Unprompted: Beat

(A look into the past of one of my recurring characters...)

The thrum was her heartbeat; her heart was too quiet, but this noise would shake the walls and break the boards if she let it. There was an angry buzz and a swallowed roar under her fingertips. Those tips were nearly bleeding, but she wasn’t finished yet. The blisters might break open, but it was early. Her fingers would get tougher. Her heartbeat was able to speak and scream, but she was learning how to make it sing. For now, she ached. Tomorrow, she would shiver and buzz through the air and ears.

This vibrating and thumping room was her shrine and her secret. It was where her heart was growing, taking shape, a mandala of old prayers and boot scrapes written across the floor when she would dance around posters of the Clash, pictures and printouts of Flyleaf. They were hers and hers alone – they might belong to others, but not the way that they belonged to her. She’d taken them home and taken them here, and everywhere she’d gone, they'd hid inside of her, and now she was just barely learning how to sing back to them with her nearly bloody fingers and her half-balanced beats.

The bass was heavy in her hands, strapping her down, big on her smallness. She didn’t care, she could make a sound as big as a lion’s roar, as deep as the tromping of an elephant. Jericho fell to the sound of a horn, and that horn resonated with a heart the same as hers, and so she plucked and struck and thumped her big, black boots on the wooden floor until the neighbors stabbed up and cracked down with brooms and bursts of vocal violence. She pretended not to hear them – she wasn’t brave enough to push back, not yet, but pretending was her specialty. Her fingers ached, but she could pretend that she was changing, that she could feel the toughness flowing in the thrum, and so she was.

Her heart was an angry, beating, biting bass against her tiny fingers and it was shaking her body free of the little closet. Soon enough, she’d buzz right out of everything and that door wouldn’t hold her any more. She’d take her Clash and Flyleaf out into the empty air and she’d shiver and shudder the sky like thunder falls. This was her heart’s prayer and she’d sacrifice the blood in her fingers again and again until the thunder struck and lightning sparked her heart alive.

When she finished cleaning, shutting, and locking everything away, her fingertips were angry red and her body stung and swam with sweat. She pushed through the door with her aching back and she was back inside the room of pink and green and yellow softness. The music here was quiet, strings and songs of peace and poise. Her big, black boots were off her feet and pastel purple socks made hardly a sound at all upon the carpets, thick and full. The room absorbed her, and she was stuck, her heartbeat screeching feedback behind the walk-in closet door.

Her fingers were still aching. The buzz was in the pulsing of her blood against her skin, the hollow pain inside her bones. She sang softly in the shower, but the beating of the steam against her skin couldn’t wash away all of the ache. Her heart was still racing, still alive in echoes. The spikes and eye shadow washed away, but the stinging stayed. Her secret shape was beaten and bruised into her body. The beat was still alive.

Her fingers ached and she was still alive. Her heart was still beating. She could not be silenced, even if she never made a sound outside her shrine. She was alive.
She was alive.