A World of Horror by Eric J. Guignard

Author:Eric J. Guignard [Guignard, Eric J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A World of Horror
Publisher: Eric J. Guignard
Published: 2018-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

RHEA DANIEL is an artist and aspiring writer living in Mumbai, India. She loves making jewelry, bookbinding, hand lettering, journaling, dancing, and has her fingers in way too many pies. To keep up with what she’s currently up to you can follow her blog @ rheadaniel.tumblr.com.

CHEMIROCHA

Charlie Human

Readers’ Advisory: Although this anthology has been classified as “horror” (albeit broadly-themed and quiet), the following selection has no horror in it.

Really, it hasn’t a dark aspect at all, but rather it’s a beautiful little anecdote about the personification of a pop song in South Africa. Such is the fun and license of editing an anthology, that the editor can include rich voices such as author Charlie Human’s that help expand the boundaries of this book’s vision. For at the least, this is still speculative fiction and that embodies any number of aspects to progress the unique, the expressive, and the literary imagination: And herein lies all that in the mystical legend of the Chemirocha.

***

A POP SONG GETS CAUGHT IN BARBED WIRE. Entangled, the sweet and repetitive murmur starts to rip, tearing at the corners and dancing hopelessly in Cape Town’s southeast wind. There it stays through hot, dry days and cold, wet nights.

Passersby don’t notice it whipping like a flag in the breeze. But as they pass, its murmur, its whisper, its sad, lonely lullaby grasps at their minds and makes them whistle or hum or dig their hands deeper into their pockets.

The song is locked in a deadly struggle for survival. It could give up, let its harmony unwind, its structure unravel and slide limp and lifeless through the chain-link fence. But it doesn’t. It may be a pop song, designed only as ephemera, destined to be discarded. It could die like a one-hit wonder is supposed to.

But it doesn’t.

Something . . . It could be part of the dark river, some fluid, some ooze that splashes across it. In the moment of that splash the song is galvanized, it yearns: the stolid men and women who slump by on their way to work. The stubbornness, the resilience, the sheer, harsh fuck-you! that seems to resound in the human heart like a constant ringing bell. That is what the pop song wants.

It draws bits from the humans that walk by. It goes for the shiny parts like a magpie. It goes for the hidden parts like a hunter. It weaves itself together until it has arms and legs.

It weaves itself together until someone sees it.

“My god, boy!” a man says, and he cuts away the barbed wire with shears. “How did you get up there?”

The man puts the boy—the song—gently on the ground and wraps a coat around his tiny bloodied flesh. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

A murmur in reply, the pop refrain is ragged and torn. But still there. Still playing. Still alive.

Then come bright lights.

“What’s your name?” a voice attached to a face with glasses asks.

He doesn’t know. A song is a song. It doesn’t need to know what to call itself.

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