PROSE: THIS IS NOT THE RIVERBED.
She picks up the phone. She remembers that she should be cradling a mobile version of it, yet instead, she finds herself cradling the stem of the landline, tipping its speaker farther back, right next to her right ear. She does not ask how the phone got here. She glares down at the small round table propping up the device like it’s the only dessert left in the world, and thinks about twirling the springy cable attached to it as they chat. Her voice is barely audible amidst the whir of cold air conditioning, everything non-musical awkward and noisy to herself, so the voice feels disembodied even when she rumbles, from organ THROAT to the AIR,
The answer she receives is immediate, and it is this kind of to-go, rehearsed indifference no different from an automated system funnelling angry clients into the proper departments that grates on her. She verbalises her confusion in an equally proper spat of eh, ah, and huh, oh-ah?, and the tutted sounds hang like all disastrophe sounds, like cold air, like cold air conditioning whirling, like leaky faucets in her bathroom, like water that runs all on its own top to bottom in her home, or what she must believe it is, distracting her from both frustration and boredom with stagnation. In the water she dips her head down and bobbles; neither mosquitoes nor flies can land on her corpse and make their own sense of homes there. The floating girl corpse lies with her back exposed to the sun. But it never rots. As far as she was concerned, closing the coffin on her body meant that no one will know if she would ever truly rot.
Her frown deepens. Frustration sours with a show of teeth, baring disgust privately in the safety of her home. The voice on the other hand had spoken to her in a muffled, rambunctious manner, as though they were stuck underwater and were forced to gurgle their words through its hold. When she was younger, she had saw an American film about a serial killer who chose to harass his victims through calls. The very thought, abrupt as it was, made her agitation shoot through the roof.
Um. I’m going to hang up now.
What are you listening to?
Sayaka instinctively covers the receiver with a hand.
She glances behind, at her laptop that was already falling asleep, belting out a song for how-long now.
Ah, you can hear that? It’s Mozart’s Symphony No. 25.
If the music had been any louder it would have fulfilled her theatrical dream, but the volume was set so low, even if she did not recall when she bothered to tamper with such a thing, that it flowed into a river before her eyes. It was the closest she could feel to experiencing an orchestral concert anymore. Her faulty memory had scrambled the reason for why she liked it in the first place. The water turning murky from repeated cleansing told her it was irrelevant. Music was supposed to relax her after a long day, not set her mind to work as to why she liked it, or how she was a poser for not retaining any memory of her actually witnessing an orchestra. Wasn’t that the sort of thing rich people reserved?
Did a person need a reason to enjoy something?
The voice on the other end responded.
You always liked the violins.
A statement of that nature was not meaningful to her. ‘Always’ — when? ‘Liked’ — yes, but why? ‘The Violins’ — The instrument, even if conjured, fell dead and heavy like driftwood in her grip. All sounds flat. Untuned. She could twist the knobs all she wants, and she could never reach the correct sound, but to believe there was a Correct tone would have to mean she knew of a different, more meaningful kind of sound before she woke up and faced the four walls of her house forever. She taps the spacebar and the laptop stops singing Mozart to her.
Why do you know I like it?
There was a long silence. Her dozen mirrors in the dark glared back at her the same way she looked down and idly fingered the keypad, unsure of which button would magically grant her the answers she sought. She shifted on her feet, the limbs that slow near the staircase, burning and itching whenever she attempted the outside world, cooling only when she soaked in water, really, all these things of ears and feet are terribly troublesome, irritable and pitifully designed to imprison her to this building, and Sayaka began to loath these parts until the voice interrupted her.
How am I supposed to know?
The voice mimicked her distaste.
Then it hangs up on its own.
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