The Boy in the Speakers by Natalie Finamore

The Boy in the Speakers

Once, not very long ago, a man and woman loved each other. This isn’t unusual, but their love was. High school sweethearts, everyone said that they would get sick of each other, but they never did. They spent years together in mutual bliss, eventually getting married.

The day came when they wished to have a child. For years and years they tried, but without any success. Eventually, they scraped enough money together for fertility treatments, and the woman soon discovered that she was pregnant. Before she told the happy news to her husband, she sat beneath the mimosa tree behind their house, looking up into the branches. A bird was perched in the tree above her, singing sweetly as the sun began to sink below the horizon. She whispered to herself, “May my child sing as beautifully as that bird does. May they be as free as its wings upon the wind.”

Her husband was overjoyed to hear that they had finally conceived a child, but their happiness was not to last for long. When the woman went into labor, she began to lose a lot of blood. The doctors did everything to save her, but she was dying, and dying fast. As she faded, she held her husband’s hand and said, “If I die, bury me beneath the mimosa tree.”

The doctors saved the child, named Jacob, and the man was allowed by the county to bury his wife beneath the mimosa tree. He held his son in the shade of the branches, and called his wife’s old number over and over just to hear her voice. Eventually, he stopped paying the bill, and he slowly forgot the sweet sounds of his wife’s voice.

He joined a dating site, and soon married again in the kind of whirlwind romance that the internet age has made us so familiar with. Soon, he and his new wife had a daughter, Marlene. The daughter and son were no more than two years apart, and they were attached at the hip. They grew up together, and Jacob would always sing Marlene to sleep at night. Jacob was Marlene’s protector and closest confidant. When Marlene got bullied at school, Jacob would scare the kids off, when Marlene was sick, Jacob would put his CDs on for her, when Marlene needed anything, Jacob was there to be her protector.

The stepmother was jealous of Marlene’s love for her brother, but as he got older, she became jealous of his singing talent. See, the stepmother was a failed artist, and she spent hours on the internet, wallowing in self-pity and obsessing over her passed days without making any effort to lift herself from her position in life. Her husband worked long hours, and often wouldn’t be seen around the house because he went out and got drunk after work with his old college buddies. It was no secret in the household that the stepmother took out her rage out upon Jacob. From the moment she moved in, she punished Jacob at every turn. When he was young, she would spank, pinch, and send him to time out for inordinate amounts of time for even the smallest infractions. She tried to control him by taking away his electronics, his CDs, grounding him, denying him dinner—and treating Marlene like a princess. Jacob’s good heart never resented his sister for the treatment he endured from his stepmother. Instead, he funneled all of his sadness and hatred into his music. He played whenever and wherever he could, his beautiful voice capturing all emotion perfectly.  Jacob had begun posting videos of himself singing with his guitar. He had gained a local following, and one of his videos had gone viral. Jacob was excited—his stepmother could only see her failure and jealousy. Every time Jacob had a success, she would punish him, but she could never stop his tenacity for his music.

Jacob was called to play a gig at a local venue, and he was going to be late coming home. Marlene begged her mother to let her go, but her mother angrily ordered her to go to bed. Marlene cried and cried in her room, and her mother screamed at her door while Jacob could not protect her, “You ungrateful child! I gave birth to you! He isn’t even your blood!”

Jacob got home around ten. He crept in the door, being careful not to wake anyone in the house, but he was surprised to see his mother sitting in the front room, staring at the front door where he stood.

“You’re up late,” his voice came out in barely a whisper. He was afraid, but he couldn’t say of what.

“It’s the perfect time to take care of things—get those pesky chores done that you just can’t get to during the day,” she walked over to where Jacob stood.

At this moment, Marlene was walking down the stairs to get a drink of water, careful to be quiet, as she didn’t want to incite the wrath of her mother. She saw her mother and Jacob from the bottom of the stairs, and she was frozen. They were just standing there; staring at one another like all hell was going to break loose. She didn’t know why, but she pulled her phone out of her pocket, turning the camera on, and started to record.

“What do you want…mom?” Jacob asked, “I was just going to head to bed.”

“I just wanted to tell you that I’m proud of you, son,” the stepmother reached her arms out, moving to embrace Jacob. A smile spread across his face, he was overjoyed to finally be appreciated and loved—even for a moment—by the stepmother that had rejected him for so long. This happiness, however, was short-lived.

His stepmother whipped a boxcutter out from the sleeve of her robe, and angrily cut across Jacob’s throat. Marlene screamed from the stairs, dropping her phone, and the mother turned around, eyes blazing with hellfire.

“If you tell a soul, I’ll do worse than kill you, you ungrateful child.”

Marlene shook and sobbed as she watched her mother walk into the kitchen. Jacob’s blood was spreading across the linoleum floor of the entryway, and Marlene wished that he would stand up—that he would be okay. Her mother returned, her bloody hands gripping the electric turkey knife.

“No! No mom, please!”

Jacob was dismembered over an excruciatingly long expanse of time. Marlene’s mother took pieces of his body and neatly cut them, placing them in plastic bags in the freezer. She wrapped his head, some of his organs, and his bones in a trash bag and shoved the heap into Marlene’s quivering arms.

“You bury these under the mimosa tree so he can be with his stinking slut mother where he belongs! If you try to run, you’ll end up in the freezer too.”

Marlene dragged the bag outside, her mother watching her from the kitchen window. She grabbed the shovel from the shed and dug a hole in the soft dirt under the mimosa tree. The hole took a long time to dig, but she managed to get it deep enough to accommodate the garbage bag. She gently placed what was left of her brother in the hole and filled it with dirt, trying to put the sod back on in the least suspicious-looking manner possible. No one ever really went in the backyard except for her and Jacob, so it didn’t really matter, but she wanted it to look good enough that she could pretend that none of it happened until the morning. Marlene plucked some of the mimosa flowers off of the tree just as the sun began to rise, and placed them on the soil where the pieces of her brother lay.

Marlene walked back in to find the house spotless and smelling of bleach, the sun streaming in through the front windows and illuminating the entryway that had been stained with her brother’s blood only several hours before. She smelled cooking meat, and her mother leaned out of the kitchen.

“Clean yourself up. Your father is coming to have breakfast with us, it’s his day off and I’m trying to do something nice for him.”

Later, Marlene sat across from her father as he ate what he seemed to think was “ham and eggs”. Marlene couldn’t even take a bite.

“Why aren’t you eating this delicious breakfast that your mother made, Marlene?” her father asked through a mouthful of food.

“I…” her mother grabbed her knee and dug her nails in, “I’m not feeling that well, I think I may have gotten the flu at school. Sorry, mom,” The grip on her knee relaxed.

“Where’s Jake?” her father seemed to have just only noticed

“He never came home last night. Stupid kid is probably out partying.”

Marlene passed the next month in a stupor. She did poorly in school. Her mother had put out a missing person report for her brother, but at each candlelight vigil, each search party, her mind was heavy with what really happened to Jacob. Every night, she went to talk to Jacob beneath the mimosa tree. She asked him to make it right, to expose their mother, to be her protector and her voice one last time.

Suddenly, one night under the tree, her phone lit up with a video of her brother singing, but it was a song she did not recognize. He sang,

“My mother, she slew me,

My father, he ate me,

And my sister, Marlene buried me,

With my mother under the mimosa tree.”

Marlene stared at the phone, and she knew, her brother was back to save her.

Her mother began getting phone calls. Marlene heard the same song wafting from the receiver, and each time her mother screamed for  the caller to “stop pranking her”. Jacob didn’t stop there. The lyrics to the macabre song began arriving in messages on the mother’s Facebook. They came out of the mouths of the newscasters on TV. They whispered from the car radio. They typed themselves in word documents on the mother’s laptop. It was driving her mad.

Marlene would go under the tree, and call her brother’s old number every night, and he would sing the song to her over and over again. One night, her mother came running out of the house into the backyard. Marlene could hear her brother’s voice from the laptop in the house.

“He’s taken everything from me! Everything!” her mother screamed, “I can’t even distract myself anymore. I’m digging him up! I’m digging that little shit up! I’m going to burn that fucking tree to the ground!”

Marlene’s mother began running toward the tree. Her father appeared in the door.

“What’s going on?” he asked, somewhat detached and not seeming to notice the disembodied voice of his song growing louder and louder through the Marlene’s phone.

Despite all of the commotion, and her mother marching toward the mimosa tree with revenge in her eyes, Marlene felt strangely calm. Her brother’s voice no longer seemed to be coming from her phone, but from below where she was sitting. The ground started to shake.

All of a sudden, the ground burst open, and there stood Jacob and his mother in all their glory. Marlene’s mother kept rushing headlong towards the mimosa, screaming. Jacob’s mother rushed forward and in a clap of light, reached into the wicked women’s chest and began pulling her into the ground by her heart. Jacob pulled Marlene away from the tree, and the ground swallowed up both of their mothers without a trace.

Marlene was overjoyed to see her brother in the flesh, and she buried her face into his chest. She lifted her head to express her joy to her father, but he was too busy searching the ground below the mimosa to realize his son was there.

“I don’t have long here, sis. Tell the cops what happened to me. Live your life. I’ll always be there in spirit to sing to you,” and with that, he faded into the ground.

Marlene wept, but she did as her brother asked. She showed the police the video that she had taken with her phone. She told them that she had been threatened with death by her mother and that’s why she had never come forward. When the police asked where her mother was, she told them that she had run off.

Marlene and her father had a rocky relationship at best after that. He dove even farther into drink after he realized that he had eaten his son, and that he had been too absorbed in his job and social life to even take notice of what had happened. Despite all of this, Marlene was still happy, for she sat under the mimosa tree every night, and though what was left of her brother had been taken for evidence long ago, she spread his ashes beneath the tree. He kept his promise, and sang to her through her phone. Wherever there was a speaker, Jacob could be heard singing,

“My mother, she slew me,

My father, he ate me,

And my sister, Marlene saved me

Marlene saved my soul.”