The Piano
by Hazel McCorriston
She is poised behind the curtain, I imagine: hands firm and long and ready to play. The first key is something central and core, not high nor low. She begins slowly and carefully, feeling her way through her introduction to us, each touch an expression.
The curtain between me and her is dark and heavy but somehow it does not distort her sound, thick and thin as a paper wall. The small concert is in a church and my ticket was given to me by a friend. This surprised me, because I do not really know music, and I have spent years waiting to understand.
She plays from a raised section at the front of the building, and I wonder what it means to only hear and not to see the body who moves the notes, which are actually letters, towards me. She sings now, not in words but in the same way a light object floats on the surface of dark black waves.
The same way your coat is soaked through from walking across the moor. The same way a father waves to his son from the train station platform and might hide his tears from him as he turns, sending him into the world. The same way the words ‘on my way home’ hold a whole world in their short round little letters, typed fast and carelessly but how much care that world took to create.
She sings just to me now, her sound a story whose end I crave, waiting for its utterance, knowing that the only language that is real and true is the positioning of notes, the falling of fruit, the sighing of trees, the objects we use to make our home.
She is wordless voice and ivory white and aged, a song that feels infinite. In her blue curtain, I see you smile at how winter sunlight makes my eyes water and at my silly attempt to record each day’s repetition in a sentence. I smile for it is my life’s chorus. It is to see these moments, to watch the way they come to hold the world in the letter assigned to each note.
When I was a child I stole some flowers from the pre-school teacher’s home, but I did not realise I was stealing them. I went outside to play at lunchtime in the large garden attached to the grand house the teacher hosted children from each day. It had a perfect lawn and oiled teak seating that was used for sports day each summer. But it was early spring and crisp-cold, so the garden was barren. Except for a cluster of bluebells beneath a fir tree, dark and brooding like a blanket to climb under. They were a gathering of brave heads, daring to leap out into existence, deciding it was their time. One by one, I took each gently from the ground, low down so their necks stayed long, my hands becoming sticky from the dampness of their broken stems and the cool of the earth.
The woman who owned the pre-school became red-faced and scolded me when she saw the bluebells in my hand; I had wanted to take them home, I pictured them in the little china vase that usually stood on our kitchen windowsill. When I did go home, my mother made me write her an apology letter to the teacher.
The flowers wilted their heads in shame. They could never have lasted long enough for my father to see them that day. But every year before that, when new bluebells came to our garden as winter eased, he pointed them out so I could see how beautiful they were.
The church is silent but I know the pianist’s pattern of notes will now shape my walk home and follow me in my sleep. Nobody in the audience moves. Then there is the sound of bare feet floating above stone floor, and a movement at the edge of the curtain. She emerges, in a long dress of black silk. I see that the woman behind the curtain is me, exactly as I am now, unchanged and unready, calm in her search for music and fearful to show her face. She looks through the applauding crowd and I like to imagine she sees you, clapping as hard as her quickly beating heart, eyes damp with pride, cheering on her life’s work.
BIO: Hazel McCorriston is based in London. Her short fiction has been featured in Aesterion Magazine and Between the Lines Anthology. She has a degree in English Literature and a Master’s degree in Psychology. More of her work can be found on her Medium platform: https://medium.com/@HazelMcCorriston.