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The Flutist and The Graveyard
The Flutist and The Graveyard
The Flutist and The Graveyard
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The Flutist and The Graveyard

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Huy is a homeless boy with a haunted past trying his best to survive for another day. A cardboard box in an alleyway is his bed, the darkened walls form his room and the sky makes his roof. His constant companion and source of bread and milk is the flute he was given at a tender age, and his friends are either stray cats or "old souls." But Huy has a secret, and it is one he will take to the graveyard with him when the day is done. When a cryptic warning arrives out of the blue from an acquaintace who loves scaring him to death with sudden entrance and whispers, Huy has to acknowledge that a powerful curse is at work, and only he can put a permanent stop to it.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherKhoa Ngô
Release dateDec 23, 2016
ISBN9781370218646
The Flutist and The Graveyard
Author

Khoa Ngô

Ngo Binh Anh Khoa is currently a teacher of English at Ho Chi Minh University of Technology (HUTECH). While not working or grading papers, he can be found daydreaming, watching horror and horrible films, reading fictions, and writing dark verses for personal entertainment, some of which have previously appeared in publications such as Spectral Realms, New Myths, The Audient Void, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Star*Line, Weirdbook, Penumbric, Eye to the Telescope, Eternal Haunted Summers, Scifaikuest, ParABnormal Magazine, and other venues featuring speculative poetry. In addition to speculative verses, he also writes mainstream haiku, some of which have won awards and honorable mentions in multiple contests in the US, the UK, Japan, Canada, Romania, Croatia and elsewhere.

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    The Flutist and The Graveyard - Khoa Ngô

    The Flutist and The Graveyard

    THE SUN WAS SETTING in the western sky afar, shedding what was left of its warmth before it left to lighten up the other side of the Earth.

    Huy loved to imagine the sun to be a spherical orange with flowery tendrils shaped like a red, unruly lion’s mane around the core. He knew that it was childish and far from facts, of course. He had learnt his fair share of basic science through his meager education back when he had had the chance to (and basic counting he could handle, but the rest of algebra–he found soon–hated him, and geometry pretty much wanted to turn his brain into jelly), and he knew full well that the sun was nothing so comical, just a flaming ball of gas, a tiny speck among an ocean filled with stars, and that single speck was doing whatever it could to preserve the even tinier ones with its embrace, sheltering them for as long as it could with whatever transient warmth still left.

    A smile bloomed on Huy’s face, like a flower slowly showing off its petals.

    What a good friend the sun is to the planets in its care, he mused. Until it blows up eventually and takes everything with it. United we stand, together perish, so it would seem. He added a chuckle to that, not at all in good humor.

    The boy had stopped playing his latest song two minutes ago and was now letting a monstrous yawn loose, uncaring of his manners or any wayward eyes that might find him sitting by the roadside. Nobody had been on that case for at least a year now. Besides, one can’t eat manners to survive on the streets.

    His mouth opened widely, showing off all of his teeth and gum and tongue. There were tears condensed at the corners of his eyes, but they never fell down. He never bothered to cover his mouth when yawning. He hadn’t cared for the last two years now.

    Huy returned to playing his flute shortly afterward. He liked to think he had composed that song from scratch, but there was something inside his mind that whispered otherwise, telling him it was an old tune whose name he could not remember, but whose melodies he could call upon as easily as the lungs exhale the air from the body or how the limbs move in accordance with the brain’s will.

    He didn’t know the song’s name, but he had a feeling that he should. Names are, after all, important. A gift of identity which defines one’s place within the world.

    The melody was soft and sweet, and somewhere in the even deeper layers of his mind, Huy could almost recall the lost lyrics, and a voice to accompany the words, clear as an echo of a distant bell. But they hid well and never came out. It was maddening, like an itch that one can’t reach, or a word that dances teasingly at the very tip of the tongue and yet refuses to cross over the edge.

    Huy released the hair he was fisting, took in deep breaths and counted to ten. He did not want to be bald before sixty, granted that he could live that long. Besides, a bald head would not be a trendsetter for any twelve-year-old kids anywhere.

    His eyes trailed toward the sun again, slow in its descent and gentle in its crimson orange hue. It was a warm day, and a lazy day. People were walking to and fro with kids tottering behind them toward their waiting rides. The entire place seemed bustling with noises of people going and coming, of cars and motorbikes honking and roaring and dashing like crazed metal beasts, of people shouting for the attention of their children, of vendors crying for attention and many others begging for the same thing.

    The sound of his flute by the mostly empty pavement was perhaps–he thought with a frown–the only clear note among this noxious symphony of chaos banging against the eardrums. He wished there were an off button somewhere, or a knob at least to turn the volume down.

    Huy decided to ignore everything and get back to his playing. He had a belly to feed, and thus would sit there and play his flute for two more hours.

    One and a half hour later, the alley cats had to come and watch him seconds before he decided to pack up, and he couldn’t for the life of him refuse to play for those poor stray souls and kindred spirits on the roads. Crowds start out small, and the cats certainly have a way of attracting a small group, though they were more interested in filming him and uploading the video online, where it would get more views than he could ever manage to get in real life.

    More views, more likes and not a single bill inside his hungry, withering cap that had–he assumed–once been white. Now it looked like something brown and haunted by a horrid odor, and Huy had to get rid of the imagery as fast as it came and focused back on the flute and the videos. He would like to keep whatever nutrients he had left inside.

    Exposure was good, he supposed, but he was certain that the likes would be for the cats. Everybody loves cats. With their big pleading eyes and swishing tail and beautiful coats of

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