The music box

When Humperdink Tumble first showed his music box to the public at the new world product fair in the sweetly cool spring of 2054, it was met with whoops of derisive mirth and ridiculing glee. The very idea was found ludicrous if not impossible boardering on the artistically offensive.

That was until he turned it on.

“I don’t know…. exactly…. how it works!”

He said, the words tumbling out his mouth with some fight but not enough to find their way into the minds of the stunned audience. The words broke their moorings and fell free from meaning and were lost in a sea of sound.

His eyes lolled down in sympathy of his brain's fine failure to verbalise structure on a breakdown under scrutiny. His thoughts just incidental to events – not the calculated manifestations of a well formed personality.

“But… err… it does work!”

He finally muttered finding some triumph where he felt there was none, the flashing cameras distilling his face into black and white, dark and light as the crowd awoke and started taking photographic pictures, as if you could, of such a thing.

News of the box spread across the world like a flash, lightening up information super highways with digital fire.

Soon Humperdink’s face was seen on screens around the globe being asked endless questions by keen clean shaven anchor-men with big microphones: “How does it work?” “What’s the secret?” “What gave you the idea?” “What effect will it have on everything?” “What does it mean?” “How does it feel, to be you, being asked all these questions?”

Humperdink Tumble lost count of the number times he said “Hmm… I’m not really sure...” looking down at the ground bashfully – “I was.... trying to make... a rabbit hutch.” his eyes swelling up with tears.

He tried to tell the anecdote of its conception as well as he could but it often fell on dead expressions.

It had meant it to be a classical rabbit hutch but with some measurement confusion had ended up something more suited to sleep a small polar bear. In a moment of madness he had filled it with wool and wire and the withered remains of woodlice over fed on wild rice.

Then it started to hum.

Humperdink, having never made a rabbit hutch before thought nothing of it. His suspicions only aroused when his neighbours started to knock on the door to ask what the exquisite noise coming from his back garden was.

The media frenzy following the world fair finally abated to a circus but even that slowly faded and packed up camp to find fresher blood.

Military men came to see if they could turn it into a thing to kill. Money men came to try and make a deal.

But the box just sung sweet songs to their souls, caressing nearly forgotten parts of their hearts back to life, leaving them saying goodbye, with a tear in their eye and a new point of view and generally spent far more time with their loved ones from then on.

The best technicians and engineers came to figure out, with detailed examinations, how it worked but all they found was there was no way it could have, would have or even should have ever been.

Humperdink made another.

It just made loud farting noises, varying in pitch and length to an extra-ordinary degree, which in some ways was even more remarkable.

But after the music box the reviews were dismissive.

Humperdink with little else to do toured his box around the various music festivals of the land, turning it on, to play the genre that was most prevalent – be it punk rock or jazz or simple folk – streaming out beautiful, perfect and unique music to the relative crowd listening. It always managed to pull a reasonable crowd.

Then one day it stopped.

It never made a sound again and no one was the wiser.

Humperdink’s 3rd attempt at making a rabbit hutch turned out like a well… a rabbit hutch.

He adopted a brown haired rabbit called Oscar who just loved it and lived in it very happily.