2120 words

Ever since her sisters kicked her out of the family band, Cyrene had been searching for someone she could harmonize with. The problem was her auditions had a nasty habit of turning into massacres. Figurative, sure. But also, inevitably, literal.

There was the Americana group out in Asheville—they'd been promising until they'd fizzed out like Cheerwine shaken hard and fast before Cyrene even got to the chorus. And just like that bright red soda pop, their contents stained the carpets. And the walls. And Cyrene, when she tried to revive them.

Then, there was the audition with the anti-folk duo in Austin, back when Cyrene still held on to the possibility that what had happened to the Americana group was a fluke. The duo's music was too whimsical for her, but she was drawn to the simple chaos of their sound. They made it through half of the chorus before popping: blown-out speakers with bulging eyes.

After that, she stopped auditioning with original work. Covers had to be safer. They weren't even properly her music. They couldn't possibly have the same effect.

They didn't. But the distinction was a weak technicality.

After disintegrating a pop artist, asphyxiating an indie band, and exsanguinating a group of filkers, Cyrene stopped auditioning altogether.

Maybe her sisters were right.

Maybe she was a hopeless virtuoso.

#

Singing with her sisters had always been effortless—as long as Cyrene didn't try to harmonize. A few hummed notes to find their key, and they'd be flying through their sets, voices weaving in and out of intricate formations. They weren't just a family band, they were a murmuration. Songbirds, warbling as they danced through the sky.

Finding that ease and joy in music with other people shouldn't have been so difficult. The artists she'd auditioned with were good. Some of them were even great. On paper, they were more than capable of collaborating with someone like Cyrene. Some of them, she suspected, would have joined their voices with hers in ways her sisters never would or could.

Maybe the problem was that, unlike her sisters, they were people.

Or maybe it was some fault in her music.

No one else in the family had ever branched out, so Cyrene lacked data to know, definitively, one way or another.

All she knew was what her sisters had told her, that last practice.

They were sick of her hogging the spotlight.

She'd only wanted to try something new. Write a song instead of singing the ancient tunes they'd inherited from their ancestors. But when she'd pulled out her fledgling song, handed out the sheet music, they'd accused her of trying to replace not just their traditional tunes but them. She'd already had a tendency to hog the lead vocals. If they let her start writing songs, she'd use her newfound skill to make them permanent background singers: a musical mutiny they would not abide.

Melodica had cried angry tears, demanding to know why she didn't deserve to be the lead singer once in a while.

Brio and Aria had calmly explained that they didn't want her songs, and they didn't need her.

Tympani had drummed long and loud and hard any time Cyrene tried to explain.

That she wanted, more than anything, to be able to harmonize.

That she could never hear the currents that allowed voices to flit above and below the melody, free to pinwheel and dive.

That she'd only given herself the lead parts because harmony evaded her.

#

It'd been months since she last made music when she saw the open mic flyer. Months of nothing but dreary sets, sung alone and in her shower and only when her roommates were out.

The flyer called to her, and if she hadn't lashed herself so thoroughly to the mast of her day job, it would have sunk her resolve.

But then one week, after work, she went with her colleagues to a local pub. It was a big, empty place. A converted garage, with industrial lighting and picnic benches for seating. The open mic flyer fluttered on a bulletin board in the entry, along with advertisements for a poetry slam and a weekly jam session.

Inside, in the opposite corner from the counter and till, a ragtag group picked bluegrass tunes with more speed than synchronicity. A tween on the banjo seemed to lead the pack, with a chocolate-box assortment of elders and teenagers on guitars and ukuleles, a handful of church ladies with tambourines shaken confidently off-rhythm, a toddler slobbering on a kazoo, a twiggy twenty-something who alternated between a mouth harp and a cajon, and a couple of oddballs on electric piano and stand-up bass.

Cyrene was enthralled.

Her resolve crumbled under the banjo's assault.

According to the bass player, they were here every week. And when Friday rolled around again, Cyrene grabbed her lute and joined them. It seemed like a safe choice. Unlike her voice, her lute had never killed anyone.

#

During the months Cyrene jammed with the Pint Place Pickers, she didn't sing a single note. It wasn't that she didn't want to. It was just that she could imagine the way the group would come undone if she joined in on a raucous chorus or participated in call and response.

The banjo player's dormant aneurism would burst, and then the tambourine ladies would fall like dominoes as dismay triggered strokes and heart attacks. Several of the guitarists would choke on their own inhaled spit. The toddler with the kazoo would startle and run outside and escape, but he'd be the only one. The keyboardist would inexplicably die of electric shock. The bass player would trip while dragging her instrument out of the fracas and fall neck-first onto the dusty amp that waited, quiescent, for open mic night.

Cyrene needed to sing just as much as she needed to breathe. But she couldn't bring herself to break up this horrible, beautiful group in such a permanent way.

She stayed quiet.

But the more she jammed without singing, the more her need to sing grew. Once or twice, swept away by the melancholy twining of voices, she came so perilously close to humming along that she had to bite her tongue hard enough to draw blood to stop the sound from slaughtering everyone in the room.

She quit the group, but the urge kept building. If she didn't do something soon, she'd break and go to karaoke with her roommates. Or she'd sign up for that open mic after all. Or maybe she'd just start busking on some random street corner, killing off the passersby.

She considered booking a flight home and begging her sisters to take her back—or, at least, to let her join one last practice. It wouldn't be enough, but that was a problem for future Cyrene. Now, she'd do anything to sing just one more time without committing homicide.

Not that her sisters would let her.

They were stubborn, and once their minds were made up, there could be no changing them. Not even to prevent mass murder. Because how would she learn not to be such a virtuoso if they caved in and let her back into the band, even for an hour?

She wouldn't. At least, not by their logic.

Stubbornness was a trait that rioted through the family. It was why her benighted parents had named her Cyrene, even after friends and family members had urged them to reconsider, pointing out the obvious:

Cyrene the Siren was more joke than appellative.

She was a laughingstock, even among her sisters, from the moment she was born. And now she was reduced to begging for musical crumbs because she couldn't stand the thought of killing a bunch of musicians (who were, at best, mediocre amateurs—but also the loveliest humans she knew) for the chance to sing a few bars.

She was in the process of purchasing plane tickets when her work group chat pinged. There, on her screen, was a sort of duet. An artist sang, and somebody a world away from them harmonized after the fact.

It was as revolutionary as a key change, midsong.

Cyrene had never considered technology as a solution before. Music had always been an immediate thing, a physical resonance that rang through her and her sisters and spilled out into the waiting world, powerful enough to doom ancient heroes and potent enough to plow through everyone else in the process.

This was a far cry from those ancient performances. Currents of possibility caught at Cyrene, lifting her imagination into flight.

The next day at work, Cyrene forced her colleagues to teach her how to use the app that had made this miracle possible.

#

Singing to a phone screen was trickier than it looked. The hardest part wasn't keeping her lute on screen—though that was a challenge—but imagining the voices that would join her, if she was lucky, and leaving space for their additions.

She stuck to traditional songs at first. Just in case. But when her renditions of those failed to trigger a global rash of app-related deaths, she branched out. A few modern covers. A few originals.

Every day, she woke up to more duets. Nobody died. Or, at least, nobody died because of her. Still, she didn't try to harmonize. What if it got her booted from the app? What if her harmonies were so horrible the entire internet rejected her, just like her sisters had done? What if—

She woke one morning to a flurry of comments on her latest video. The usernames were familiar, and her stomach sank as she read.

melodicasings: Still a hopeless virtuoso, I see. 🙃

terrifictympani: Why don't you duet other people @sirencyrene? Too good to sing backup??

briobringsthenoise: What @terrifictympani said!

aria-ready: You know what they say: Those who can, do. Those who can't sing on the internet.

Cyrene didn't post anything for days after that. She'd moved on when her sisters kicked her out of the family band. She'd even half-believed their reasons for doing it. She'd taken the blame and dealt with the consequences and clawed her way back to music the hard way. And even after all that, they couldn't let her sing her songs.

She was reduced, again, to singing in the shower while her roommates were away. Like her songs were something dirty to be rinsed down the drain as soon as they swelled out of her and vibrated against the wet tile walls.

Eventually, her notifications pulled her back to the app. There were dozens of them. Dozens and dozens. A few were heckling, like her sisters' had been. More were supportive. A handful of kind souls reported her sisters' comments and blocked them.

Cyrene took their example, blocking one sister after the next, grief and determination dueling in her chest like the Pint Place Pickers' banjo player had sometimes done with one of the guitarists in their weekly jam sessions. A rapid, aggressive battle of melodies with no clear winner.

Cyrene tried her first duet.

Harmony wobbled out of her in fits and starts. She didn't record it. Or her second try. Or her third. She sang with strangers day after day, leaving no more trace of her contribution than the heart button she mashed on their songs.

After a week of practice, she was ready. Her harmonies still sometimes soared too high. They still had a trick of nosediving so abruptly they scraped ground before she'd fully noticed, turning songs into catastrophes. But it didn't matter.

She picked a song.

She recorded a duet.

She shared it with her followers.

It wasn't quite the same as singing with her sisters. Nothing ever would be, she suspected. But nobody died. And nobody kicked her off the app.

She sang as much and as often as she needed to. And even though she started out alone, some strong magic, stronger even than the magic in her blood, allowed others to join her, voices tangling with hers over time and distance and spotty wifi.

She was a siren. Her melodies were capable of driving listeners to their doom. Her live collaborations literally killed. But she was a singer, nevertheless.

And so she sang.

Sometimes, the songs were hers. Sometimes, she was the one joining in. It didn't matter to her much, which was which. She lost herself in the blending of voices.

She'd finally discovered the currents that let her freewheel through a song, spiraling up and swooping low, in perfect time with the others soaring around her. A murmuration of her own, separated by time and technology but real nonetheless.

Cyrene had found an entire world to harmonize with.

© 2024 Courtney Floyd