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                 K R I S T E N' S    C O L L E C T I O N
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Piano
by Chronic fantasist (chip_potts@yahoo.co.uk)
***

This is a story about someone who plays the piano. It's 
kind of inspired by a Smiths song - when I was very 
young, I thought a line in the Hand that Rocks the 
Cradle was "there will be blood on the piano tonight" 
which made an impression (this isn't what he says). 
Also, the idea of Charlie Mingus's clown that realises 
that the more he beats himself up, the more applause he 
gets was an influence. (M-solo, v, ritual, suicide)

***

Greg lived in an old flat in Edinburgh’s Tollcross, 
with a cat called Marmeladova after his favourite novel 
character and on account of her honey coloured fur that 
seemed to catch fire in the sunlight and made Greg’s 
eyes sting with admiration. 

The highlight of Greg’s day was to sit, sometimes with 
Marmeladova on his lap, sometimes without her, at his 
enormous double windows that pared the walls away from 
his house and let the light of the outside in, 
inescapable. Greg tore down the curtains that had been 
there when he’d bought the flat. He would sit in front 
of the windows, sometimes for hours, and gaze out of 
them, at the concrete ground three stories down, at the 
rows of sandstone tenements that sprouted 
perpendicularly from halfway along his own street, and 
this filled him up the way that food fills some people 
up, or books, or friends, or family.

Greg had left his family behind because they had wanted 
him to go into the family business, which was farming, 
while Greg had wanted to be a musician. It had been a 
messy business, his leaving home, with the family 
refusing to believe that their last hope of continuing 
their centuries old family business would disappear 
with their only child, and unable to comprehend the 
meaning of music to the boy, for to them it was just so 
much clatter. 

As for friends, he’d never been very good at making 
them, because his obsession made him a very dull and 
selfish person to be around. Greg knew that he could 
never be a whole person, and believed it was because he 
was a vessel for the expression of something more than 
himself.

However, he had recently begun to think that he may 
have made a mistake. Perhaps he should have stayed at 
home and farmed. Perhaps he should have chosen to be a 
full person and live a real life instead of living this 
shadow life. Perhaps he had been too bloody minded, too 
arrogant, and too dismissive, and only now was he was 
learning his real lesson, that it was impossible to 
give up the real world and survive.

There was actually nothing more than himself, that he 
had been deluded and childish to think that there was. 
Because, even though he was a very talented pianist and 
had many interesting ideas for compositions, every time 
he sat down to write a happy song it ended sad, and 
every time he gave up with a sigh and decided to just 
go ahead and write a sad song, he wouldn’t be able to 
finish it for crying.

One day after Greg felt he had not more energy to go on 
with the music that he knew was inside him, he happened 
across an inverse law between his insides and outsides, 
purely by frustrated accident. He realised that if he 
cut his arm just a little bit, the music that was 
inside him but that was too sad for him to stand to 
write, would emerge little by little instead of choking 
impotently in his throat and wrists and veins. 

So he kept a razor and a bag of towels by his piano 
each time he sat down to play, and every time he felt 
he couldn’t go on writing, he cut his arm a little bit 
more and made sure not to get any blood on the piano, 
and then he could go on.

Greg started to write the masterpiece of his life. He 
could feel it, the genius of his music, as though he 
had channelled the voice of nature through his fingers 
into the notes floating from the piano. He was to reach 
the beautiful high point of the piece any day now, he 
could see the music before his eyes physical and 
precise as a map, and could feel the approach of the 
climax as if he were standing at some point along the 
map, before a jaguar shocking him straight in the eye 
with its own keen, violent eye. He knew exactly where 
his melody was going, and how he would harmonise it in 
just such a way that had never been heard before. 

He could taste the chords in the distance and his 
fingertips ached to transfer their ungraspable soul 
from his head to the manuscript paper before him. The 
emotion crashed against him in waves and his sight 
cleared, his head was no longer muddled, every sound 
was conducted directly to his chest and the cotton wool 
bubble that had seemed to coat his senses all his life 
evaporated from around his nerves. 

For the first time he recognised what was important, 
and what was beautiful, and what he had done wrong in 
his past, and what he would never do wrong again, and 
what he would do again and again and again no matter 
how wrong it was because, after all, he was only human. 
And all the time the waves of music crashing against 
his insides increased in force, itching against his 
veins to burst out, his arteries clouding in the 
perfection of the music, his head swimming with 
sforzandos and crescendos and diminuendos and 
ritorendos...

…and with all of this bursting inside of him, he found 
that he could not get the music out. As soon as he 
played the first chord of the climax, as soon as he 
tried to put his pen to the paper, his stomach churned, 
his eyes filled with tears, sometimes he was physically 
sick, and he had to lie down all day and all night, 
unable to do anything, just shaking, sweating, weak 
with longing and burning quietly with frustration, the 
music swelling inside his head into the cacophony of 
limbo that he feared would choke him to death or drive 
him insane.

He could not sleep any more. His block plagued him and 
his focus was so intense that he could think of nothing 
else. His cat crawled out of the cat flap and never 
looked back. Having given up everything else for his 
music, Greg decided he could not afford to look back, 
or sideways, or even forwards and out of his window any 
more. He looked at himself, he looked inside himself 
and he looked at the piano, and that was his life. 

He cut his arm, slowly, and the blood welling from the 
fresh, deep wound echoed in shards of sound in his head 
and flushed the music out of him and onto the page. He 
took the knife to himself again, slashing across the 
previous cut, and the initial surprised tension of the 
resisting flesh to part gave way to the slow seeping of 
blood that increased to a thick flow that he could not 
stem and that fell in a contrasting deluge of shocking 
bright red onto the black and white keys of the piano. 

His sight was becoming blurry but his strength was all 
in his hands, he could play and write and that was all 
that mattered. The keys were not allowed to go sticky 
as the blood was not allowed to dry for the fresh blood 
that spattered onto the old pattern. The blood oiled 
his mind and gave him the breath he needed to write.

Having run out of unbroken flesh on his arms to cut, he 
unbuttoned his shirt and sliced the knife cleanly 
against his chest in an arced rainbow, which wept 
slowly down his torso and into his jeans. He undid his 
jeans and kicked them off, then cut down his groin, 
inside his hip bone, down his thighs, his shins, his 
ankles, and immediately after a cut, his hands would 
fly back to the piano, back to the page, and coast on 
the rush of the adrenaline until it ran out and he 
needed to cut more.

He was reaching the last line of the music, he was so 
weak he wasn’t sure if he could stay upright and he 
leant his head against the head of the piano. His hands 
were shaking but did not betray him as he struggled to 
copy the final notes from the keys onto the page. He 
felt he had cut away all the ties that had been holding 
him back, piece by piece, as if he had finally 
uncovered himself, and there was only one bond left 
that kept him from completion. 

He took the knife shakily to his throat and sliced 
diagonally across it, from his jaw to his collar bone. 
As he felt the life seeping out of his body, he 
committed his last notes onto the manuscript paper and 
then his arms rested, his bloody carcass tilting over 
the bloody piano, and the paper bloodied underneath 
him, but still legible, although this meant nothing to 
the policemen who found him two weeks later.

END

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This story was written as an adult fantasy. The author
does not condone the described behavior in real life.

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Kristen's collection - Directory 42