Drumsticks without a Drummer
By- Jaha Canon
Disclaimer- Rent? I couldn't have come up with something -that- awesome.
Tom Collins found himself alone in the tiny apartment. It got bigger somehow, and emptier.
On the table sat a bucket.
The bucket that belonged to Collins' late lover. His Angel.
Mimi brought it by earlier that day along with Angel's drumsticks. She arranged the items on the table carefully, as if she were making a shrine to her friend. Or as if she were trying to figure out how Angel had kept the bucket and drumsticks when she had lived.
Angel actually had no particular way of setting them, Collins remembered, she'd usually just toss them somewhere and sometimes they would end up frantically searching for a missing drumstick. The bucket and drums had no particular home, place, or arrangement other than with Angel.
Angel had no need for them, though. She would often even drum her fingers absentmindedly to a beat all her own. Collins had grown accustomed to the slight tapping each night as they both were going to sleep. The world was her drum set.
Still, there was her bucket and her drumsticks. Sitting there, as if waiting for it's drummer to pick them up and go out into the streets. Collins found himself expecting the same thing. He expected the bucket to have the same light that Angel had- the same spirit. He wished that this worldly object of his lover absorbed some of the qualities he'd loved so much about her… so that he could keep those things forever.
But the bucket was empty. There was no Angel in that body she'd once lived in, in that bucket she carried, or within those drumsticks she put everyone in complete awe with.
Collins knew where Angel is.
She'd never rented anything, he realized, she'd owned his heart all along.
He could imagine her in there, drumming his heartbeat and keeping him going.