A dirty index finger probed a large, hairy ear canal. The finger, bent, scratched and weather-worn, escaped the ear and was cast down until it hovered over an ivory-coloured key. It shook, waiting, as compressed air was pushed through a regulating valve, into a reservoir, up a wind-trunk, and into an airtight box.
At just the right moment, as it had done thousands of times before, the finger dropped, pressing the key down hard. A pallet opened. Air flew up a pipe. Then up another pipe. And another, until it escaped each pipe in the key channel, blowing out the top of the organ.
The sound rushed past the organ player and hit the walls, bouncing and reverberating at weird angles, finding every nook and cranny. It reflected and refracted against stained-glass windows. It bounded down the aisles and skirted through the overzealous parishioners who made up the first pew. It meandered past the deaf patrons in the second pew, in the hopes of a miracle. It ignored the third pew all together as it ducked and dodged down the building, gliding effortlessly. It meandered off the wooden floor and twirled up a pair of denim jeans belonging to a girl, skimming past her thick belt, slinking up her patterned navy blue and white top with thin straps, around her beaded necklace, through her over-sized ear-ring, before circling around her ear. It had found a home! It rushed into the ear but was blocked by an ear-bud.
A hand waved in front of the girl. She rolled her eyes and reluctantly pulled the same ear-bud from her ear, the sound intermingling with the noise from the awful organ. She turned her head with a look of exaggerated pain.
The owner of the hand was, she thought, some old guy. If she could be bothered thinking about it properly she would say he was in his mid to late thirties. In other words, old!
'What have you got there?' the man said. 'One of those iPods?'
The girl's eyebrows wrinkled. What the hell was he talking about?
'Pretty impressive things,' he continued, unperturbed. 'Technology changes so quickly.'
The girl rolled her eyes and mouthed the word 'pedo'. She put the ear-bud back in her ear. Now she'd missed half the song!
'Hey!' shouted the man. 'You should listen to your elders! Life wasn't always this easy. In my day we didn't have MP3's.'
An older man, who the girl would describe as 'really old', sitting nearby, had his interest piqued and decided to listen in on the discussion.
'All we had,' the man continued, 'were ghetto blasters. To get to the next song you'd have to listen to the sound it made as you fast forwarded. And at the end of the day you'd be happy if your shoulders weren't too lopsided.'
The older man couldn't hold himself back. 'Ghetto blaster, you say? Hmph, in my day you couldn't carry music around. No. You'd have to be patient. Wait till you got home. Maybe, after your brothers and sisters, ma, and pa had used the turntable, you'd get to put on a record. Back then you appreciated it. And you didn't, let me tell you, even dream of breathing too heavy or you'd scratch the vinyl.'
The sound of snoring stopped. No one had heard it until it wasn't there, and even then they were only hearing its absence. The source of the lack of noise, who the girl might describe as 'really, really old', raised its head. 'Vinyl? In my day you couldn't just sit and listen to music. You had to create it! You'd spend years learning, you would. If you played the wrong key you'd get your fingers cut off. And then you'd be in trouble with your folks for having no fingers! But by the end, at least, you could play the piano.'
'You had pianos?' asked a really, really, really old man. 'In my day you'd spend all day starving for food. Mmm, it was tough.' He waited for nods of agreement and looks of awe. Receiving neither, he continued: 'Despite starving, you'd still climb to the tops of tall trees like monkeys - mhmm monkeys - and hang on to the branches. Sometimes the dang things'd break off and you'd go tumbling all the way down to the hard ground. But us survivors would pick up the snapped bits of wood, level 'em off, and play them by banging 'em together. That was real music, it was!'
'You had wood?' interjected a really, really, really, really old man, frowning. 'In my day we'd have to dig up an old relative. At the risk of upsetting the spirits, mind! We'd dangle their mutilated legs in the river and then drag them over stone to make shuffling noises.' He frowned ever further, allowing the large creases in his face to find a home. 'The stone wouldn't be nearby, neither; more likely a days walk in fifty degree weather. But we didn't complain! The best way to keep the legs wet was to pick some that had skin.'
The girl continued listening to her music, oblivious to the competition that had sprung up.
A really, really, really, really, really old man, seated nearby, looked on with indignation. 'Skin? You had skin?! In my day we walked around pushing our organs in with our hands. Didn't have blood, either - we had to pump oxygen to our cells by hand. Gripping an oxygen atom without skin on is no easy task, let me tell you.'
'Atoms?' muttered a really, really, really, really, really, really old man. 'You had it easy! In my day we had to collect stray protons, neutrons, and those pesky electrons, and hand-craft the atoms ourselves. We didn't just get given them like some...some prize! If you weren't able to make your own atoms, you weren't created. Simple survival of the fittest - and we liked it!'
A noise, loud yet distant, thundered the building. It sounded like the remembrance of a thought of a remnant of an echo of a giant finger impatiently tapping against the earth. The organ sounds stopped. The chattering stopped. The only sound that could be heard came from the girl's ear-buds. Every other church member looked up.
'You were created?' boomed God. 'Ha!'
© 2010 Ben Safta
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Australia License
