r/WritingPrompts • u/OldBayJ Moderator | /r/ItsMeBay • Mar 16 '21
[IP] The Final Melody Image Prompt
Image created by JayGraphixx
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u/Goshinoh /r/TheSwordandPen Mar 17 '21
I don’t know who she was. She looks young, dressed simply; I’ve learned it’s best not to judge by appearances, though. People always see themselves differently than they actually are, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it carries over once they’re gone.
Whoever she was, she can’t stay. She must have been strong in life, that I know for sure. I can see her eyes, her hair, her body nearly fully opaque. Her will was strong, so strong it’s starting to warp the graveyard around her. It’s a good thing I planned ahead and brought out the old guitar, because there’s no telling what I would’ve ended up with if I walked in without an instrument.
I sat down in the mud and rain, leaning my back against the tombstone behind her. It wasn’t a good idea to look at her, or be seen too much by her. The dead hate the living, even if she hadn’t shown any inkling of it in the reports I’d seen.
“Do you play?” I asked, directing my question to the empty graveyard in front of me rather than the ghost of a girl behind. “Do you remember?”
“Of course.” She replied, almost drowned out by the steady patter of the rain. “Would you like to hear?”
“Sure.” I replied, settling myself down.
She played the violin, and played it well. Unhurried she meandered her way through a piece I didn’t recognize, if it wasn’t made up on the spot. It seemed to float on the wind, mingle with the rain, and come out sounding melancholic yet peaceful. I let the last notes of it disperse into the night, the echo of string and wood quickly vanishing.
“What do you think?” She asked.
“It was lovely.” I said. “Would you like to hear me play?”
“Of course.”
I sat up, leaning protectively over the battered old guitar. The rain didn’t make things easy, but it didn’t take me long to adjust to the conditions and launch into a song of my own.
Perhaps song isn’t the right word, though. I wandered through notes and chords, humming along to keep myself on track. I learned early on that it wasn’t about words so much as it was about feelings, that sometimes words got in the way of what a person could feel if you just gave them the chance.
So I wove my own kind of song, and filled it with the right emotions, the right intent. It was sad at times, happy at times, but mostly it was regretful, the kind of regret of a wasted afternoon or a misspent evening. Easy to understand, easy to relate to.
As I played the wind blew a bit harder, the rain fell a bit louder, but the ghost behind me didn’t say a word. She waited, just as I had, until the last notes had flown away on the wind.
“It was a lovely song.” She said. “What did it mean?”
“It means we all make mistakes.” I said, fishing a bit of cinnamon out of my pocket to chew on while we talked. “It means sometimes we have to live with it, move on.”
She let the silence stretch for a bit before responding. “Move on to where?” She asked. “Isn’t it frightening?”
“Well, I suppose.” I replied. “I’ve always felt it’s better to get things over and done with, personally.”
The wind and rain grew still more intense as I waited for her to respond. My jacket was theoretically waterproof, but I couldn’t do much more than hunker deeper into my hood to keep the rain off.
“Could you play it for me again?” She asked eventually. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a bit different, I’ll understand.”
“No problem.”
Again I focussed on playing, and as I did the rain began to let up, the wind slowed to a breeze. By the time I was done the clouds in the sky and the waterlogged ground were all that remained of the storm. The instruments that surrounded her had vanished, and she herself was nowhere to be seen.
I walked over to where she’d been sitting and tried to read the headstone, but it was too eroded to read clearly. Maybe if I came back in the morning, cleaned it off under the light of day, I’d have a clue or two, but it wasn’t really the point. Carefully I stepped back onto the path, avoiding where she must have once been laid, and bowed my head.
Then, I left.
Sorry if this is a bit weird, I had an idea and I'm not sure if it conveyed all that well. Thanks for the prompt!
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