By Amy Monaghan
The mandolin was like a body. The wood of her skin: withered and frail. The strings of her mind: loose, defeated. Song, tune and melody had abandoned her a long, long time ago. It seemed impossible, now, that she would ever again produce a sound resembling music. The best she might hope for was the hollow sound of a stone falling into shallow water.
But she still remembered music. The way the notes could move about and dance until they became a song. The friendly lilt of The Mother’s fingers as they worked across her strings. She remembered these things. She did.
The mandolin lived in booth 82 of the antique mall. It was a vast, lonely place where thousands of objects like her waited, and waited, and waited. Booth 82 was run by an elderly man whose face looked like a walnut, his mouth a long, thin crack in the shell. He had acquired her after The Death of The Mother, and she had been here ever since. She often felt resentment at her placement – buried, as she was, beneath a collection of souvenir handkerchiefs. The Walnut had done her a great disservice by not cleaning her up and displaying her properly. He had set her up to fail.
Today, like all other days, was a Waiting Day. And on Waiting Days, it was impossible not to long for The Mother, who she missed more than music, more than life itself. But before the depths of The Waiting and The Longing could be mined, a lyrical chime sounded somewhere in the distance, signifying the arrival of The Guests.
She never knew their intentions, of course – the ones who came each day to prowl the narrow, overfilled aisles of the antique mall. They peered into nooks and crannies, stretched their limbs towards the highest shelves and the lowest boxes. Always looking, always choosing. The mandolin had never yet come close to being chosen.
Some time passed and she listened to their rummaging, and the dissonant sound of their words, which she couldn’t understand. She had never understood The Mother either, but that hadn’t mattered; not even a little bit. They had been together long enough to speak through the language of time.
They had first known each other in The Other Place, where the air was cold and crisp. Here, the air was so hot it made her swell, and the humidity warped her into shapes she didn’t recognize. It had warped The Mother, too, in a way. The Mother had been different, lighter, in The Other Place, where the air was colder and it had only been the two of them. Becoming The Mother had changed her.
These ruminations were interrupted by the shifting veil of the handkerchiefs above her. Someone had come rummaging.
It was a child: The Daughter. She looked so much like The Mother had when they first met, that for an impossible second the mandolin was sure she had come back to life. But this was not The Mother; it was a different child. Her messy, sweaty hair clung to her face. Her hands were dirty, and her smile was wide. The Daughter reached out as if to pluck one of the mandolin’s strings, and a pre-emptive jolt of shame coursed through her, the mandolin, from headstock to endpin. She didn’t want this child to know what she’d become: a tuneless, obsolete thing. A relic. As if she had heard this thought, The Daughter dropped her hand and, instead of plucking, ran it gently along the warped and dirty wood of the mandolin’s side.
Touch. She hadn’t known touch in so long.
And although she felt ashamed of the roughness of her frame – she used to gleam when the sunlight hit her – she sensed, somehow, that The Daughter wasn’t judging her.
Into the air. The Daughter lifted her up, high above her own head. The humid, stagnant air of the antique mall rushed past, and the mandolin felt herself transported. If only she could fly like this through time, back to The Mother, back to the cool, safe oxygen of The Other Place.
The Daughter came to a stop in a different booth, quite far from the one owned by The Walnut. The mandolin didn’t recognize it, had never been there before. She let herself (what choice did she have?) be hoisted towards an adult, The Older One, who seemed to be the parent of The Daughter. They spoke to each other in that garbled language the mandolin couldn’t understand. The Older One spoke harshly – too harshly, it seemed to the mandolin, for a person as small and innocent as The Daughter. After a moment of back and forth, The Older One grabbed The Daughter by the wrist, pulled back their hand, and slapped The Daughter across her cheek.
As clearly as the mandolin could feel herself being lowered roughly onto a nearby shelf, she could almost feel the tears falling from The Daughter’s eyes. She remembered The Mother, and her hollow inside filled with sadness. The Mother had cried sometimes – often, towards The End. She had spilled tears while she played, transferred them from her eyes into the mandolin’s wood, and the mandolin had always been grateful to take them. It felt like a service she was crafted to provide. She wished she could do the same for The Daughter, but it wasn’t meant to be. The Older One was already dragging the child away, into the dusty depths of the graveyard of forgotten things.
The mandolin rested on the shelf. This booth, she was sure, was owned by some other walnut-faced man or woman, some other Keeper of Things. The world was made of keepers and those who are kept. The mandolin knew this better than anyone.
And where was she to be kept now? Booth 74, the sign above her declared. She was not where she had started, and not where she belonged. Her frets all ached with longing: longing for the crisp, cold air of The Other Place, for the gentle grasp and the hot, familiar tears of The Mother. For everything that had come before and could never be accessed again.
A musical pitter patter, the song of small shoes on concrete, grew in the air around her. The Daughter had come back.
She reached for the mandolin, lifted her from the busy shelf, and held her tight against her body. The Daughter’s fingers strummed, defiant and joyful, across the loose and languid strings, and a sound almost entirely forgotten emanated out from within the mandolin.
Music. There was music, still.
The angry voice of The Older One drew closer, admonishing The Daughter with its sharp, cruel sounds. But The Daughter smiled, plucked one more string on the mandolin’s neck, and placed her back, gently, in a spot far more dignified than where she’d laid beneath the handkerchiefs. The Daughter’s small shoes made more music on the concrete as she ran away.
And the mandolin could feel the vibration of a distant melody buzzing through her. A song so familiar that it hurt like lemon juice squeezed into a wound. She let it seep through her, let it sting, until it was in every part of her, and the wood of her body was infused with the sound.
About the Author
Amy Monaghan is a queer Los Angeles-based writer with an MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as Chaotic Merge, Witness Magazine, Mulberry Literary, Cagibi Lit, and others. In her free time she enjoys road trips to towns with one gas station, reading books about tragedy, and collecting pinecones in the park. Learn more at www.amymonaghanwrites.com.