A Borrower's Anthology

Dreams & Magic

Nicholas gains an unanticipated audience member when he decides to practice his guitar skills for a day.

...

If words were a body then music was the blood which moved them through the world. Its beat bled new purpose into them, making words even stronger.

Nicholas had never heard of a borrower making their own music. It didn't seem imagined out of thin air, like the humans' culture, but another of the concepts they had borrowed yet again. Still, if they ever came in contact with more of their kind outside of the Henderson house, if they ever had to move, Nicholas knew he wanted to take a small piece of what he'd overheard from Darius' solo practice with him. He wanted to be the first borrower that had found a way to make his own guitar, his own songs.

All he needed to do was try to make sense of those strange symbols they called 'notes' on paper.

He waited until the door closed after Darius before he slowly crawled out of his hiding place, giving himself an ample amount of time to check if Darius would make a return. When his blonde head didn't poke through the door again, Nicholas secured the strap around his shoulder and tossed down his cloth rope.

Unlike Philip's room, where Michelle had easy access up and down because of which wall was faulty, Darius' was too close to a place where he frequented most of his time: his bed. Nicholas needed to open the wall's panel at just enough of a crack then scale his headboard until he was able to toss the rope onto the nightstand, rock-climbing his way down from the height. As a borrower, one couldn't afford to be afraid of tall passages, but Nicholas had certainly been cowardly as a child. He'd always been on the back of his uncle whenever they moved from place to place during a borrowing mission, when Nick was too young to be left alone at home. That was especially the case of a roach infestation in their old childhood home during the summer and fall seasons. He'd learned confidence with his grappling hooks and ropes overtime.

He was eighteen now, though that didn't mean he didn't have a safety net of duct tape on his feet just in case he slipped.

Ripping the suction from his moccasins, Nicholas hopped across the gap to the table, scaled his way down a second time, and reached the floor in a little under five minutes. His own grin chased away the angel on his shoulder when his eyes landed on the opened guitar case. Michelle was rubbing off on him too much if he was leaving home like this for not even a scavenge but to learn from the humans. He would never hear the end of it if he, the worrywart, told her so. He'd keep it his little secret.

Sidling his way up to the guitar, Nicholas climbed to the top of the case and settled on the wooden surface. As he sat, he reached to pluck off the strap from around his torso, setting his own instrument in his lap. It wasn't as well-manicured as Darius', but he'd been collecting the necessary pieces of cardboard for a good while now, crafting and sticking it together until his project looked like an actual guitar. For the strings, he'd cut and looped together a few rubberbands with enough elasticity to take a beating. Shoddy or not, it served its purpose, and he was proud of his little friend. The only trial he had run into was finding a way to 'tune' it, as he heard Darius explain to his band-mates.

Every Wednesday night, Darius invited a few friends over. They all toted along with them different instruments that Nicholas had never heard before, and as expected, their different designs brought along with them different sounds. Yet somehow they just meshed. It didn't matter if one blew into a snake-like system with holes, or tickled letter-less, white laptop keys. Even in their imperfect practice, the instruments sounded like they were meant to blend together in harmony. A few times, Nicholas had dragged Michelle along to listen to the humans' music, and she had been just as impressed as Nick. They'd sit there together, listening, for hours until they were warned of their sleep schedules.