Garbage Music

  #

  “She played for me, I saw her. She let me watch her play,” Jacinta said at dinner, sitting crosslegged on her cushion at the low dinner table across from her parents. Her mother was there, which did not happen often. Mother was a scavenger, a proud and dangerous profession, and she sailed out to far ruins, sometimes even beyond the northern islands to the Asian mainland, for weeks at a time with the rest of her crew on the great solar catamaran Birrarung Marr, the size of thirty houses put all together. Her rifle and pistol sat on their high shelf, carefully unloaded and locked while in the home where they would not be needed.

  “Who played for you, sweet?” her mother asked.

  “Neyerneyemeet, I would guess,” her father said, stealing Jacinta's thunder. She frowned at him.

  “That's right,” Jacinta said. “She played the Last World War for me. And I think she played her birth and growing up, too.”

  “Played the Last War?” her mother asked. “How do you play a war?”

  “You could hear it,” Jacinta said. “I could feel it. The music told me the suffering and the violence and the chaos, like I was there.”

  “She couldn't have,” her father said, and Jacinta frowned at him again, harder. “I mean,” he said, hands up to her frown and spread wide, placating, “I'm sure she played something that sounded that way, but how could you know that it was meant to be that? I'm certain she'd not have said so. She's never spoken in living memory.”

  “I could tell, father. If you had heard it you'd know it too,” Jacinta said, matter of fact like she was talking about the weather.

  “Hm,” her mother said, and they ate in silence for a little while, all thinking.