:m e l o d i a:
...can you hear my voice...?
In the dappled shade of the old oak tree, they stood together, admiring the world before them. The world was cold, and had been cruel to both of them, but by each other’s side they could take on anything; they were each other's strength and courage and faith. They were each other’s dreams and desires. They were each other’s love. The two were best friends, alone together in an empty world where all they had was one another. There was no such thing as Hope without Sacrifice. They were like one single entity — a stolen horse and a boy without a family. If it weren't for the fact that they were two different species, they might have been lovers, by state of mind. And why not? Sacrifice understood Hope in a way that no human ever had; and Hope treated Sacrifice in a way that no human ever could. My best friend, Hope would often tell himself as he watched the blue-eyed Paint graze; the only one I ever had.
And what a sad fact it was that the boy who had named himself Hope had never had any friends. He had always been different from other boys his own age, in a way that caused him to look down upon them. Hope was intelligent and mature. The other boys were loud and unkempt. He was never normal; not by society's standards. But what was normal? To him, normality was true the balance in one's life, the natural rhythm that beat inside of them. To Hope, normality varied from person to person because no two souls had the same rhythm. Some, like his own, didn't even have rhythms. They had melodies. They were special, more advanced people who had more trouble finding harmony within another because very few rhythms would ever match their songs. It was thinking like that which made him different. When he had to explain his theory on rhythmical compatibility to the many councilors and child psychologists that he was forced to see, they hesitated before calling him unique and articulate, and said that nothing would help him. But his parents weren't so sure. They worried about him; an only child, Hope was distanced and anti-social. He admitted to hating other human beings, and refused to speak to anyone his own age. When he did — he would report — he saw one of two things in their eyes. Either they became confused, or they laughed. And people weren't supposed to laugh unless someone had something funny to say.
So, intelligent, articulate, unique Hope — whose real name was Keegan Rain Chandler — was left without hope of respite from what others would call psychological damage. But he didn't care. In his own mind, there was no such thing as psychological damage; it was just that some peoples' souls beat out extremely complicated rhythms... and very rarely, some sung melodies. What exactly differentiated a person with a rhythm from one with a melody? Hope didn't know. He had never met someone with a melody before. Until he met Sacrifice, a tall, thick Paint gelding with glass eyes like a doll's. Alice Human Sacrifice he was registered as, and Hope was instantly in love as soon as he laid eyes on him. As a last-ditch effort to help their son, Christopher and Arielle Chandler enrolled their son in riding lessons over the summer of his fourteenth birthday, at the suggestion of a psychologist who said that horses could sometimes be therapeutic to mentally disabled children. This news Hope was not happy with, because of course he wasn't mentally disabled. No, he really wasn't. He just couldn't fall victim to the conditioning of the media. He couldn't allow himself to turn into a technology-addicted idiot who would eventually develop arthritis in his thumbs from texting too much. He wouldn't become slave to trends in fashion, and he wouldn't be a clone to every other boy he hung out with. So, he just didn't indulge in things that normal boys would. He didn't play sports or listen to loud music. He didn't wear baggy jeans or sweaters. He didn't carry an iPod or a cell phone. He didn't succumb to the appetites of the flesh — Hell, he didn't even like girls. Hope liked classical music, learning about new cultures and languages, poetry, and thick books. He liked the way his reading glasses looked, and how artistic sheet music looked without even having to be played. He liked intellectual conversation. He liked strong, older men. More than any other thing, though, Hope liked horses. Once he gave Sacrifice a try, the two were inseparable.
"In sync," he said. The last night of the first week, Hope came home for a weekend visit, grinning. His grey-green eyes were lit up, shining like stars, and he was smiling. Christopher and Arielle couldn't have been happier, even when Hope made the strange comment. "We galloped today, because I was moved into advanced riding classes. Sacrifice and I were in sync, which is strange because we both have melodies." Of course, Christopher and Arielle had no idea what he meant by this, but they passed it off. He was fourteen, and he had always been different. He had an imagination, they would tell each other for comfort. They could never admit to each other that he may actually be hearing these rhythms and melodies that he kept talking about. Of course not, because that would mean he was bordering on schizophrenia, and their son was definitely not schizophrenic. That was just taking it too far. Hope was just different. That was it. Different.
Truthfully, Hope was hearing these melodies and rhythms, and it wasn't because he was crazy, either. Hope was different, alright. He was gifted, even. There was something so special about him that no one could ever fathom; because it wasn't normal to the society that was made up of conditioned clones. Hope had the ability to hear the rhythms of the souls of living beings, and how they harmonized with each other. He noticed at a young age that those who interacted combined their rhythms, and if the two natural rhythms created a discordant noise, the two people didn't get along. Alternately, if two people worked well together, their noise would harmonize, creating something halfway bearable. But Hope could never put up with the sounds of other peoples' rhythms, harmonizing or not. He was too busy enjoying his own melody, which sounds rather conceited until one considers that it was the loudest sound in his ears until he learned to block it out. By then, he had full control over his ability, and he had realized that these sounds weren't only the sounds of a soul, but those of life within a being. He realized it when he was at the scene of the birth of a foal, whose rhythm died out with his life less than an hour after he was born. He also noticed by this that the rhythm of mother and child always harmonized flawlessly, which meant that there was two different possibilities of perfect harmony in a child's life — his mother and his soul mate.
It was that realization that finally broke him down into doing what he knew he had to — that he could tell which relationships were harmonic and which were discordant. He could predict when a couple wouldn't work out and when they would. He could tell a mother the state of her child's life before it was born. He could tell when people were coming up noiselessly behind him. All these, and people began to become suspicious of what Hope really was. Finally traumatized by her son's gift, Arielle snuck down into the basement one night after dinner and hung herself. From the living room, watching the horse jumping from Spruce Meadows, Hope told his father that he just heard his mother's rhythm go out. She was found hanging later that night. Christopher was filled with mixed emotions — the love for his son, the love for his wife, the disgust toward his son's gift.... Confused and broken, he lit the house one fire and trapped himself in the basement, attempting to lock Hope in his room to dispose of him as well. But Hope managed to crawl out his window and make it down to ground level with nothing more than a sprained ankle. Now alone, Hope had no idea what to do or where to go, so he decided to make his way back to the ranch where he had been taking lessons for two years now. He ran to Sacrifice, who was all too happy to see him. Hope was always in harmony when he was with Sacrifice, because the gelding had a soft, sweet melody very similar to Hope's. It was as if they were made for each other. The two fit together like two pieces of the same puzzle; and Hope couldn't stand to leave his only friend behind when he ran to avoid the humanity that he despised so greatly.
That was what brought them to the old oak tree… in a place where he and Sacrifice could be together forever. Somewhere where ‘normal’ human society would no longer judge him for the way he was…. Somewhere beyond life and into perfection…. He couldn’t stand the thought that he might be an abnormality in their eyes, and that it was his deviation had driven both his parents into their deaths. Maybe… when he arrived… they would accept him again.