But I hear what I want to hear, and I can’t find a way to see past all the roils of red.
I throw my closed fist to the concrete, meeting the crimson stains beside me. I should feel a sharp explosion, but the numbness that follows is hardly surprising.
I contemplate doing it again when Harlen sniffs, the space between us turning cooler,freezing me down to my bones.
I take a deep breath and remind myself to slow down when I feel my words lodge like boulders.
“I don’t run from my fucking storm, man.”
And they were somewhat of the truest words I’d ever spoken. Because I chose to sit in a pool ofherdried blood,chasing the storm.
My teeth cut through my bottom lip.
I gnaw my way into the flesh until coppery notes slide over my tongue, leaving a film at the back of my throat.
I’m tapping the same keys I’d been sequencing for the past forty-five minutes.
The last working B-flat on my old sixty-one key keyboard had stopped working and it was fucking with my head.
I press my fingers into my eyes, and hold my breath.
It didn't help that I was tired and hungover, and that the more time I spent drilling this riff, the further I got from finding what was missing.
The constant slow drag of my fingers across notes that didn’t belong felt like an insult, not only to the keys, but to the music I was trying too hard to create.
Harlen had always been better at this than me. He had a way of hearing what I couldn’t, but the seedy fucker wasn’t answering my calls.
I snatch my phone, tapping his number for the sixth time, sucking on the inside of my cheek and clenching my fists. It rings once before hitting his voicemail with a familiar, jarring beep. It hurts like a motherfucker.
“Answer your phone, you fuck. I need you.” My voice is choppy, dry, and turbulent;my hands too, when I kill the call, intending to return to my keys, only to stick my middle finger to them and navigate into my music instead. I hit play on “No One” by Cold, throwing my phone down on top of the vicious black and white teeth.
The music begins to pour out of the speaker at my side, ringing with the clash of notes bouncing off the peeling sea-moss green walls that make up this shoe-box I’venevercalled home.
The room is a tiny, four-point square, with a window that doesn’t open, a ceiling that sits too low and old wood planked flooring that is growing black mold—even though my asshole father was adamant that’s not what it was.
I shove away from my chipped desk and push my hands into the front pocket of my gray hoodie, snatching for my dwindling packet of squashed cigarettes. I shake the second to last one out and slump back in my chair, tilting to the right because the piece of junk is missing a wheel. I smoke it almost to the bone, then I reach for my pocketknife.
Knuckles turning white, I begin carving over the word ‘bleed’that I’d been scratching into my desk for the past week.
My ears zero in on the drums that beat their way through my crackly speakers as I work on vivisecting my desk, smoking the last of my cigarette, hoping something might come from it, that my frustration will push me into some form of greatness.
It doesn’t, though. The way I knew it wouldn’t. Because my father’s words are constant, phantom barks through the back of my head:You are nothing, a nobody, boy. A talentless waste of air space.
I bite my tongue and clench my fists. It’s not that I cared what he thought of me. The murky-grey lens in which he viewed life meant nothing to me. But moments like this, ones where I felt like I was constantly throwing myself against walls andgetting nowhere, had a way of making me wonder if perhaps his words did carry some form of the truth. And yet, I clung to the music, because it was the only outlet that wouldn’t kill me, even though it carried limitless stab wounds, twisted blades, and an agonizing bleed out.
My eyes flick between my trashed keys and the word‘bleed’when my bedroom door swings open, cracking against the opposite wall. And I don’t look up, I already know it’s my sister, Jade, because the wafting cloud of jasmine, ocean, and ripe apples that precedes her infiltrates the entrance of my nose. Pushing the cigarette between my lips, I take a hard pull, watching her thin, pale, and freckled arms curl around my shoulders, cocooning me in a warm hug.
I drop the hand holding my cigarette to her wrist, squeezing it, my muscles softening beneath her forearms.
The tender moment only lasts the length of a short second before she’s stepping back, shoving my head, and snatching at the packet of cigarettes.
I press a knuckle into my eye, twist it, spinning to face her.
Jade pulls herself onto the windowsill, placing the last stick into her mouth and lighting it up.
“Think quick,” she rasps, and the lighter she chucks toward me spins top to tail through the air.
I open my hand, catch it in my fist, saying nothing.
