being to dance much more evenly. His hands on the waist of the doll, and the other’s tighter on the hand, and he was staring at the doll’s eye, too.

Glaring, green in color, but sadly the other was taken out of its socket, but it was satisfying to stare nonetheless. He was dancing. He had lifted his left feet and lifted it as much as he could, and stepped it onto the floor and rotating upon his very axis on the latter, while Micael and Jack were both playing.

Twenty-four bars in, and Micael could already feel the fatigue on his fingers, as he was pressing into something like keys with very low sensitivity. Every press was like a battle to conquer and when every time he did, he had lost a very fraction of his ability. And then he and Jack had reached the part where the composition’s dynamics was risen.

DUN… DUN… DUN… DUN!

And Jack’s violin was gracefully following, too. It felt like they had practiced Chopin’s Nocturne for ages and they never missed one session. The dead trees were accompanying the child’s dancing together with the doll. The night was fleeing from the harsh reality that this moment, too was going to be irrelevant, or maybe it already had been one. The very music was touching Micael on his back, he could feel that someone was caressing his very back with smooth hands and seducing movements, like Amy’s, but he tried to focused on playing even with fatigued fingers. The hammers were heavy and unresponsive, like what he had expected from an old piano with its foot cut constructively and replaced with goddamn planks, and upon the touches was a voice, something of unfamiliar decibel.

“Look closely, Micael, for it was never meant to be broken.”

He got right up unto his thoughts, and he then could feel that his finger could do no more, so he started shifting the dynamics down on its thirty-second bar, and gradually halt to a completely stop. Jack looked worried and confused. No. He felt worried and confused, too (for his body under a damn cape and his face under an ugly-looking skull-like mask would not want to tell anything but to scare and kill). The child was furiously disappointed, at most, for he was dancing so gracefully like a coconut palm waving back and forth thru the strongest hurricane’s presence, and they both looked at Micael, with the child having a quite sad smile and teary eyes. Micael deciding to stop was simply killing the eustress all throughout the hall.

Everyone could again feel that the place was long forgotten and not taken care of, like a sack filled with grains and dumped into a river, of which its very farmer had forgotten of its very whereabouts. Jack released the violin from his chin and shoulder, and uttered with melancholy behind his voice:

“What’s the matter?”
“Irrelevance, Jack. That is what matters.”

“I see. A thrown bait being thrown back is such a comeuppance,” Jack replied, and he threw the throw against the wall violently and abruptly, and the sound was echoing around the hall’s four walls, but Micael got no reaction at all for he was thinking of something much more than just being irrelevant. The violin looked good, and then suddenly it shapeshifted itself, too. The body was broken, the bouts could not be recognized, and its strings were untangled on the floor, like ropes anchored on the boat. The fingerboard was the only part of it that was still intact, but it never to be restored nonetheless. Jack was still holding unto the bow, and soon he threw it back where he got it with the violin. Jack looked at the child, and he was still feeling the dancing but his body had just ceased to know what dancing was, or how to even utter a dance with his body.

It was never meant to be broken. What’s that supposed to mean? he thought inside his mind, but the only thing he could for now was to turn his back and look at Jack and the child. He saw that Jack was not frustrated at all, his eyes were red in color and the child’s reaction was to cut the doll’s head right of its neck, of which he eventually did with no effort at all, like threading a needle through melting butter. “The music was irrelevant, too. We never really had happiness before, Jack. We only had fun killing,” he uttered with quite a tamed voice and a look on Jack’s red eyes, which eventually turned back into purple. “We never killed anyone, Aleck. We just made them breathe again,” Jack replied and smirked under his mask, of which Micael noticed with the movement of his shoulders, which was quite unusual for a spring-heeled one to do so.

“I had fun,” uttered the child willingly, but he was sad and wanted to have more dancing, for he felt how to be a dancer where the dead trees and the waning moon was watching. “Soon enough, my boy. All we have to do is either go back the open gates, or break what’s never meant to be,” and what Jack had uttered sent Micael’s bottom spine aquiver, which felt like being shocked alive and being shocked again to confirm one’s heartbeat. “Shall we continue, Aleck?” Jack uttered. He saw that Micael was stone-cold, his eyes colder, and it took a moment before he even got himself up and reply as if he was thinking of the fact that Jack had uttered something very similar to what he had heard while playing. It was never meant to be broken.

He then replied with quite the look to Jack: “Yes… I want to know more about the open gates.” They then continued to walk outside the hall, of which they alighted the walls through the door where they had entered. Whilst walking down the stairs afront the doorway, Micael noticed the incandescence of which he had seen before entering the hall, this time its light was brighter and farther. He then had the balls to ask Jack with the littlest of hesitation inside his head. He looked at him, with his eyes looking like scared games, and asked:

"What’s with the incandescence from afar, Jack?”

“That’s where our lives and thoughts will be headed, Aleck. Nothing more. And for us to reach the open gates, we must know that it is the being which causes someone to be rational, not the tangible.”

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