The Labor in Love

Many people come into the world with tears on their face. Most, wailing tears, thrust into a cold bright space for the first time. Uncomfortable and unable to do anything else to express it. Some are lucky enough to be met with another kind of tear. A joint wailing alongside their own, as arms extend to the person they see for the first time. They know without a shadow of a doubt that they will never love anything more for the rest of their life.

 Anna’s creation was quiet, tepid even. Alone under the bright light of creation, held by an older man wearing a pair of spectacles and a paintbrush in hand. That was the only time Anna ever saw the man.

Her mother, Violeta was deft with the violin. She played just about anything that made its way into her hands. Sitting in the audience watching her was the closest Anna ever felt to her mother. The way she moved made Anna feel like she was the violin itself, a character in the story, entrusted with all of her mother’s heart in every note. Over the years she watched her mother fall in love with, and through, music. First with Night on Bald Mountain, then Recuerdos de la Alhambra, and then with Violin Sonata No. 3 in D Minor. She lit up rooms with every draw of her bow. She was the focus of glances at parties. The same parties her mother would nervously rant about in the hours of preparation. The people around them grew, their home changed, and eventually her mother’s hair grew pale. She grew thin. Her fingers became thicker at the joints, and shortly after, Anna noticed the shaking. Her mother picked her up less and less. Though Anna never held it against her. She knew that if she was not able to pick up her bow, the time for caresses and gentle hair brushing was past them. She began to hold onto those moments. Each note hummed in a fragile voice that broke her heart, became a measure she clung to. Repeating the sound over and over in her head. She knew that she had to memorize it, along with the sonatas of old, alongside the feeling of her fingertips in her hair. It hurt to remember these things while her mother was still in front of her. As if she was replacing her before she had even gone. Anna hadn’t even understood how she knew her mother would leave her. It was a feeling she thought must have been natural, despite how unnatural it had felt beneath her canvas chest. Those melodies brought her comfort, and wove through her mind during the dark times. 

It was her mother’s daughter that put her in the first box she ever spent time in. Following the long quiet period of her mother’s passing, Anna had been happy to see Helen. She had grown up beautifully. Her hair was the shade of brown that shimmered red in the sun just like her mother’s had. When she was a baby it was corn-silk blonde and darkened over the years. Anna thought that it was fitting that Anna should at least live with some reminder of her mother since Helen otherwise looked nothing like her, nor did she have Violeta’s same talent for music. Her husband Anthony, a short, fat man with a joyful smile, played piano. She only heard it a handful of times before her dark place was moved. His playing was reminiscent of her mother’s, though his music was never particularly good, it was happy, she knew it was because the man himself was happy. In that way, he gave her back a piece of her life she had only been able to experience in memory. It was nice being there with them, even in that box, living in that moment rather than the past.

Anna used her time in the box to exercise her imagination. Sometimes she’d imagine that the pair were talking to her. She would sneak in quick replies in their chats. She’d pretend to be appalled at the faux pa of a misplaced interjection on Anthony’s part. Sometimes Helen would laugh, likely at a silly face or some real life, unimagined flub on the part of her husband. Though Anna liked to imagine she was the one making the joke, the life of the party. She knew if she was out there with them, she could be. They would love her, even if realistically only as a treasure they shared with the friends she often heard chatting around the kitchen table. 

 Each visiting guest brought with them a chance. Anna would hope that one of them would ask about her. The mysterious box in the corner of the dining room. She rehearsed the exact look she would give them that would make them fall in love with her. They would absolutely need to keep her, and she would say goodbye to Helen and Anthony. They would be sad, they didn’t get to appreciate the time they had with her, but they knew she would be with the right family. 

Helen and Anthony stopped having people over. Slowly the entertaining, when it happened, became smaller crowds. Their volume quieted and their tones became sad. Anthony would get angry at their guests at times. Shouting that they were making things worse for her. He couldn’t have been speaking about her, but despite the irritation in his tone, she sometimes wished he was. She wasn’t entirely sure why. Until the last night she heard him speak, when his words were so frantic, so loud and wild that Anna couldn’t tell what he was saying or to who. Then there were very loud sirens, stomping of boots, and a wailing she had never quite been able to get out of her head.

“She’s gone mom, she’s gone, she’s gone” Anna could hear the snot running from his nose in that cry. She could practically see the red puffy face in his cracking voice. The cacophony ended roughly an hour after it started, with a slammed door and then silence. 

It must have been days before Anna heard another sound. An opening door and footfall. She never heard voices again in that house. There was no laughter. No piano. Anthony packed her box somewhere else. In silence. Anna hated silence.

She had to do a lot of remembering in the quiet times, and then more in the dark times. At first the scenes of her past were a comfort. Replaying the moment of her first ball, Violeta’s tenth birthday, and second year with Anna. Her mother had lovingly dressed her in a green silk gown with matching ribbons. Couples around her floated above marble floors and laughed holding glasses filled with glittering gold liquid. She hadn’t told a soul about her mother’s stolen glass, or the way she had sat Anna down against the wall behind the hall curtain giggling through the importance of appearing mature in these types of settings. In the early days Violeta was still unable to speak eloquently like the adults around them. She would practice speaking with Anna, though it was never intentional practice. She was pretty sure Violeta just liked having someone to talk to. Anna had liked it too. Anna held all of her mother’s secrets, but her mother never asked her how she felt holding them. Now Anna thought that maybe she didn’t like it. Not without having a place to keep her own. She wanted to give them to someone else. Wanted someone to hear Helen’s laugh, to take away Anthony’s wails. She wanted someone to remember her mother’s music, if only to have someone to remind her when she began to forget herself.

She grew frustrated with memories. Beyond the occasional bump or crash from above she had nothing else to live with. And the longer she lived with them the more upset she grew. Night on Bald Mountain no longer sounded passionate in her head. The pride and accomplishment that lived in her mother’s performance was drained from the memory. Instead the piece was mean. Taunting. The notes always stayed the same but the hesitation on the first bridge, the crescendo at the refrain, the stutter at the last down beat of the piece were gone. Clumsily replicated where her failing memory could place them, and the part of her mother she was looking for gone with them.

 She grew bitter after the first thirteen years had passed. Hopeless by the thirty eighth. By the eighty sixth year in the box Anna was so deep in her own numbness she had no awareness of the shifts that happened over the time that passed by. The changes in temperature were subtle, nothing that anyone would have noticed. Not when all your other senses are effectively blank. Even the bumpy travel and murmur of voices didn’t register in the clouded stupor of Anna’s dormancy. 

The first crashing of drums from above had scared her. Reminding her of the days in Helen’s dining room when she would hear the occasional argument. The next time she heard the noise was when she recognised it for music. A melodic succession of intentional notes within the crashing. It wasn’t so unlike the music she’d heard before, but it had been so long since she heard much of anything that this musical disruption was as shocking as it was a discovery. She believed this music had to belong to someone new. Some great great granddaughter of her mother’s who had strayed from the family’s traditional roots. It was weeks before she met this mysterious new family. She had begun to believe the departure from the dining room was a fluke. She was destined to spend her life in the box until her stitching disintegrated and the rest of her unraveled.

Then she was carried off someplace and the long familiar drone of celebration hummed to life around her. The noise around her ebbed and flowed with a rhythm she slowly began to decipher. First there would be shouts of names, often a mix though they were the same each round. Then the group would grow quiet at the sound of ripping. This terrified Anna, though not as much as the silence after the ripping would stop. She could tell how entertaining this was to them based on how loud they got and how short the post-ripping silence would be. Then she heard the name Daniel, she would not have remembered had she not felt herself lurch inside the box moments after the name was chanted. It was the ripping sound around her that pieced the whole thing together. She was inside the box. And very very soon these loud people would surround her. Staring at her. Doing whatever it is they did after the ripping. And she would be outside of the box.

The silence after her box was ripped was very long. The lights were not as bright as she thought they would be. A dim golden light washed over the room from a large tree, trimmed with decorations in the center of the space. He was tall and slim, with white streaks in dark black hair, and eyes that crinkled in the corners as he focused intently on her. The silence drew on and it struck Anna that this man looked nothing like her mother, Helen, or Anthony. He was a stranger to her, and she to him. His eyes leave her for a moment to search the faces around the room as if to ask that they are all seeing what he is.

They stay quiet as his eyes squeeze shut, rolling tears dropping onto her cheeks. He brushed back a stray curl and a breeze blew cold against her damp face. There was an open window next to the man. This man who held her now, just above the box.