A Llull in the Compass by W. C. Bamberger

Author:W. C. Bamberger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, sci-fi, aliens, apocalypse, doom
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2011-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

Dully and Bo wandered away to find places to bed down, but Marcella took my arm before I could do the same.

“Sit by the fire with me,” she said, “while I sing to Syd. Syd likes this next song because we get to pound things, don’t we, Syd? It’s ...‘Wonderful Widow.’” The little girl began to slap out a clumsy rhythm on the clutter of toys in front of her. Marcella grinned and began singing a slow, loose lyric: “night by silent sailing night....”

I had heard her sing this song before, but it seemed more haunting each time, and Marcella sang the beautiful but strange lyric—Edgar Allan Poe could have written many of the lines—with more assurance than she sang any of the other songs.

“That’s beautiful,” I said when she was done.

Syd was bored now, and went off to play with the laces in her spare pair of shoes.

“Do you...,” Marcella began slowly. “Do you have memory problems?”

“Sometimes I forget where I put my keys—a year and a half ago.”

She shook her head. “That’s...I’m not talking about lost memories. I’m talking about memories that are too present; pushy memories. Memories like Rich was talking about.” I noticed that when she began a sentence she would tilt her head slightly to the side, and straighten it again when she’d finished. Then I realized that she was expecting me to say something.

“All that about the Bizarro comics and about the sinks? It was odd that he would remember all that.”

“I know maybe a hundred songs, like everybody does. But every night just after sundown ‘The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs’ pushes itself on me. It’s like the other ninety-nine are outside, and I can see them through a window, but ‘The Wonderful Widow’ is inside with me, demanding my attention.”

“Everyone gets songs stuck in their heads; jingles.”

“I understand that....” she said, each word evenly spaced, keeping her temper with me. I was irritating her by not understanding what she was trying to say. “Stop looking away and listen, Alastair. This is something else, and I’m talking to you about it because I think that you’d be likely to tell me the truth if you’ve felt something like it.” She was right. “And I think this is something important, but I don’t know what it is. Look up, look at me and listen, OK? I only heard that song once, Alastair, years ago at a concert I didn’t want to go to, a concert I hated.”

“It obviously made a big impression.”

“Oh, it impressed me, alright. An Asian woman sitting at a closed piano, pounding on the wood of it with her hands, never once touching the keys; another woman standing there, singing the words like they were opera and the pounding woman was her orchestra. I was sure God was punishing me for going out with someone who wasn’t a jock.”

“God’s on the side of the jocks?”

She stretched her arms out wide. “He loves us! We do the most for his image.” Then her smile faded.

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