The tune had started, as far as anyone could trace it, in a village that lost most of its people in a single terrible season, back when death moved through households like weather and nobody had the luxury of grieving one loss before the next arrived. The survivors needed something to do with their hands and their fear, and what they landed on was a song, sung low around the fires at night, half plea and half performance, the kind of thing that could pass for a joke if anyone asked what it meant.
Nah nah, black death,
Give us one more night to breathe,
Nah nah, black death,
We're not quite ready yet to leave.
It wasn’t a hymn, exactly. It didn’t ask for mercy in any grand sense, didn’t promise faith or virtue in exchange. It just asked for time, a little more of it, phrased casually enough that singing it didn’t feel like admitting how frightened everyone actually was.
The song outlived the outbreak that produced it, passed down the way songs do, sung at bedsides during ordinary illnesses long after the original terror had faded into distant history, sung half-jokingly by people who no longer remembered why the words were phrased quite so strangely. Families would sing it to a grandparent running a bad fever, to a child recovering slowly from something the doctor called nothing serious, always with the same rhythm, the same small, stubborn refusal dressed up as a lullaby.
Nobody could say whether it had ever worked, whether the extra nights it had once been sung for had actually been granted or would have happened regardless, and by now that question mattered less than the singing itself, a habit worn smooth by centuries of use, still murmured at bedsides in language soft enough to sound like comfort rather than the small, old fear it had first been built from.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
Leave a Reply