Song of Death

My mother is just the same as any other mother. She works hard to earn money to support herself and I. It's not always easy with the single income, even though she has a decent paying job, but we manage. There's always been food on the table and a roof over our heads, even if that roof does leak when it rains.

Like other moms, she's there when I need her and she always tries to make me feel better when I'm down or sick. We have our spats and treat each other to bitter induced silence every once in a while, but that's okay. It's perfectly normal, right?

There is one way in which I would say my mom isn't like other moms, though. I don't know what you'd call it. Superpower, intuition? Whatever it is, my mom has this uncanny ability to know when bad things are going to happen or worse, when people are going to die.

No, she doesn't gaze into some crystal ball for hours on end, study tarot cards or drench the air in the house with incense. She doesn't have some psychic hotline and she certainly doesn't wear a gaudy outfit and carry prayer beads around like they're her lifeline. She doesn't speak to ghosts or spirits or whatever you want to call them and she can't talk to animals. She just knows.

She'll wake up in the morning with a sense of imposing danger. I guess so anyway. I've never felt it, so I don't know how to describe it exactly. I don't even know if words could describe the sense that she gets. Is it something in the pit of her stomach that feels maybe like an ulcer? Is it some gnawing feeling at her heart? Your guess is as good as mine.

It's usually not some common badness, like a suicide bombing in some country far away, or other things like that that you hear on the news. If it was simply that, I wouldn't think she had any sort of 'knowing' ability at all. Hell, I could wake up tomorrow and say there's going to be a bombing somewhere and probably be right. No. Mostly when she gets these feelings it has something to do with someone either she knows or we both know, including ourselves.

To me, it seems most of the time the bad feeling results in someone dying. Sometimes it's about something simple in which no one is seriously injured, like a minor auto collision. That's happened before. She woke up with a bad feeling and later that day it would turn into her hitting two deer. She was fine, but the car wasn't in too good of shape. But on many occasions, too many for my liking, it has resulted in death. Maybe not right away, but within the next few days someone else joins those 'six feet under'.

She's usually able to tell, too, when it's going to be someone dying. How? There's one reason, and one reason alone.

A song.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I believe it's true.

It's some song that I don't think I've ever really heard and I don't think it has anything to do with sadness or death or morbidity of any sort. Just some song that you could hear on the radio any day, and you probably have heard it and thought nothing of it. But for some reason, whenever my mother hears it, someone dies.

I don't think it would work the same way if she was to put that song on, playing it off some tape or something. It has to be random; unexpected.

You probably think I'm some harebrained little kid, making up things just to make my mommy seem more special than anyone else's. What kid hasn't done that, right? I suppose there's no way for me to really prove it to you without there being some doubt in your mind, so you just have to take my word for it.

Several years ago, when she heard this song on the radio again, someone she knew from work died. Apparently it was cancer, or something like that that was slowly taking the person's life. It had been a while between my mom hearing the song and hearing of the person's death (since they worked different shifts), but when she did hear about it, and heard the day on which that person had died, she remembered the song. It had been a day before the person died that she'd heard the song.

Her father also seemed to be subject to this deadly song. Just days after that song had popped onto the radio, we learned of his death. I think that was really the first time I heard her make mention of this situation with the song. It was the first time that I became aware that whenever she mentioned she'd heard the song that someone else was going to die. It was after that that I would fear every time I heard about the song coming on. Worry about who would be next…

I have no doubt that it probably just sounds like one giant coincidence. Yet… every time? Every time that blasted song comes on the radio and she hears it? Why? Why that song? What powers does it have, if any at all? Maybe I'm just crazy. Maybe my mother has just been telling me some cruel story all along. Maybe she has some strange illness that causes her to play cruel jokes on everyone around her by saying these things. Maybe not.

That song was on the other day. I happened to be standing there this time, too and I heard it come on the radio. Well, sort of. I don't remember it much at all. I don't remember a tune, a single note, a single lyric, anything. That song is so forgettable to me that even after it was off the radio I couldn't remember what I'd just heard. So, it's like I never even heard it at all. Did I just imagine it?

I don't think so. Because now I'm sitting here in this church, listening to a eulogy for the person lying in the casket. Did the song kill them, too? Or was it coincidence again? What is it that felt the need to take away this person and cause my heart to wrench and my eyes to flood? What is it that felt the need to take them away and cause my throat to close and make me feel like I'm going to throw up at the same time?

I hate that song. Even if I don't remember it, I hate it and I hope I never heard it again. Not that I'd recognize it, I guess.

My mother? Oh, she's here, too. Unfortunately, she's not sitting beside me. No, there's no rude person wedged between a mother and her child with little regard to this child's tears. No…

My mother?

Though in the past she's never seemed to know who was going to die… I'm curious; did she know who it would be on this occasion? Cause this time… she's the one in the casket…

End