One Last Note

The sight of it was comical. One you had to actually see to appreciate. With the sun reflecting off the curled and twisted brass, it just about resembled a small sun snaking through the water. It took the instrument a few tries to slide up the sand, but eventually it made it ashore where it rested close enough to touch his big toe all he had to do was reach out for it.

It was a peculiar find. Unexpected, if not incredibly unlikely. Of all things, the ocean had rejected a sousaphone.

The morning had been quiet and hardly anyone else was there to marvel at the oddity with him. There was a couple with their daughter hunting for seashells and an older gentleman not too far from them who was pacing up and down the shoreline, but that was it. Each space was theirs and no one seemed to want to notice the other. The sousaphone might as well have been one of them. Present and unnoticed.

His foot nudged the tip of its spine. “How’d you get here?”

Spoken aloud, they were the first words he said in days. They were spoken softly, like a whisper. He pulled the instrument to rest in his lap, running his hands over its shape. It looked new, smooth and polished but was hot from the sun. It smelled of salt. He pressed his lips to the mouthpiece. It tasted like salt.  

He didn’t feel his fingers as they played from memory, and fantasy of days long gone. They remembered every evening when after dinner he’d be called downstairs to learn the instruments his father loved more than anything else, even more than him. Music always came first. The meaning and feeling they invoked stood front and center in those moments under the delicacy of a lesson, with the poems they could create. A note could thread through time and touch the past and bring it all forward. He felt it now creeping into the present and itching to go further.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, II Allegretto. He hadn’t played it in years. The memory reached all the way back to when and where he first played it. His fingers were fluent in the memory as if no time had passed. Suddenly, the ocean was gone. He didn’t smell the sand or salt. No heat roasting his bare limbs. The cool air carried the soft fragrance of washed linen and fig candles. Overpowering them, like a ghost in his memory, was the mix of sandalwood with spiced citrus. For him it was as warm and safe, as comforting as any smell could possibly be. Never had he known a day when his father didn’t smell of that aftershave. He could smell it now.

There’s a high that comes with music, and it was making his soul sing. He felt himself stand as his legs began to twist in a dance, felt his waist sway and his chest follow the ups and downs of the vibrations that was connecting man to instrument. It was his father’s song and when the end came, he played it again. This time merging in his own melody until the two were netted in a single note. One last note.

He opened his eyes, but he wasn’t alone anymore. The others from the beach had come to surround like a street performer. There were more than there’d been earlier. There were at least ten people watching him. Just the way everyone had been watching him in the sterile, white hospital room when he started to cry, same tune humming from his lips. The seawater on the mouthpiece now tasted suspiciously like tears.

Rachel Roth

Dead Flies

The Undead Redhead