sia red

Yours is the gift of song.

It starts with a hum, simple and melodic. Your mother brushes through your hair, long fingers passing over your brow, your nose. A song is on her lips, but it feels distant to you, cold. At odds with the warmth of her skin, the quiet of her normal demeanor. There is love in her smile but silence in her song, broken edges in its trailing whispers.

Have you heard this before?

Perhaps so. Perhaps you simply chose to ignore it before, wont to idolize your maker as all children are.

“Ma,” you say sleepily, your voice heavy with impending dreams, “That doesn’t sound right.”

She answers you with mild surprise and tailored patience. “I’m sorry, little one,” she murmurs tiredly and strokes the crown of your hair, “How should it sound?”

You hesitate, caught between the precipice of something at once terrifying and magnificent. You don’t know what it is or what it means, but you know, instinctively, this song will be unlike all the others before.

You sing. You sing and the magic of your ancestors stirs within your blood, pulses through your heart. You sing and you remember things that never happened to you--that could not, for you are but a babe now under your mother’s hand.

You remember wars and the silences that fell after them. Harvests and forests of moons long past; threads of gold woven between branches that touch your face and warm your bones.

The Earth That Was; the Earth that can never again be.

The metal that spread across its surface like an impenetrable scab, the radiation that quieted all the songs before.

A finger presses to your lips and your throat begins to burn and ache. The song is stolen from you, taken hostage by the padding of a single digit laid against your skin.

Hers is the gift of silence. And though you are frightened and the pain of your awakening has chased the sleep from your mind, you take solace in the silence she commands.

Your mother smiles sadly and lifts her finger, but you do not sing again. You do not speak.

You both understand what has happened. What must happen now.

“Sia,” she kisses your cheek, lips trembling and wet with the trace of hidden tears, “Promise to remember me.”

“Always, Ma.”

But that, like the song, sounds empty. Sounds broken.

The next morning you make for the Ministry of Gifts.