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New Short Fiction Award

Three times a year, we award a writer who submits, in our opinion, the best original, previously unpublished work.

Jane McCarthy of Serta, Portugal is the winner of the 71st Jerry Jazz Musician New Short Fiction Award, announced and published for the first time on April 13, 2026.

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Photo by Johannes Schröter, via Pexels 

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Where the Music Wasn’t Allowed

by Jane McCarthy

 

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…..My mother learned English from the refrigerator.

…..This isn’t metaphor, or not entirely. The appliance arrived the same year we did, delivered on a truck whose driver whistled as if history were optional. Off-white, slightly dented, buzzing with the calm authority of something designed to outlive its owners. It squatted in the kitchen like a distant relative who planned to stay forever and had already decided where to put his shoes.

…..Every morning before work, my mother stood in front of it in her robe, hair still wet, sounding out the words printed on the magnets I brought home from school.

…..Milk.
…..Eggs.
…..Don’t forget.

…..She preferred imperatives. They made sense. They told you where to stand.

…..I was nine years old and already fluent in disappearing.

…..Our apartment complex in Southern California appeared engineered to offend memory. Beige walls. Identical balconies. A parking lot where nothing historical had ever occurred and where nothing, we were assured, ever would. It was a place built on the belief that the past was a zoning violation.

…..At night, the refrigerator clicked and sighed, rehearsing its language of maintenance. My mother repeated after it, as if hoping the machine might one day repeat after her.

…..“Cold,” she said one morning, pressing her palm against the door.

…..“Yes,” I said. “That’s cold.”

…..She nodded, satisfied, as though temperature itself had been successfully negotiated.

…..My father didn’t learn English from appliances. He learned it from silence.

…..Before the war, he’d been a poet in a language whose vowels didn’t exist here. After the war, he repaired small engines in a garage that smelled of oil, metal, and apology. He came home with hands blackened and a voice quieter than before, as though language itself had learned to duck. He listened more than he spoke. When he did speak, he chose words the way one chooses stones to cross a river, carefully, aware of the current.

…..At dinner, my mother practiced English aloud. My father practiced restraint.

…..Music entered our lives accidentally.

…..The man upstairs played the piano every evening at seven. Always at seven. He was old, ancient by my standards, and walked with a gait that suggested negotiation rather than confidence. His voice, when we heard it in the stairwell, sounded like gravel rinsed in honey. But it was the piano that announced him: a melody looping itself again and again, circling like a bird unsure where to land.

…..I didn’t know the composer’s name. I didn’t know repetition could be a form of meditation.

…..My mother paused mid-chop. My father froze with his fork suspended like a thought he’d not yet decided to finish. The refrigerator seemed to quiet itself, resentful.

…..“What is that?” my mother asked.

…..“Music,” I said, though I had no authority.

…..She tilted her head. “It sounds like someone trying to remember something.”

…..She was better at English than I realized.

…..The melody became a clock. When it played, we were briefly synchronized with something beyond survival. It didn’t explain us, but it held us.

…..At school, I learned quickly that this country valued confidence over accuracy. Teachers encouraged participation, which I interpreted as noise with permission. I spoke rarely. When I did, my words arrived with an accent my classmates couldn’t locate on a map. This confused them. They preferred their foreigners either exotic or silent.

…..Music class was different. There, precision mattered more than fluency. No one asked where a note came from, only whether it arrived on time.

…..I chose the tenor saxophone because it looked like a tick made of brass. Because it carried its own personality. Because it could sound like laughter or warning depending on how you breathed into it.

…..When I practiced at home, my mother sat nearby polishing my shoes with ceremonial care.

…..“Is it sad?” she asked.

…..“Yes,” I said.

…..She nodded. “Good. Sad things are honest.”

…..The man upstairs died in winter.

…..There was no announcement. No ambulance. No ceremony. The piano simply stopped.

…..The silence was so thick it rearranged the furniture of our evenings. My mother turned on the television for company. English poured out, confident, declarative, unashamed of itself. She mouthed the words slightly behind the sound, like someone chasing a train already leaving the station.

…..My father stared at the dark ceiling.

…..After two weeks, I carried my saxophone upstairs.

…..The door to the old man’s apartment was unlocked. Inside, the air smelled of dust, oranges, and coffee. The piano sat there, closed, dignified, offended by neglect. I didn’t open it. Instead, I played the melody he’d played every night, standing where his shadow might have been.

…..Not well. Not correctly. But with the audacity of someone inheriting something without permission.

…..When I finished, I realized I was crying, for the fact that music had survived us both.

…..Time, as it tends to, continued without consulting us.

…..My mother’s English improved. She learned to argue with telemarketers and negotiate utility bills. My father’s silence became economical, almost elegant. They worked. They paid rent. They learned which dreams were considered impolite.

…..I learned harmony. Counterpoint. The long argument between discipline and freedom. I learned how Western music pretends to resolve itself.

…..In college, I discovered jazz, instead of as rebellion, as record-keeping.

…..Jazz didn’t promise resolution. It documented contradiction.

…..I learned about clubs that no longer existed except in liner notes and eviction records. Rooms where musicians played for drinks, or for union cards, or for the privilege of being exploited slightly less than the night before. I learned how zoning laws, liquor licenses, and racial covenants shaped the sound as much as chord changes ever did.

…..I learned that swing had once been described as a threat. That improvisation had been framed as disorder. That musicians were praised for freedom only after it could be safely marketed.

…..Jazz reminded me of my parents’ English: imperfect, rhythmic, resistant to simplification.

…..After graduation, I worked days translating legal documents for immigrants. Birth certificates. Court notices. Letters explaining, carefully, why someone would not be staying.

…..At night, I played tenor sax in clubs where the air smelled of beer, cigarettes, and anticipation.

…..They called these places jazz clubs, though the music often wandered elsewhere. Poetry basements. Improvised sets. Rooms that advertised experimentation the way others advertised safety.

…..One night, after a set that felt both exhausting and insufficient, an old man approached me.

…..“You play like someone who listens,” he said.

…..“I play like someone who learned late,” I replied.

…..He smiled. “The best ones always do.”

…..His name was Leo. He’d played tenor before me, and before that, in rooms that no longer had addresses. He spoke about tours that paid in sandwiches, about contracts that promised immortality and delivered overdue checks.

…..“Jazz,” he said, “is what happens when people refuse to disappear quietly.”

…..My parents came to hear me play once.

…..They sat in the back, close together, holding hands like new arrivals again. My mother smiled too much. My father stared at the floor, listening harder than anyone else in the room.

…..Afterward, my mother hugged me.

…..“You sound like home,” she said.

…..My father nodded. “But not a place that stays.”

…..That was the closest he came to blessing.

…..The refrigerator died loudly.

…..Sparks. Complaints. A final rattle.

…..My mother cried, not for the machine, but for the years it had witnessed without comment. We replaced it with something stainless steel and smug.

…..The magnets didn’t stick.

…..Now, years later, my parents have returned to a country that no longer recognizes them. I remain, playing music in rooms that welcome me and rooms that don’t.

…..When people ask me where I’m from, I tell them the truth.

…..From a kitchen that buzzed through the night.

…..From a piano heard through the ceiling.

…..From a sax that learned to speak before it learned to belong.

…..From music that remembers what official records erase.

…..Some nights, when the room is right, when the audience stops mistaking volume for meaning, I play a note that feels older than me.

…..It hangs there for a moment, unsupported, unprofitable, unrepeatable.

…..Then it’s gone.

…..But the room has changed.

…..That’s how you know it mattered.

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Jane McCarthy is a ghostwriter and is also writing her debut novel. Her stories and poems have appeared in a number of print and online journals. Readers can view her most recent works by clicking here.

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“The Sound of Becoming,” J.C. Michaels’ winning story in the 70th Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest

Click here to read more short fiction published on Jerry Jazz Musician

Click here to read The Sunday Poem

Click here for information about how to submit your poetry or short fiction

Click here for details about the upcoming 72nd  Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest

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Jerry Jazz Musician…human produced since 1999

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