source: The Magic Flute recorded at the Grosses Festspielhaus in Salzburg, Austria in 2006
Day 895: 5 Minute Freewrite: Thursday - Prompt: opera singer
Her voice came out of nowhere, no place anyone recognized, no person anyone remembered. John and Martha Hanson were good farm folk who went to church every Sunday, never bared their legs and shoulders in public, paid their dues, and fended for themselves. That their youngest child should yearn for the stage, singing arias with a heaving bosom and red lips parted in throes of passion, just staggered the imagination. How that voice of hers traveled into the farthest reaches of a concert hall without a microphone was less of a shock, given the way John and Martha hollered commands from afar to their offspring. Still. To sing like that. To crave applause, to have roses tossed at her feet. Nothing in their gene pool had prepared them for this child.
"Lilian Rose," said John, "was not a wise name. After Tom, Pat, Mike and Mary, what did you expect?"
"Lily is all we ever called her," Mary said. "Don't try pinning this on me."
"It's your green eyes and golden freckles she has, nothing of the Hanson skin and hair."
They could argue until the cows came home but they'd never settle the matter: how did an opera singer rise from their humble, sensible family?
She wrote them letters from Milan, Paris, and New York. Pictures of her, all cleavage and flowing red-gold hair rippling like a Christmas card angel's, embarrassed them in magazines that someone would always clip and mail.
The new virus changed her world. Theaters, concert halls, universities, and even churches closed their doors to the public. No gatherings of more than ten people at a time, anywhere, until the magic numbers were reached, the "leveling off" of new cases.
FIVE MINUTES ARE UP
With no more live music, no income, and the threat of being quarantined in a city full of concrete and empty store shelves, Lilian Rose made a cataclysmic decision to drive home before the roads were closed too. That she had a car at all was something, a touch of Midwestern in her, a need for mobility and independence that trains, planes and buses could not provide even in their better days.
On the barn roof she would stand, at sunset, singing her arias to the cows, sheep, pigs, and scattered neighbors. The youngest of the boys, Mike, would live-stream her concerts to people around the world, and her videos went viral, which might do her some good in the future if ever the future turned a new page.
Weeks stretched into months. Mr. Hanson raged on about conspiracy theories, unreliable statistics, loss of liberty, and fears of the government reaching deeper and deeper into their lives. Lily kept singing.
When the factories shut down and truckers stopped driving groceries to towns all over the nation, hungry hoards started roaming the countryside like packs of wild dogs. Mr. Hanson had his guns, but Mary prayed and prayed he would never need fire one at a human.
By the end of April, then May, then June, the new "normal" wore on. On a summer night when fireflies blinked over the growing corn, two big, dark, burly silhouettes lurched down the gravel road and into the driveway of the Hanson farm. As if they'd stepped from the cover of a dystopian sci-fi novel, they wore goggles, cloaks, gloves, and breathing apparatus, and they held some sort of medieval weaponry.
Her dad loaded his Winchester, but a third silhouette emerged from the shadows and landed a blow on the back of the old man's head.
Lilian thought of her costume box and hustled into her Queen of the Night cape and mask. Crawling out of the bedroom window, then climbing to the roof of the old farmhouse, she gripped her great-grandfather's Ruger pistol in one hand, a glowing flashlight in the other, casting her face in deep shadows.
Then she began humming, an ominous sound like the moaning of the damned. The three silhouettes huddled together and lifted their heads, apparently focusing on the specter on the roof.
Her humming rose to a crescendo and a blast of sound came hurtling from her mouth. Conveniently, a summer breeze lifted the edges of her cloak and it flapped around her. The sound was long, loud, and reverberating.
She thought of the Bremen Town Musicians, her favorite folk tale from childhood. She focused on the intruders. Holding the Ruger aloft, she pulled the trigger.
It was loud, with or without a bullet.
The intruders ran as if from a pack of demons.
Her father was bruised but awake at the kitchen table, grumbling and seething, threatening to build a fortress and arm even his wife and daughter with weaponry.
"Her voice," Mary said, "is all the weapon a woman may need."
Lilian agreed, but she would keep bullets in her pockets, all the same.