Strings of Calling

Gently playing an old worn out guitar on the doorstep of his small house, a boy watches a group of butterflies fly by. He changes the tune subtly and watches as the butterflies are followed by bees. He played without really being aware of what he was playing, allowing the thoughts he was thinking to simply flow from his fingers into his music. Now, he was thinking about how nice the weather was and how excited he was to be starting school the next day. Once more, he changes the melody as if to combine the sounds of both songs and sits comfortably as both the butterflies and the bees begin buzzing around his head. He stopped playing, and the animals disappeared, leaving no trace that they had even been there.

Puzzled, he began to play again, and started to wonder why exactly the animals came and went at his playing. He’d always been able to do that with them, ever since he could remember, but had never paused to consider why. Really, it had only been today that he had figured out that he was the only one who could do that, that no one else he knew shared that particular trait. And as children have the most curious minds, he desperately wanted to know why that was. He had continued to play while he was thinking, and he looked down from the space he had been staring into to find a very confused flock of birds looking at him from the ground. Again, he stopped playing and watched the birds fly away, leaving a few feathers to speak to the fact they had been there. He set the guitar down gently, wishing to think now without the disturbance of animals showing up everywhere he turned.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to think much before his mother called him into the house startlingly too early for dinner. Sighing, he got up and walked slowly into the house, wondering what on earth she could possibly want at this particular hour. And stopped in his tracks when he was met by the commanding presence of the strange woman standing in his kitchen. Her hair was a tangled mess and her clothes were dusty, yet she was commanding the same respect that one would have expected had a queen stood in the center of a small village home.

“Hello, I am Violet, and I am here with the Power Child Protection Program. I am going to need to take you to our facility for your own safety. I have already spoken with your mother, and it would be best if you would not argue and come quietly and as quickly as possible.” There was an undeniable urgency to her voice.

The boy stared at her suspiciously for a while before turning and walking away in a concernedly calm manner. His mother was about to stop him before she decided that he was probably just going to process what had just been said before coming right back. In part, she was correct. He walked out to the doorstep, sitting down rather forcefully, and began to play, totally disregarding the fact that playing a tune of anger and fear would likely bring about animals he would not want to deal with. He had absolutely no intention of going with that lady to any facility for any reason. Her audacity to even assume he would be dumb enough to just leave with a stranger angered him, but the prospect of potentially being in danger as she had said also caused fear. His afternoon was ruined, so when his mother came outside to speak to him, she was swarmed by the cloud of mosquitos and wasps that had been buzzing around his head.

He looked his mother in the eyes and told her, with the slightest tone of defiance, “I’m not going with her.” Before she could protest, he picked up the guitar and began to walk, determined to find some place in this village or on its outskirts where he could be left alone to think. The thought of having time to think improved his mood as he walked.

That mood improvement ended rather abruptly when he was ambushed by two men who grabbed him and his guitar before taking off at a dead run for the outskirts of town.

The boy was knocked unconscious somewhere between being ambushed and arriving at the kidnappers’ destination. When he woke up, he was in a room that looked very much like a prison cell. His guitar was locked in a similar looking room directly across the hallway, as if it could somehow cause trouble on its own. The only light came from a very old gas lamp in the hallway and a tiny window near the ceiling.

Considering these only two apparent sources of light, he was much surprising when a red light started blinking out of nowhere in midair. There was no sound to accompany this red light, and it appeared to serve no purpose. It soon stopped, and he dismissed it as his imagination.

However, a few moments later, a man entered the room with a guitar. It was not his guitar, but it was a guitar. The boy was surprised to have a visitor in his room, but quickly hid his look of surprise when the man snapped at him, telling him that he should have been expecting his arrival. That seems to have been the lights purpose: to herald the arrival of the man and the guitar. The man shoved the guitar into the boy’s hands. “Play,” he ordered.

The man was the kind of unfriendly person you never want to get on the bad side of, so the boy began to play fearfully without asking questions. He tried very hard to avoid eye contact with the intimidating man standing in his cell, but the man would not stand for that, demanding that he look at him while he played. Adjusting his gaze and struggling to hold back tears, the boy continued to play, as always, allowing his thoughts and feelings to flow into the music. Within seconds, the man had an army of angry ants crawling up his legs and delivering tiny bites that were sure to itch for days to come.

The man looked down in horror and snatched the guitar from the boy’s hands. Bolting out of the room, he forgot to lock the door in his desperation to escape the ants. Soon, the boy could hear people yelling and arguing down the hall, saying things he could hear but not make out but was still sure were not good news for him.

Soon after a woman came in, still yelling angrily in words he could not understand, and slapped him soundly across the face. He bit back the tears welling up in his eyes, determined not to show these cruel people they had got to him in any way. Anger began to burn inside him at their unfair treatment, and he stared stonily at the woman as she stormed out. She remembered to lock the door behind her.

As soon as she’d left, he slowly sat down on the floor and stared out the tiny window. He thought about his mom and his friends and the animals who seemed like his friends. He wished he could go back to them, as he was sure that whatever was going to happen to him here was the opposite of good. Although he missed them, he perhaps missed the guitar hanging across the room even more. If he had the guitar, he was sure coping with his situation would be easier because he would have the comfort of music. Plus, it wasn’t just any guitar; it had been his dad’s guitar.

Days went by. The only person the boy ever saw was the small old lady who brought him a bit of food and water; the people who seemed to be in charge were staying far away from him ever since the incident with the aunts. He sat and dreamed of going home, devising wild escape plans that he knew would never work. He tried asking the lady about his guitar, but she never responded. After several more days, he began to lose all hope of ever going home. So, he was beyond shocked when the old lady opened his cell and handed him his guitar in the middle of the night.

Weeping tears of relief, he took his guitar and ran to sit in the corner of the cell. Only able to see the strings by the light of the moon shining through the window, he began to play out all the emotions he had felt for the last several weeks. It was a song that spoke of fear, anger, and sadness. It sung of hope turned into hopelessness, all woven together by his consuming wish to go home.

Playing his feelings into the night, he failed to notice the large number of gophers that had begun to congregate in the cell until one of them nipped at his ankle. To his great surprise, he found they had dug a tunnel out of the jail cell. He was not willing to waste the opportunity to escape and crawled out, trying his best to carry the guitar with him.

And if the gopher escape tunnel were not enough surprise for one night, when he climbed out of the tunnel, he was met by the same woman who had come to his home all those weeks ago. She glared at him disapprovingly and snatched his guitar from him before grabbing his arm forcefully.

“I think, for your own sake, you’d better come with me,” she said exasperatedly and began to march off with him in tow. He rolled his eyes, unable to believe he was basically being kidnapped again. In the process of rolling his eyes, he missed the part where she walked through a portal into a space just outside the doors of a large dismal facility. He only looked up in time to see a stark sign above the double metal doors: Power Child Protection Program