4308.263 · September 19, 1988 AD
The Song That Remembers
A stifling music room. A yellowed photocopied page. An old bush ballad nobody sings anymore—until today. Mrs Elwood calls it a rarity, something a schoolteacher wrote in Marree over a century ago. But when Violet opens her mouth to sing, the words don't feel learned. They feel remembered. A girl who wandered too far. Footprints lost where spirits lie. The desert keeps what it beguiled. And Violet's voice no longer sounds like her own.
"Songs are just stories too stubborn to die."
Choir practice should be simple. Familiar harmonies, predictable rhythms, the one place Violet's restless mind usually quiets. But Mrs Elwood has chosen something different today—The Ballad of Marree, penned by a schoolteacher named Esther Greenough in the late 1800s. A rarity, she calls it. A curiosity.
The melody is minor-keyed and mournful, built from intervals that ache like old wounds. The lyrics speak of a girl who walked alone beneath a burning sky, whose name the wind erased, whose footprints vanished where spirits dwell. The desert keeps what it beguiled—and will not grant the dead their rest.
Around Violet, her classmates sing without feeling the weight. Mandy taps her foot. Jasmine's soprano lifts sweetly beside her. But Violet's voice has gone strange in her own throat—foreign, distant, as though someone else is singing through her.
She isn't learning these words. She's recognising them.
When the bell rings, she stays behind. Folds the lyrics carefully. Slips them into her bag beside Sally Harlow's photograph and Emily Sullivan's ghost.
The pattern is no longer coincidence. It's inheritance.
