Saxophone Boy

• Ciara Hadley, Grade 10, O'Connor Catholic College
• Short Story
• 2014

Excellence Award in the 'The Text Generation 2014' competition

I selfishly, mercilessly, ruthlessly miss his music the most. His instrument sits unplayed now, with once-greasy fingerprints fading memory-like on the metal. And when I try to recall his smile or his eyes or his lips, the only thing that comes to mind is the melodies those lips made. That must display our relationship completely- because while I was his world, his love, the deepest desire of my innermost heart, my darling, he was only ever my music.
My saxophone boy.

Why don't you read no more, my darling?

Read? No, I don't do that any more. Times have changed since I used to curl up and empathise with ink-and-paper people. The adventure books I used to find so thrilling hold nothing but my characters wearing his face as they explode into fireworks of bloodied innards. Now the stacks by my bedside are only equations and facts and an endless pit of information someone else has already picked apart.

I prefer to listen to you play. Quick, play for me.

Music- now there is something I could never have given up. It was a passion we shared, the soft and delicate relationship between music and audience, the swooping lift of a melody spiking and dancing beats upon your eardrums. The deep and the high, soft and sharp, the clamouring mess of an orchestra of attention-hungry instruments, each vying for their music to take centre stage. When the soft beat takes hold of your heartbeat and leads it tangoing from your control, then, then, you can empathise with quivering notes far better than you ever could with our beloved paper people.

Whatever you say. You do realise I wont always be around to play for you?

He left me there, in the orchestra pit, but now the players were packing up and I couldn't understand the opera. He was doing his work for queen and country, and he would always return for me. And like I never could, he gave up music. He swapped his saxophone for a gun and his melodies for bomb blasts. Where his fingers should be painting greasy prints on metal, they now pulled life-shattering triggers. His legs, made for dark dress pants on a spotlit stage, raced along foreign ground in dust-caked fabric.

Don't be silly, my saxophone boy. What would I do without you?

They sent my saxophone boy back to me in a box, with a lifeless medal as some sort of recompense. At his funeral I choked out meaningless noises formed into meaningless words and thought only of the slow and heavy melody that caught his heartbeat and tangoed away with it to where he could not follow. I thought of the gun that should have been a saxophone and the bomb that should have been a soft whisper of breath. I wondered how much music he had there on stage and in the firing line, while I still cowered in the orchestra pit. Could he even hear the music up there?