Energy of Music

[This piece was based on a prompt where you are assigned a character, situation, setting, and plot twist. Mine were a high school grad, a concert, an old farmhouse porch, and somebody dies, respectively.]


“What happened?” the detective asked, looking at the cop. The police officer shrugged, taking another lazy sip of his coffee and he jabbed his thumb in my direction.
“She’s the only remaining witness; you’ll have to question her,” The cop yawned and lazily walked over to me, followed closely by the detective. He crouched in front of me, narrowing his eyes as he looked me over. I pulled the neon orange shock blanket tighter around me, as if it could block out his piercing stare, and stared at the dew covered grass.
“Well,” he said, still looking at me. “Speak.” It was a command, not an option. I swallowed down the dread and fear rising in my throat as I began to recall the horrifying events of the previous evening…


The farmhouse had been abandoned for some time. Longer than anyone could remember. Now it was mostly just drug addicts who needed a fix in private, or high school kids who needed a big party space. This was one of those times. Recent high school grads crowded the lawn, laughing, singing, dancing, drinking, while some unheard of band performed on the porch. It wasn’t my usual crowd, and I began to think of why I had come in the first place.
“It’ll be fun,” Amanda said. “You need to get out more anyways.”
Amanda had long since wandered off with her boyfriend and I didn’t care enough to find them. I sat with my knees drawn to my chest on a blanket in the back. The music was okay, but I preferred my own playlist better and tuned it all out with my iPod. The music radiating from the porch was geared more towards the people who had nothing better to do but listen to the most unpopular music they could find. I was surrounded by hipsters. Another group walked onto the porch, I took out one ear bud to give them a chance, but after about a minute I craved the glorious sounds of auto tune and a synth. The night progressed with more and more bands preforming on the porch. Until, maybe around 1 am, a guy walked up. He had no instruments, nobody else with him. He said something about how “Music is an energy floating all around us. We just gotta sit back and soak it in,” but I didn’t really hear much more after that. After a minute of him standing there in silence taking in the “energy of music,” he just collapsed to the ground. The rest of the audience that was paying attention followed suit. They dropped like flies, crumpling to the dirt. Until eventually, everybody had fallen. I didn’t leave after that, Amanda was my ride home and she was nowhere to be found. So I just fell asleep and hoped that everything would be fine in the morning. When I wake up, there are two police cars and an ambulance on the scene and a medic checking my vitals.

“Interesting,” the detective muttered, folding his hands together behind his back. He walked over to one of the bodies and crouched by it. He poked around, feeling the ribcage and stomach. The cop looked a mixture of mortified, confused, and excruciatingly bored, and I imagine I didn’t look too much different. The detective grinned slightly as he stood back up, “Obviously, how could I be so blind before?” He walked back over and began to explain that it appeared all their organs had been crushed. “They were hipsters. They got too metaphorically underground when they began to ponder the philosophy of music instead of just blindly listening to it. And it killed them.”

-Seb