I put my fiddle case on the desk. Took my time tuning down to DDAD, listening to the whispered undercurrent.
When I liked the tuning, I lifted my bow. “This is a song called ‘Wind Will Rove.’ I want you to hear what living history means to me.”
I played them all. All the known variations, all the ones that weren’t lost to time. I rested the fiddle and sang Howie McCabe’s faulty snippet of “Windy Grove” from the recreation of his historical interview and Will E. Womack’s “Wind Will Roam.” I recited the history in between: “Windy Grove” and “Wendigo” and “When I Go.” Lifted the fiddle to my chin again and closed my eyes. “Wind Will Rove”: three times through in its traditional form, three times through with my own alterations.
“Practice too much and you sound like you’re remembering it instead of feeling it,” my grandmother used to say. This was a new room to my fiddle; even the old variations felt new within it. My fingers danced light and quick.
I tried to make the song sound like something more than wind. What did any of us know of wind? Nothing but words on a screen. I willed our entire ship into the new song I created. We were the wind. We were the wind and borne by the wind, transmitted. I played a ship traveling through the vacuum. I played life on the ship, footsteps on familiar streets, people, goats, frustration, movement while standing still.
The students sat silent at the end. Only one was an OldTimer, Emily Redhorse, who had been one of the three who actually turned in their assignments; Nelson grew up hearing this music, I know. I was pretty sure the rest had no clue what they heard. One look at Nelson said he’d already formulated a response, so I didn’t let him open his mouth.
I settled my fiddle back into its case and left.
There are so many stories about my grandmother. I don’t imagine there’ll ever be many about me. Maybe one of the kids in this class will tell a story about the day their teacher cracked up. Maybe Emily Redhorse will take a seat in the OldTime one day and light into my tune. Maybe history and story will combine to birth something larger than both, and you, Teyla, you and your brother will take the time to investigate where anecdote deviates from truth. If you wonder which of these stories are true, well, they all are in their way, even if some happened and some didn’t.
I’ve recorded my song variation into the new database, in the “other” section to keep from offending Harriet, for now. I call it “We Will Rove.” I think my grandmother would approve. I’ve included a history, too, starting with “Windy Grove” and “Wind Will Rove,” tracing through my grandmother’s apocryphal spacewalk and my mother’s attempt to find meaning for herself and my daughter’s unrecorded song, on the way to my own adaptation. It’s all one story, at its core.
I’m working more changes into the song, making it more and more my own. I close my eyes when I play it, picturing a through-line, picturing how one day, long after I’m gone, a door will open. Children will spill from the ship and into the bright sun of a new place, and somebody will lift my old fiddle, my grandmother’s fiddle, and will put a new tune to the wind.
Gord Sellar is a Canadian writer currently living in the South Korean countryside with his wife and son, and countless plastic dinosaurs. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies since 2007, and in translation in Korean, Italian, Czech, and Chinese. He was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2009, and wrote the screenplay for South Korea’s first cinematic adaptation of a Lovecraft story, the award winning “The Music of Jo Hyeja” (2012). He is currently working on an SF novel set in the 1730s.
FOCUS
Gord Sellar
When the news rippled through the classroom in a flurry of smart-phone beeps, almost nobody reacted. My Linh knew, though, that she must’ve done something right, and Huong’s beaming smile was all the confirmation she needed.
Still, she felt a nagging sense of worry, too. A riot was a riot: unanticipated things happened. Fires, street fights, and eventually a wave of arrests. And then there was her father: she hadn’t said a word to him about what they were up to, but dedicated revolutionary that he was, he never missed a good riot. Yet for nearly everyone else in the room, the task of memorizing English vocabulary lists took priority over the events unfolding in Bin Duong City. My Linh sat watching her classmates speed-memorize their way through the boring lists of vocabulary, wondering how many of them had parents working in the factories, and how many would’ve panicked by now if they weren’t high on Focus?
She caught Hoc’s eye and noticed Huong nodding toward the exit. A glance at her teacher assured her that he wouldn’t stop them leaving. Even on normal days, she didn’t have to ask permission to go to the toilet: Mrs. Tran just smiled at her slightly pityingly, not bothering to caution her against skipping class. She was a kindly sort, and vaguely encouraging, but she’d clearly long ago given up on the kids who weren’t dosing, even the ones like My Linh who had no choice. “Nobody asked to be born allergic to Focus,” Mrs. Tran had sometimes said to her, about My Linh and her dad alike, before glancing at Hoc
