I didn’t really make much of it when I saw smoke rising from the chimney in my house that evening. But then I went inside and saw my great-grandmother sitting on the floor by the fireplace with the newspaper articles from my room scattered around her. She had a pile of them in her lap but then she picked it up and tossed it into the flames.
For a moment, I thought I was dreaming. I wasn’t freaking out and swatting what was left of the articles from her hands. Instead, in my disbelief, I unceremoniously strolled into the living room.
“What are you doing?” I asked nonchalantly.
The old woman looked up at me with the frustration that always gave her beady eyes that eerie shine. “These are all memories that are too dangerous to remember.” She forced her withered lips to curl into a smile. “I am actually kind of glad music is gone. I haven’t lost my hearing this way, the way I lost most of my eyesight.”
“Yes, except now there is nothing good to hear,” I countered despite the disrespect coiling around my words.
She gathered another pile of old articles and tossed them into the fire. “You weren’t alive to remember when music almost brought on another civil war. They began putting out all those songs and they caused so much tension that music was no longer enjoyable. It still isn’t with all of the risk it brings with it.”
“I would be willing to die if it means I can enjoy music while I am alive. I enjoy it. It’s how I get my peace.”
She was about to feed another pile of memories to the flames when she absorbed my words and stopped. She looked up at me with those sad and tired black orbs melting with the anger that she spent her entire life hiding in order to save herself from a threat that I doubted my entire life.
“You just don’t understand,” she whispered, her voice a small breeze that barely reached the other side of the room where I stood.
I shook my head and walked away. I had to get ready. For some reason, I agreed to go to Idris’s house tonight.