This is a short story that I wrote several months ago. The only constraint I was under was a maximum word count. Though such limits are largely arbitrary, I have found that limitations force new directions of thought. The idea for this concept began as something much more innocent. I was a musician in high school even though I wasn't very good at it. A music teacher once told me that I could be good if I devoted myself, practicing every single day. I didn't want to do that. I knew I wasn't particularly talented, and music wouldn't be fun anymore if I had to work at it. My life took a different path. Still, sometimes I hear a scrap of melody that forcefully takes me back to memories of playing. And for a moment, I feel tremendous loss. I find myself moved by beauty, and sometimes wish that the beauty had been enough to keep me devoted. I am happy with the path I have chosen, and the feeling of something lost never stays more than a moment, but in writing this story I imagined that fleeting emotion consuming someone, and took it to what I felt was a logical, if regrettable, conclusion.

Enough

Zach pushed open the door a little too forcefully. He winced, stepping aside for a glaring nurse to leave the room. His momentum broken as he shuffled in. Sean was looking out the window from his bed, leaning forward the little he could to see around the steadily beeping monitor. He turned to glance at his entering brother for a moment but quickly returned his gaze to the setting sun.

“You’re here.”

“Of course I’m here,” Zach said with clipped words. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Sean raised one shoulder in a small shrug, the other immobile in a sling. Zach took in the sling, and the casts and the bandages. Everything he felt since getting the call, that blind panic that drove him to drop everything, even telling his boss to shove it up his ass when he tried to stop him, to tear down the streets nearly getting in his own wreck, to push past nurses and throw open doors, everything in him was still there. He thought it should have left when he saw his brother alive, but it took up residence in his chest and liked the neighborhood.

“Doctor says my arm broke in a bad way. He had to reset it twice, and there might have been nerve damage. So, I might come out of this a double cripple.” Sean punctuated his blithe remark by waving the hand not in a sling, the old scars still visible on the once beautiful hand.

“What happened?” Zach said, still standing near the door. Sean took his time.

“You heard it already. I was in a crash. Fell asleep at the wheel.” He added as an afterthought.

“You fell asleep at the wheel.”

Sean nodded slightly.

“Bullshit.”

Sean looked up at that. Zach hadn’t known he was going to say that until it happened. But now that it was floating on the stale air between him and his brother, he realized that’s how he felt.

“You fell asleep at the wheel in the middle of the day at the busiest intersection at town?”

“They tested my blood when I came in. They’ll tell you I hadn’t been drinking.” Sean answered, his voice flat.

“I know you weren’t drunk!” Zach took a breath to calm himself before his voice grew too loud.

“That’s not what I meant. Look.” Zach paused, swallowing through a dry throat.

“It’s been nearly a year since mom passed. You’re struggling to pay for college. Maybe you thought…” Zach trailed off, not wanting to make his worries real. Sean was less concerned.

“Maybe I thought what’s the point of living if I have bills and mom can’t hold my hand? Is that what you think?” Sean’s face was flushed, and the monitor at his side shifted tone. But Zach had seen his twin bluster before.

“Tell me I’m wrong.” Zach grabbed a chair and dragged it right up to his brother’s side, his knees pressing against the bed.

“Tell me you were coming off an all-nighter and couldn’t stay awake. Tell me you were coming off a bender and were drunk or stoned out of your head. Tell me you didn’t…”

Sean looked away. Zach closed his eyes and put his head down to his brother’s bedside. The panic in his chest had now rented a room to despair.

“How did you know?” The whisper came.

“Because,” Zach answered with his head still down. “I saw when you hurt your hand.”

He looked up and tried to take Sean’s twisted hand, but he pulled back. Sean’s story that time had been an accident too. It had broken their mother’s heart. Sean wasn’t ready to talk, so Zach waited. Long after the sunlight had faded Sean spoke softly to the darkened room.

“That was my answer. Everything wrong started with the damn music. The violin mom had me practice for hours every single day. Practice until my hands bled. The stress, the weight of, of everything.” Zach listened, silently swallowing the old resentments of the son who had nothing to offer the insistent mother and the jealousy of the teenager never offered a scholarship.

“I thought if I didn’t have the music to worry about, I could be normal. I could be happy. But I wasn’t and today, when Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto came on… I never turn to classical, but it just came up, and I just, I couldn’t.”

“You wanted to die?”

“I…don’t know. I heard it. The song I used to play. I remember feeling like I was being crushed, but that song,” Sean wiped at his eyes with his scarred hand, “It really is beautiful.”

“You miss the music that much?” Zach asked softly. “You miss being able to play?”

“Yes. But I don’t regret what I did. I just wish the music was enough for me.”

~~~~~

Bad Poem of the Week

Grief Unspoken

Define love. Can it be measured in tears

Shed in passing of those we should have grieved?

Why do tears elude me, what in me fears?

Deprived of proof, isolated, bereaved.

Why is volume of tears the mark of loss?

What of pints consumed in toast to those past?

Or prayers said in silence before the cross?

Must I seem unmoved, an actor miscast?

Such dread, such worry of what they will see,

The crumbling façade, the unmaking woe,

Bereft of rule, the restraint that is me;

The flood of tears may rise, my walls laid low.

Though to the seen world my eyes remain dry,

Face stone, tongue lead, in my silence I cry.

-by Matthew J Rees

-For my grandfather