These headphones are made of birdsong, yes they are. They are woven of magical grass from faraway hills, yes they are. When nobody is looking they portal back to a wonderland to visit the fairy-folk, yes they do. When I wear them my feet grow wheels and take me down roads undiscovered, yes they do. One day they’ll be an airplane and take me over mountains yonder.
That morning it was as if the band of the headphones had become a bridge to someplace special. It was as if I could dance from one side to the other and back again… and yet be in a new place every time I did it. To my fingertips came a frisson of joy. To my steps came a merry bounce. Today would be a good day to discover new things. Maybe, just maybe, I’d finally go beyond my usual hills.
Within a crumpled paper bag, cold rain soaking it to slush, emerged the outline of a pair of headphones. Though they should have, by rights, been silent, a violin music played on and on. Ariah picked them up, unsure what to make of them. It was as if every sorrow from her heart was being played as an orchestral serenade. She checked her phone, nothing to pair with. She checked for buttons, none. Then at once they become white, as white as any cloud. Whatever in the world were they?
Rain splattered, the storm cloud grey headphones perched half in and out of the backpack. The bluetooth moving out of range, their sound was an inconsistent dribble to the beat of rain on the closeby pane. Quieter they grew. Splutter. Splutter. Silence. Connection dead. And so they sat there, rested, wrested from the demands of the phone. Silence. Silence.
My headphones were ear-warmers too, each side a fluffy curled up kitten. I was always careful with them in the snowy weather, for white as they were they’d be so very camouflaged. I’d named them too, Marsh and Mallow. Somehow they suit the New Year's Eve dances, with their ambiance of an innocent sparky joy. I wonder sometimes about the one who dreamed them up, if they too feel about them the way I do, as if they snuggle and hug.
The headphones were birthday balloon-ish between a rainbow arc. They were the colours of my gummy bear daydreams. Within their happy hug my brain danced to every kind of music. Plastic or not, they were my salve, my medicine, my happy place. Travelling as I am, finding a new home in every port, they and the music they bring is my constant, them and the constellations come nightfall.
Ariah awoke with a scream. The headphones that had been on her bedside table were crawling toward her spider fast. In a blink they’d clamped onto her head, stalagmite teeth digging in, breaking her skin, drawing blood. Crackle spit. Crackle spit. Pain. Pain. Pain. Is it growing into my skull? She roll-tumbled to the mirror. Headphones no more, instead it was a warped plastic mask with a breathing filter. Then it began, a song, a happy song of better days that stuttered and screeched even as the stalagmites grew.
The headphones spluttered on and on in a morbid fickle whisper. Crackle spit. Crackle spit. At times Ariah thought the plastic had melted into a strange arrangement of stalagmites, only for them to reform into the wan scratched cinnamon. She turned them over and over in her hands. Why did they make her sweat? What was that odour? Why were they so much colder than everything else in the room? Crackle spit. Crackle spit. Dropping them, she backed away so fast that her head struck the crumbling wall.
Headphones are a musical gateway to a better world, no wonder we latch on to whatever heals.
Headphones lock-in the good, lock-out the bad, that's is what great musical artists can do.
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