Unique Talents

By Kim Farleigh

Dave heard: “Look at this–books, music–are you going to do anything with your life? Or what?”

His father left the room, slamming the door. Dave reached for his guitar.    

Blue ocean and snow-white sand faced Dave’s window. He hoped his music achieved the purity of those hues.  

Listening to his latest recorded song induced a gratification he hoped to give others.

A bone-white seagull fluttered across cobalt. The hues were limits, that white unable to be whiter; that blue unable to be bluer. Dave pursued such limits. 

Imagining himself playing in a concert, he thought: Stop daydreaming. Only think about the next note. 

He imagined sound sparkling like sea blue. Sometimes he sang at parties, strangers saying: “Hey–you’ve got a nice voice.”

He played his recordings to a friend who said: “It’s got a hypnotic splendour.”

The friend’s green eyes and white hair reminded Dave of marine sea against white shore. Imagining the chord sequences necessary to evoke marine-green’s clarity against luminous white, Dave visualised gold protons raining and rebounding, thinking how to transfer that onto the keyboard so the listener perceived showers of light. Only Dave’s friend knew where Dave went in those moments of apparent mental shutdown, Dave’s vacuous façade hiding raging creativity.             

Returning to NOW, Dave said: “Thanks.” 

The friend’s cheeks were reddish. Red, green, and white, on the friend's face, projecting sincerity, stimulated a return to Dave’s hidden world. 

The friend’s girlfriend, hearing the music, said: “What’s this?” 

“It’s Dave,” the friend said.

“Huh!” she replied. “No way!”

Regina’s green eyes magnified arrogantly when observing Dave, Dave “an unemployed bum.” 

Green, Dave noted, spews arrogance. 

His friend took the recordings to someone who knew a famous disk jockey. The disk jockey listened and asked: “Who is this guy?” 

“An unemployed bum,” Dave’s friend joked.

“They usually are,” the disk jockey said. “I’d like to see him play.”

So he did. 

“I’m going to push this,” he told Dave. 

The disk jockey’s chin-reaching sideburns bothered Dave on first sighting.  

“They’re so dark brown,” he said, “on a face so white, that the contrast emphasises how consciously musical they are–like furry clichés. But he’s a good guy. He loves music so much he shows it in every way.”

The DJ played Dave’s music on the radio. The radio station got so many enquiries that record companies battled for what they had ignored–Dave’s signature. 

Regina started smiling when seeing Dave. She told everyone that she and Dave “couldn’t have been closer.”

“She once told me,” Dave told the disk jockey, “with those green eyes of hers beaming disdainfully, how disappointed my father must have been with me.”

The day Dave’s first CD got released he was in a restaurant with his family; his father showed the CD to a waiter, saying: “He’s my son.”

“Oh, please,” Dave said.  

Dave’s father told a journalist: “My son’s got a unique talent.” Regina said: “It was obvious he was different.”  

Dave’s next song’s chorus was: “Eradicate self-analysis. Don’t know thyself. Make memory gleam snow-white. Obliterate self-awareness.”

Because everyone assumed that that only applied to others, it became Dave’s biggest hit.

Kim has worked for NGO's in Greece, Kosovo, Iraq, Palestine and Macedonia. He likes to take risks to get the experience required for writing. He likes painting, art, bull-fighting, photography and architecture, which might explain why this Australian lives in Madrid. Although he wouldn’t say no to living in a Swiss ski resort or a French chateau. 217 of his stories have been accepted by over 100 different magazines.