HOME | DD

Description
With out stretched hands, she touched it. Milk white on ivory.

She thought she was alone. He knew she would never have stroked the keys so longingly and so gently if she thought someone was watching. He knew she would have wiped the tears that she let run undiverted down her cheeks.

The room had all manner of silence and shadows about it. She was highlighted only by a stroke of silvery twilight, which had infiltrated a break in the heavy velveteen drapes, glancing off her freckled skin. The chairs sat around, empty, as if holding some invisible audience that had been heralding this long awaited reprieve.

They had called her ‘the baby’ when she first joined. She was barely twenty-four, too young they surmised to really understand life: the beauty or the heartaches. She was just some fresh-faced Jersey girl with quick moving hands and a light, twinkling laugh.

She let her right hand rest lightly on the key. Middle C echoed around the room as a bell tolls the hour, penetrating, though comforting in its consistency. She pressed it again.

He had never really thought much about who she was, or rather, who she had been before she had entered their world. She simply became, as many women before, one of his belongings, something he took for granted.

Raising her left hand to join her right, she began to play, lightly at first. He wondered for a moment where she had found music, until he realized her eyes were shut, and she was playing the haunting melody from memory. Her hair hung down her back, notes soared and swelled and came back to earth with such grace and precision that he could not believe that she was in control of something so magical. He had never really been a musical person.

Her head bent over her hands, shoulders swaying with the rises in the melody. In just a few bars she was away from this room and this place, so far away. Dreaming in F major.

He felt himself almost intruding, like he was being voyeuristic by watching this open hearted and naked display of passion. Though he could not bring himself to leave that room. The melody had enchanted him, an incantation woven in the silence to stun mere mortals, to carry them to the angel’s realm. And she was their conduit; she was the one that would spirit away the unsuspecting souls of any who would be caught in the music’s radius.

The notes were doing her bidding; she showed an effortless display of manipulation that he had never been a party to but for words and syntax, and even in his most high success, in his most beautiful connections, he had never been able to create this.

He wasn’t sure how long he sat and watched her. It seemed endless, timeless and impossible to restrict, to restrain. It tumbled from her unbound, like water spilling over an edge, babbling and bubbling and reaching him at the other edge of the room with nothing being able to stop it.

The music matched her tears. They fell from her eyelashes unchecked, on to her hands and fingers, onto the perfect ebony and ivory. She did not shake, did not make any sound until the moment her fingers slowed, stilled, played their final note.

Then her head dropped to her hands, and she sobbed.

Description
With out stretched hands, she touched it. Milk white on ivory.

She thought she was alone. He knew she would never have stroked the keys so longingly and so gently if she thought someone was watching. He knew she would have wiped the tears that she let run undiverted down her cheeks.

The room had all manner of silence and shadows about it. She was highlighted only by a stroke of silvery twilight, which had infiltrated a break in the heavy velveteen drapes, glancing off her freckled skin. The chairs sat around, empty, as if holding some invisible audience that had been heralding this long awaited reprieve.

They had called her ‘the baby’ when she first joined. She was barely twenty-four, too young they surmised to really understand life: the beauty or the heartaches. She was just some fresh-faced Jersey girl with quick moving hands and a light, twinkling laugh.

She let her right hand rest lightly on the key. Middle C echoed around the room as a bell tolls the hour, penetrating, though comforting in its consistency. She pressed it again.

He had never really thought much about who she was, or rather, who she had been before she had entered their world. She simply became, as many women before, one of his belongings, something he took for granted.

Raising her left hand to join her right, she began to play, lightly at first. He wondered for a moment where she had found music, until he realized her eyes were shut, and she was playing the haunting melody from memory. Her hair hung down her back, notes soared and swelled and came back to earth with such grace and precision that he could not believe that she was in control of something so magical. He had never really been a musical person.

Her head bent over her hands, shoulders swaying with the rises in the melody. In just a few bars she was away from this room and this place, so far away. Dreaming in F major.

He felt himself almost intruding, like he was being voyeuristic by watching this open hearted and naked display of passion. Though he could not bring himself to leave that room. The melody had enchanted him, an incantation woven in the silence to stun mere mortals, to carry them to the angel’s realm. And she was their conduit; she was the one that would spirit away the unsuspecting souls of any who would be caught in the music’s radius.

The notes were doing her bidding; she showed an effortless display of manipulation that he had never been a party to but for words and syntax, and even in his most high success, in his most beautiful connections, he had never been able to create this.

He wasn’t sure how long he sat and watched her. It seemed endless, timeless and impossible to restrict, to restrain. It tumbled from her unbound, like water spilling over an edge, babbling and bubbling and reaching him at the other edge of the room with nothing being able to stop it.

The music matched her tears. They fell from her eyelashes unchecked, on to her hands and fingers, onto the perfect ebony and ivory. She did not shake, did not make any sound until the moment her fingers slowed, stilled, played their final note.

Then her head dropped to her hands, and she sobbed.