Commentary: Five minutes, five hundred words. Just a quick scribble before bed.
Enjoy!
Word One: TEMPO
The violin case bumps her thigh as she walks. Beneath her booted heels, snow crunches—she leaves behind a line of staggery dark footprints on the white-glazed sidewalk. She sighs into her scarf. The wool scratches at her lips.
Her head throbs: not with pain, but with music. The notes cluster between her temples. Their remnants shiver nearby her lashes, caught still in the cooling strands of her hair like dew in a spider's web. She mouths soundless meters; her bow arm ghosts lightly to and fro, and her fingers mime the flexes of a melody's tempo gone vivace.
She stops suddenly, brow furrowed. Other members of the orchestra departing practice step around her, a seething mass: but they are like any sea and Michiru, who knows depths better than anything, is at no risk of drowning. Her peers flow and ebb and eventually they are gone, leaving her alone there at the corner of the auditorium. That very building's shadow eclipses her. Chilled, she shivers.
She refuses to move, though, because something is wrong.
The beat in her head is off by a quarter.
Closing her eyes, she hitches the violin case up onto her shoulder such that passersby might think she intends to play it like the instrument it holds. She runs through the chorus, pretending to parse out a piece only she can hear.
She lags. Once—and then again, and a third time too. No matter how hard she tries, she is unable to keep proper time.
Graceful and eloquent of manner though Michiru might be, she still stomps her foot in frustration. Slush spatters.
A shushing sound in the street at her back—a mechanical hum. Leather squeaks. The scent of warm shores and distant sunlight cuts through the winter's chill, bright as a lemon, and lingers over the fringe of her scarf.
"Oi!" a familiar voice calls to her.
Michiru turns, letting the violin case slide down her arm to its rightful place at the tips of her fingers. Her skirt flutters at her knees; her wrist twinges, and the handle of the case beneath it gives a whispery creak.
The car idling in the street is a balmy almost-buttercream. Its driver, her elbow crooked out the window, flicks two fingers to Michiru in a hey-there-pretty-lady salute. She is blonde, and sharp-eyed, and her chin sports a healing scrape straight down the center like a cleft.
She smiles and says, "Need a ride?"
The words congeal in the air between them, a pale puff come and gone.
Michiru steps from the sidewalk and around the nose of the car. The other woman leans over and unlocks the passenger door for her—nudges it open. Michiru folds herself down into the waiting seat, propping her violin case between her knees. The heater engulfs her in its prickling exhale. She leans into its current, closing her eyes and the door.
The driver chuckles. The car rolls forward.
The beat in Michiru's head does too, whole again.