Swan Song
By Emily Allen, aged 16
His hands were always in motion, something that had failed to change. The one constant that didn’t disappear after he lost everything.
It was painfully ironic: his mother had always told him that the only time he’d stop the permanent barrage of drumming was on his deathbed. She’d cry if he ever let her know how wrong she was.
Everywhere he passed, he thrummed out a steady rhythm: three beats, one hard, one short, and one long. He pounded his melody into the fading graffiti on subway walls, etched with a scrawling memory that he passed every day but could never hope to understand. He tapped his knuckles against the frost-bitten stained glass of the church his mother never left, trying to listen to the words of salvation he had always held with disdain. He slammed his beat into the trees running alongside the street where his sister had once, years ago, held the roads as a canvas, where the chalky colors bled down the road as rain washed them all away.
Three beats, three crashes. The last melody he had ever heard.
One for the semi ramming into his dad’s antiquated Chevy.
One for the car spiraling into the guard rail, tearing through it like the metal had torn through his head.
One for the final crash as his car hit the water, the momentum launching his battered body straight through his window. The cold, a deepness that consumed him, ravaging through his injuries in seconds as he sank further and further down.
He couldn’t remember this. He couldn’t remember anything, as he drifted through the grey space he once called home, the place he spent his life running from. Nothing but those three final beats, echoing a somber anthem that he drummed through his past life.
He was like the rest of the dead, suspended in time, floating through the remnants of everything they used to know. But his hands remembered – his hands couldn’t forget.
So they pounded their music into the walls of emptiness that encompassed him, suffocating the boy in an eternal song of brutal humanity.