Scordatura — By Xan van Rooyen
A calloused fingertip catches at my coiled skin. I shiver then hum, my voice a flat warble. A screw turns, stretching my sinews.
Rough fibers drag against me, and I cry out, jostling those beside me. They, too, raise their voices, the sound caught between a shriek and a song. The fibers tugging cries from my throat gentle, and I settle into singing. Together we thrum in sympathy, connected at wrists and ankles, through meat and gristle strung taut across our shared wooden frame, a flesh amalgam. We are cradled—caged—between the legs of another, pulled tight against their chest.
I catch at memories dissolving like salt in water. Memories of spotlights, of sensation beyond reverberation.
But now, the sound consumes me.
We are not alone. There are others beyond our common tethering. There is a chorus, a sea of voices ebbing and flowing across the octaves. Breath and creaking reeds, valves and buttons, the sobering tap of a conductor’s baton. I begin to understand. I am on stage surrounded by an orchestra, but this is not where I belong.
Fingers press against me, harder—softer, as I am scraped. Raw and ragged, I raise my voice—trying to placate the hand sawing at my bones. I quiver and judder at the increasing tempo, at the frenzied tumult of screech and whimper. We keen in terrible resonance, overtones harsh and jarring, the frame holding us prisoner straining with the tension, knees clenched tight as if we might escape.
It is then I realize I cannot open my eyes, cannot see, only feel. I hear, not with ears, but I sense, rather, the skein of vibrations wringing scattered harmonics from the length of my form, tying them together in sonorous knots as fingers leave bruises on my neck. Crescent nail marks must litter my back, and I know I am bleeding from the f-holes carved into my ribs.
My voice, tremulous and trilling, bombastic and mewling. Words are diaphanous shapes in the darkness, dissipating beyond my grasp. Stop, stop, please—but all that tumbles from my lips are the sharps and flats elicited by the fingers gouging into me. I arch against the callouses, imagining striations in flesh, imagining another’s blood pouring down my flanks.
I was not always this tied thing with fingers and toes screwed into wood. Once I—the memories wrench away as the taste of aniseed fills my mouth, commanding my voice against my will.
My siblings quiet and a final growl is torn from my throat.
Silence.
I squirm, taking inventory of my injuries. Fortissimo-carved grooves run dangerously deep. Parts of me have been eroded, and I know that soon I will break.
I try to call out, in warning—in supplication—but I am mute.
No voice unless made to sing--to scream--by the hands of another.
I flail and hear a solemn twang. Wood creaks where I am pulled tight over an arch. Exposed, vulnerable. I search for some mechanism of freedom, but beneath me, there is only hollow emptiness and the trapped echoes of my distress.
I twitch and shift, my coils unraveling, and I test the strength of my bindings. There, a crack in the timber. I chafe at the sharp edges, pricking my sides.
Fingers at my throat again, their pressure drawing moans from my lips, the sound spiraling down the scale as I writhe. I want to sing my own tune, to shape my own words with teeth and tongue. I want to see who binds me in darkness, who keeps me bent-backed at their mercy as they flay music from my flesh.
The snap is sharp, a frisson unspooling through my loosening limbs. With a final splintering of bone and shearing of sinew, I am free, suspended in the thick treacle of unbecoming.
#
Dammit! Another string broken. The third in less than six months. Replacing them was starting to get expensive. Half a month’s salary they cost. But the waiting, that was worse. It took so damn long to find just the right timbre of voice: warm and rich, like honey stirred in tea. And hunting for the right sort of human, malleable enough for the spellwork, took time away from practice. Too few humans could sing properly these days, relying on machines to slick aberrations from their voices, disguising the impurities. And even those that were undefiled were too often nasal or hoarse. Too much growl and not enough purr, overtones too shrill.
This one, lying snapped and tattered, she had been perfect. Found on a stage off-Broadway gullible and hungry for stardom, she’d been so eager to believe faerie promises. She lay useless now, a puddle of gore and unwinding magic. But the best ones always were quick to break. Still, the music had been good while the string lasted. ‘Otherworldly,’ one critic had called it. ‘Magical,’ said reviewers as if they knew. Whatever bonus had been coming at the end of the month would now have to go to procuring a new string. Something more durable this time, syrup on pancakes, rather.
The bow’s tension was loosened, the remaining strings cleaned of residual rosin. The rubbing a little harsher than necessary, a reminder to the trapped souls they were better off coiled and singing on command than a silent smear on an empty stage.
Finally, the cello missing a string was cloaked in protective velvet.
The broken bits were left in a moldering pile. The spells, which had drawn living intestines into a resonant core sheathed in iron and copper wrung from blood, leaked from the corpse and misted the air with scents of burdock and belladonna.
Maintenance would handle the woman’s body, a common problem in the Oberon Orchestra. Every rehearsal left a stain of one sort or another. Nothing that couldn’t be scrubbed out of the floorboards with some elbow grease and a cleaning potion. Besides, the body wouldn’t go to waste. Titania was always in need of mulch for her flowerbeds.
Author Bio:
Xan van Rooyen is a non-binary writer originally from South Africa but now calls Finland home. Xan has a Master’s degree in music and–when not teaching–enjoys conjuring strange worlds and creating quirky characters. You can find Xan’s short stories in Daily Science Fiction, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Daily Science Fiction, Apparition Lit, and The Colored Lens.
