The Singing Stones, by Chelsea Chong

Many years ago, in a small white doctor’s office, sat a young woman everyone called Birch. She had received a letter inviting her to attend the medical centre to investigate her recent chest pain. 

When the doctor placed his stethoscope on the young woman’s chest, he furrowed his bushy brows. ‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor said. ‘I can’t find a pulse.’ He tried again, as he’d never encountered a case like this, but sure enough Birch’s chest was silent. 

‘You can’t find my pulse?’ Birch stared in disbelief at the doctor’s plain, bespectacled face. 

‘That’s right. It seems you have no heartbeat, but not to worry,’ the doctor proclaimed. ‘I’m sending you upstairs to see Dr. Griffith, our cardiologist.’

‘The results of the angiogram are fascinating.’ Dr Griffith looked up at the hazy grey image affixed to a light box. ‘There’s a fist-sized rock where it should be.’

‘My heart?’ Birch tried not to panic but failed. If she’d had a heart, it would have been racing. 

‘Yes. That’s not there. But there is a rock, or at least something that looks very much like a rock. The biopsy we took confirmed the presence of limestone.’ 

Birch put a hand on her freckled chest and ran her fingers over a sticky patch where the electrodes had been. She didn’t like the idea of a rock. Would it slow her down? Were there other rocks in place of her liver, her lungs, her spleen?  

Dr Griffith picked up a pen and pad from the table. ‘Tell me, have you been sleeping in a garden?’

‘No. In my bed, every night.’

‘And what do you eat, generally? What would a normal breakfast consist of?’ 

‘Oats. Soy milk. Sometimes toast, I guess.’

‘Is there any chance that you, or maybe someone else, has been adding a little cement?’

‘No, no. Of course, not. Disgusting.’

Dr. Griffith raised her eyebrows. ‘I’ve seen it before.’ She consulted her pad once more, searching for answers on the blank piece of paper. ‘Okay. The only other thing I can think of… Have you recently climbed to the peak of a volcano? Inhaling vapours can -’

‘No. I’ve never climbed a volcano in my life.’

‘Well, it’s just one of those things then. We’ll monitor you and maybe run a few more tests, but my advice for now is to rest, eat well and try to avoid stress. Okay? Okay. You take care now.’ She ushered Birch out the door. 

The kettle was boiling. It whistled a high pitch screech as Birch stood in her kitchen with an empty mug in hand and stared out the window. She rubbed her chest, feeling as though a Rubik’s cube was tucked under her sternum, phantom corners sharp against her lungs.

She wondered if she should call her parents and let them know, but decided against it. There was no need to worry them after everything they’d been through. Dr. Griffiths had seemed unperturbed, and so Birch decided she would simply carry on and ignore the dull ache. 

It was after the kettle clicked off, when Birch was pouring boiling water over a peppermint tea bag, that she heard the voices singing; a quiet chorus, almost too soft to hear. The sound drifted in through the kitchen window and tugged at the rock in her chest. 

Disquieted, she turned away and tried to focus on pouring her tea, but the feeling would not relent. The song grew a little louder, and the pull a little stronger until it became too uncomfortable for Birch to dismiss. She gave in, put the kettle down and moved towards the sound. When she did, the melody caught her like a warm current, pressing her gently on. It drew Birch out through the door and into her back garden, where the lawn was overgrown and strewn with bits of junk from failed DIY projects. 

The song seemed to emanate from a far corner of the garden; the point at which the ground sloped down to meet a small creek. Her father had constructed a rock wall along the water’s edge, and as Birch approached the wall, the singing grew louder. Kneeling by it, she saw the stony grey surface was now laced with purple-red veins. 

How odd, she thought. It had been an odd day, and this annoyed Birch. She’d rather not have her life interrupted. She’d taken the day off work for the doctor’s appointment, and felt she deserved a chance to rest her weary body and read a novel, but instead she found herself kneeling before a pulsing rock wall, tracing the spidery pattern of veins.

The wall sang on and on, and though she wanted to, Birch could not pull herself away. The melody that had caught her so gently now had her locked in place. She knew the tune. She was so sure she knew it, but could not pinpoint where she’d heard it before. Minutes stretched into hours and just as Birch was about to rise and try once more to drag her tired body away from the wall, it came to her. 

Just like her sister before her and her brother after, Birch was born without breath. The doctors, with their clinical pessimism, pronounced her dead upon birth, but Birch’s parents ran with her tiny lifeless body to the Somnai, knelt at their feet, and begged them for her life. (They must have heard of other parents who’d be granted a reprieve, for how else would they have known to ask?)

Birch’s parents were lucky, or some might say ‘blessed’, for the mass of shining figures reached out their arms to scoop tiny dead Birch from her mother. They ran glowing hands tenderly over the baby’s cold limbs, placed her on the ground, opened her blue lips, and sang into her. Their breath combined and flowed through Birch’s body, causing her little chest to rise. She stirred and wailed. 

‘This is her song,’ the Somnai all said at once. ‘Her life.’ They placed Birch, naked and wriggling, back into her mother’s arms.

‘Sing this to her every day to keep our breath circulating. Do this until she is old enough to sing it for herself.’ 

Kneeling in front of the rock wall, listening to her song, a sudden and violent rage filled Birch. The rock grew in her chest. It pushed up harder against her lungs and stole her breath, but she would not relent. She would not sing the song she’d been given at birth because the Somnai were liars and cheats. They spoke of life but dealt in death, and Birch wanted nothing more than to forget they existed. 

Thirty years after they had presented their firstborn to the Somnai, Birch’s parents returned, her sister’s frail, broken body in their arms.

‘Please, do it again.’ They knelt before the figures, begging, petitioning, bargaining for her life. 

When Birch’s sister first became sick, and the doctors said there was no return, the family came to be with her.   

‘Are you singing your song? Do you need us to sing it for you?’ Birch asked, full of hope. 

Standing in a circle around her bed, the family whispered the song, shouted it, sang it silently in their hearts, trying to reach the ears of the Somnai, trying to sing strength back into her withering bones. 

‘We’ve sung over her. We’ve poured ourselves empty,’ her parents declared as they held her sister’s body out to the shining figures.  

‘You have loved her well,’ they said as they took the young woman, kissed her forehead, and stroked her skin. Peace fell across her sister’s face, pain ebbing away at the Somnai’s tender touch. It was then the mass of figures began to sing, and as they did, her sister’s body disappeared and flowed into them, piece by piece, until she was gone. 

‘What did you do with her?’ Birch’s parents cried. 

‘She is with us now. She is restored.’

‘But we asked you to save her.’ The parents slammed their hands against the floor. Birch and her brother knelt behind their parents and wailed.             

‘We saved her,’ the Somnai said. 

‘We asked you to give her back.’ 

The Somnai reached out and took hold of Birch’s parents, who had fallen face down. The figures wept over them, and their tears covered her parents like a warm, salty blanket. 

Birch’s brother stood and ran towards the Somnai. Birch turned her back on them and ran away.  

It was not long after her doctor’s appointment that a stiffness crept into Birch’s limbs. At first, she could shake it off each morning with a hot shower and some stretching, but as the months rolled by and turned into years, her range of movement dwindled. She began to walk with a limp; hips freezing a little more each day. The skin on her chest developed a sickly grey tinge, and she took to wearing scarves, even on sunny days, to hide it. 

When Birch met her brother down by the creek, he said he had a message from the Somnai and it was simple. ‘Sing.’ 

‘I can’t.’  

‘You know they’re good.’ 

‘I don’t know that,’ Birch said. ‘What if they’re trying to trick us again?’

‘It wasn’t a trick,’ her brother insisted. ‘I don’t know why they took her, but it wasn’t a trick.’

‘She should be here.’

‘Did you see her face when she was in their arms?’ he asked. 

Slowly, painfully, Birch stood up, brushed the dirt from her pants, and hobbled away. 

And so it continued until the morning Birch found she couldn’t walk. She woke, as she had become accustomed, to the sound of the rock wall singing her song, accompanied by the soft rustle of wind through the gum trees that overhung her house. Gingerly, she removed the bedcovers, but when her feet met the floorboards, her body crumpled, and her head hit the bed base with a sharp crack.

Birch touched the throbbing spot at the back of her skull and felt a deep gash, but no blood. The song soared into the house from the back garden, louder than she had ever heard before. The words gripped the stone in Birch’s chest and ripped at it, dragging her out. She shuffled along, using elbows and hands to propel her inch by inch towards the melody. 

She rolled out onto the wild, dewy grass. Birds and possums peppered the branches of trees, staring at her as she caterpillared down the slope towards the creek. 

Relentless, the song pressed on, pulling her forward until she was within arm’s reach of the pulsing rock face, and still, she would not sing. Instead, Birch lay her face in the dirt and screamed. She bit the grainy earth, coughing and spluttering, as she purged rage from her frozen body.

Sing.  

She heard her brother’s voice again and knew what she must do. Stretching out her aching, leaden arm, Birch touched the rock wall and sang. Blood gushed in through her fingertips and her veins roared to life. An electric energy screamed through her, limb by limb, and she kept on singing. The locked joints and cement muscles melted into flesh and bone. The birds joined in until, at the peak of the melody, the shaking began. It started in Birch’s feet and moved up her legs and abdomen until it reached her chest. 

A colossal thump jolted her body into the air. She crashed back down and lay for a moment, breath coming hard and fast. 

When Birch placed her trembling hand on the warm skin of her chest, she felt the familiar thud of a heartbeat.  

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Chelsea Chong lives on the Sunshine Coast, with her husband and two young daughters. She works as a freelance grant writer and holds a master’s in International Development, and her short stories have appeared in Australia’s MindFOOD magazine, The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Vol.13 and Five on the Fifth. 

© 2024, Chelsea Chong