Song of the year.
A tale of two friends and the end of things.
Dear Phoenix & Cricketers,
New years bring new things. One new thing I’m very excited about is some artwork by cartoonist Donna Almendrala. It’s the illustration at the start of this week’s story, and it shows the new home for Phoenix & Cricket: a tiny bookshop that appears and reappears wherever it wishes. The bookshop is, in many ways, a living thing: It experiences the places it visits just as a person might, and it absorbs those experiences into itself — into its bricks, its wood, its heart — like a piece of paper absorbs written words.
To celebrate, I wrote the following story, Song of the year. You can read or listen to the story here, or you can listen to a special audio performance of it in my new Story Corner podcast.
Happy New Year,
LVWJ
The blizzard raged outside the little shop, and wind pounded the shop’s big red door. The wind made the door shake and rattle.
‘The year wants to end,’ the old Phoenix said from his perch next to the piano.
‘I know, I know, I’m trying,’ I said without looking at him. I sat next to the piano at my little desk, and I scribbled away on my music manuscript paper.
Years, I knew, are proud things; each one wants to be remembered properly, usually in the form of a song, for its unique events and contributions to history. Indeed, if you don’t compose a song at the end of a year, that year will simply never end. It’ll keep raging and blizzarding outside the door, just as it was now, until it heard its song.
But the song you write has to be the right song – you can’t just play a year any smattering of notes. Years aren’t stupid, you know. You have to get the feeling of a year right, and that’s what I was busy trying to do. Feverishly, I rushed between the piano and my scribbling while darting nervous glances at the clock, all while the big red door shook and rattled louder and louder.
‘It’s too happy, my friend. Too cheery,’ Phoenix chirped. Phoenix glowed his usual orange, red and yellow light as he radiated a warmth that filled the shop.
‘Well, of course it’s happy,’ I retorted. ‘This was the year I met you, after all. Best year of my life. The conversations we’ve had. The hikes. The adventures.’ I looked up at him. ‘I’ll never forget the wonder I felt watching your little head poke out of that pile of ashes I stumbled upon in the desert that morning back in January.’
It really had been the best year of my life. Framed photos hanging above the piano showed Phoenix and I going on all kinds of adventures together. Hiking and camping (where Phoenix, of course, served as the campfire each night), or us playing music (me on piano, and Phoenix tweeting and chirping away).
‘Have you already forgotten the little talk we had when the first snow came in October?’ Phoenix asked me.
I said nothing, but I remembered our chat perfectly. It had burned a memory into my heart, in a corner I did not like to visit.
‘My friend, look at me,’ Phoenix said gently.
I pretended not to hear him.
‘Old friend, please. For me.’
I stopped my scribbling, and I looked at Phoenix, who looked at me warmly and lovingly through his full-moon wire-frame glasses. I’d trekked to town just the other week to find him those glasses. ‘Metal,’ I’d told the optometrist. ‘Anything else will just melt.’
The photos above the piano showed a bird with the most brilliant orange and red plumage, and purple, luminescent eyes that carried the full volcanic fire of life inside them. But the eyes before me now, while strong and kind and steady, were embers compared to the flames they once were.
‘You know what happens when the clock strikes midnight, old chap.’
‘I know,’ I whispered. ‘I know.’
‘Perhaps that’s what’s missing?’
‘What’s missing from what?’
‘That feeling I see now in your eyes,’ Phoenix said gently. ‘Love and loss. Maybe that’s what’s missing from the song.’
He was right. I knew he was right. The song in front of me was jubilation itself – but it didn’t want to end that way. It was asking for something more, and as I thought that I could sense the blizzard shift in agreement on the other side of the big red door.
‘Come along, old friend. One last adventure, eh?’
‘But will you be the same when you come back?’
Phoenix scoffed. ‘The same? Nothing’s ever the same, dear lad. Not from year to year or moment to moment.’
‘You know what I mean,’ I grumbled. ‘Will it still be you in the morning?’
Phoenix said nothing. He just continued looking at me warmly. I looked down, took up my pen, made a few swipes, and the song was done. I knew it was done.
I took the music to the piano, sat down and started playing. I played the first notes – the ones that told the tale of when Phoenix and I first met as he tumbled out of the pile of ash, glowing like a new spring sunrise. Then the music took flight into wonder, right alongside Phoenix as he soared almost to space just so he could prove to me how he could look just like a shooting star blazing across the night sky.
‘You’re the best friend I ever had,’ I said without looking up from the piano.
‘Me, too,’ said Phoenix.
I heard the sound of Phoenix setting his glasses down on the piano, and as I reached the final chords and as the clock struck midnight, a light as bright and brilliant and melancholy as a sunset ignited in the corner of my eye. It blazed for a few seconds and then faded and disappeared entirely. My fingers lingered on the keyboard as I played the last notes of the song. It was dark in the shop now, and very still and very quiet. The blizzard of the year – the blizzard that was the year – was over, and the big red door no longer shook.
I listened to the silence and the settling sounds of the shop. It was the sound of something ending and, at the same time, something beginning. I took the sounds in hand, turned to my little desk, and started composing the next song of the year.
