Random Quote of the Day:
"I must remember to honor the power of the Off Switch!"
- Omi from Xiaolin Showdown
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Eh...not been on in ages... But now that I have internet in my room again, I may be updating a lot more. I certainly hope so, anyway...especially seeing as how I'm almost back into the mood to write.
But not tonight... So I'm just gonna go find another short angsty YGO fic and be happy. Or sad. Or something.
...heh heh heh...so much for not writing ^_^ This is inspired by the Benchmark writing prompt, "Write an essay explaining how one experience has the power to affect a person's life in a positive way." The character is heavily based on me, as I was last year; the whole session thing is very very close to being true, except that I added the violinist and the tin whistle player, and the bodhran player and the guitarist are in reality one and the same... o.O;; This is why I shouldn't be allowed to have a computer in my room...
There's A Method Behind the Madness
Sophie Taks sighed and placed her elbows on her knees, holding her head in her hands and shaking it slowly. After a moment she looked back up and glared balefully at the piece of music on the stand in front of her. She raised her flute to her lips and began to play; four bars in her mind wandered back to the math test she'd failed earlier in the week, and her fingers hesitated just long enough to throw the entire melody out of rythym. She growled and put the flute back in her lap. She turned an evil eye on the offending papers. The music wasn't complicated, per se, but it wasn't intuitive, and so she had to concentrate in order to play it properly.
That being the problem.
"Why," she groaned to herself. "Why, why, why... I can't finish my art project on time, the computer dies in the middle of writing my report, I fail two tests in one week, and I can't learn my solo...aghhh!" The only thing that saved the flute from a sudden introduction to the far wall was the sound of footsteps on the bare floor behind her.
"Sophie? Time to go," her mom's voice said.
The brunette looked up, a confused look on her face. "Go? Go where?"
"The session's tonight, remember?" Sophie repressed a sigh. Great. Just what I need. To make myself look like a fool in front of people I don't even know...
"I guess it's too late to cancel, isn't it," she said wearily. "All right, just let me grab my wooden flute, and my shoes..."
The drive to the session was short, but it seemed to drag on into eternity. Sophie's hands were sweating; her flute's corduroy-like casing was already damp. When they arrived she felt more like she was walking to a court than to a friendly session.
Of course, the first few tunes did nothing to alleviate that feeling. Her and her mom's flutes were terribly out of tune; her fingers and forearms were already tired from playing her other flute earlier in the afternoon; on the rare occasion that she could remember the tune her fingers always missed their places, and every note she played sounded strangled and forced. Several times she could have sworn she'd seen the violinist wince.
"What's up next?" the tin whistle player asked when Foxhunter's Reel finally faded to a less-than-pleasant end.
The guitarist flipped through his sheet music, hunting for one they all more or less knew. "What about Star of Munster?" he asked. Sophie's heart sank; she'd never even heard the name before. Nevertheless she raised her flute and waited for someone to start. She could at least try to pick up a few notes here and there.
The tin whistle was the first to play. The whistle's high shriek quickly spiraled down to less piercing notes, and the other instruments quickly jumped in. Halfway through the first bar old memories of other, more professional sessions began to arouse themselves in Sophie's memory, and her fingers began to move of their own accord. The guitar strummed; the violin sang; the bodhran gave its customary deep-throated but quiet roar; the whistle skirled around her feet; the other flute leaped from note to airy note, and her own low powerful tone followed the melody, straight and true. The flautist's mind was wonderfully empty. Her fingers danced across the wooden tube on their own, while the few thoughts that dared pass through her head wrapped themselves around the simlicity of it all.
The fiddler's bow slipped, and the resulting squeal sent him into a fit of laughter. The small symphony fell apart, but still Sophie played, unwilling to just let the tune die; by the time she brought it to a close everyone had rejoined, and the melody swept along to a final note worthy of the Chieftans themselves.
There was a short moment of silence, and the tin whistle player groaned. "No! I didn't get that on tape..."
The next morning rolled around all too quickly, and Sophie bit back a fluent stream of foul language when she found out she had a pop quiz in her chemistry class. The mintutes ticked away; she put her pencil down in exasperation, unable to remember even one of the answers. She put her head on her desk and let her hair fall around her face in a sort of dark curtain.
She had barely closed her eyes with the half-formed intention of sleeping through the rest of the test when Star of Munster suddenly started running through her head. For half an instant she could almost hear it; then it faded, leaving behind only a miraculously quiet, intensely concentrated mind. She glanced over the test again, absentmindedly picking up her pencil as she did so. As she read off the questions, the answers appeared in her mind's eye one by one. Tiny details she'd long since forgotten rose up and slapped her across the face, and her hand seemed to be moving of its own violition, inscribing answers she almost didn't understand. She scribbled in the last one just as the bell rang.
Her next two classes passed quickly; by bringing her mind back to the tranquil state it had been in at the session the previous night, she found, she could more or less quell the random thoughts that so often distracted her, and with them gone her work didn't seem so daunting. Band was the last period of the day, and it was with a rising sense of nervousness that she pulled out her solo to practice. Her fingers felt strangely sluggish at first, but when she lifted her eyes from the paper and just let her fingers do the walking they took on a life of their own.
"Hey, Sophie," her friend said, leaning over and pointing to a particularly difficult section, "could you play that part again, more slowly? I can't get it right." Sophie grinned and raised her flute again, closing her eyes and letting her mind wander as her fingers followed the now well-known pattern.
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