‘Well then.’ Ash mumbled to the sight of her freely falling double bass and the confluence of varied emotion that tumbled away alongside it.
Anger, a primary colour in the blind-patchwork quilt of her feelings, bubbled and broiled in forefront. Every hour of today, wasted. Every minute that she had spent lugging that impossible instrument up sets of stairs and into cars that were always too small. Every second of wretching guilt that she felt as when a doorframe proved too low and an aggrieved rumble sounded from within the Bass’s fabric case.
Sadness too, sat by the hillside in mealy silence: shaded edges of every heartbeat outlined with a vorpal-like stitching. She had owned that bass for years. Too many joyful moments were recalled as it skipped over a small rise and collided with a tree, the headstock pivoting around the trunk and sending the whole battered body spinning off in a terrifying new direction. She had spent so much of her life learning, playing, dreaming alongside that instrument and now here it was rolling down a hill in a cacophony of shudders and rumbles.
Feeling her callouses, Ash remembered the first time she had played the double bass. A teacher who had suggested the violin, a fingerboard that was far too large for her tiny hands. But the sound drew her in. A deep, guttural rumble rang out as she drew the bow poorly across its strings. It sounded magical, as if it were a snoring dragon asleep in its cave, or at least a mimic of her father’s own snores as he rested after Christmas lunch.
‘Remember the violin whenever you have to carry this.’ her teacher had said as they left her to discover the instrument for herself. The door closing and a stubborn lock becoming latched in that very moment.
They were right though. Every gig had been a burden, every practice too far away for something so unwieldly. Fiddle players would smile in their daft smug-eries, a piccolo player once mocking her, patting at their clothes to find their instrument as if they had forgotten in which pocket they had left their keys.
But no instrument, in any band or orchestra, would have the tone of double bass. It was the guts, the rumble beneath everything that underlined and shook the floor of wandering melody. It could be sweet and then brooding with the sweep of a bow. It could be so majestic, or so flurrysome that Ash felt as if she were more dancing than playing a song.
Now, it sounded horrible.
With two arching spins, the bass impacted upon the ground once again and cracked loudly as the bridge was thrown fiercely into the air. The strings, now loose, swayed and trembled in the fading light. The tuning pegs darting off into the bush as if rabbits scared by the sound of gunshot or growl.
Again, the bass struck heavily against the face of the cliff. Again, it tipped upward, a new crack streaking across its stricken body and fresh gashes scraped into the old varnish.
Only now did Ash truly think of the violin. She had played the bass for so many years but now it was small, too far away from the burden of being carried, further away from her hands and mind than it had been since she was a child. She had carried that bass everywhere.
With two more skips, the bass came to rest at the easing of the hill, it’s headstock lost, its frame destroyed.
What now?
Descend the hill and pick up the scattered pieces? Hope that this was a dream or faint of the unreal? This wasn’t her bass. No, she had somehow picked up some random cello as she left to walk home, her bass was fine and well, it was still waiting for her back at the bandroom.
But no.
Its case was here, open by her side. Its bow was still in her hand.
Whatever had snapped in her mind was gone, and now a single line of solemn regret was left in its place. This was a moment of clarity.
Closing her eyes, Ash held the forgotten neck of her bass and touched the bow against its strings. She played quietly at first, something from memory and without direction. Gentle notes that walked down grand halls on tipping toes, the cavernous height of a mountain keep echoing and towering above. The notes became quicker in time, building and growing from somewhere deep and within. Running now, the melody took flight, panic and flurry, racing towards a place of lightness. Urgent movement scampered across the strings as if it were chased. Seeking, searching, the melody tore through the halls, wanting only to find somewhere safe, wanting to escape.
A second melody then followed from the first. Deep and sawing, this melody spoke thunder and drew lightning in its breath, it marched across the heavens with long purposeful strides and with each movement the wind would swirl beneath it: a simple gesture to bring gale, a sweeping flick to silence a kingdom.
Calling, beseeching to the heavens, Ash danced with her broken instrument as sky and ground no longer held matter or meaning. The sounds of the world were silent now as only her song remained. She played voice into the babbling streams that rose and fell across the hills of her home. She shifted and stirred the distant sands of deserts that she would never know. Deep within the earthen ground, she drew faint blades of grass to the surface; birds found her wind within their wings, moss covered stones slept peacefully as she passed by their sides.
And with this, she said goodbye.
She said goodbye to wood, and string, and she said goodbye to a single mistake that made in a moment of frustration. Memory blazed at the edge of her bowstring.
Casting it once more across that gentle night, Ash heard the tuning of an orchestra and sighed in the quietude of happiness.
J. McCray
2023
Sunday Short Stories 