The Rehearsal Room

The room smelled of dust and rosin and the particular sweat of people who have been trying for years. There was a piano with two dead keys, a drum kit held together with gaffer tape, and a window that looked out on the car park where the streetlights were just coming on.

Mara was at the piano, playing the same four bars over and over. Riley was tuning a bass that had been out of tune since March. Jonah was at the door, half in, half out, the way he always was at the start of rehearsal - one foot in the room, one foot in the corridor, as if the corridor might still have somewhere better to go.

"Again," Mara said. Not to anyone. To the four bars.

Riley found the note. The bass settled under the piano like a hand under a falling thing. Jonah took his foot out of the corridor.

They played the song. It was not a good song. It was a song about a man who leaves a town, which is every song, and the chorus was a question nobody had answered yet: *what do you do with the leaving?*

"Again," Mara said.

The second time, the drums came in two bars early. Jonah stopped, swore, started again. The third time, Riley's bass string snapped and he replaced it with his hands shaking, and nobody said anything about the shaking, and the song went on.

The fourth time, something happened. It was not magic. It was the opposite of magic. It was four people in a room with dust and rosin and a window, and the song stopped being about the man who leaves and became about the four of them, in the room, at the hour when the streetlights come on, doing the thing they do.

The chorus was still a question. But now it was a question being asked by people who were going to stay in the room until it answered, or until the caretaker locked up, whichever came first.

"Again," Mara said. And they did.

Outside, the car park filled with the cars of people going home to other rooms. Inside, the four of them kept the door open, and the leaving, for a while, had somewhere to go.

The song never got good. That was not the point. The point was the trying. The point was the door. The point was that they were in it, and the leaving had to wait outside, and the leaving, for once, was the one being left.