A Little Music

My wife and I were looking at a house that we were thinking of buying. But as we went from room to room, we became more interested in how the house was decorated and furnished than we were in the actual house itself. We were intrigued by the lives that were lived there, by the framed family photographs hung on the wall by the stairs, by the checkered pot holders coordinated with the soft blues and bright yellows of the kitchen, by the books arranged on the mahogany bookshelves in the study. In the master bedroom upstairs, we liked the cozy way the bed was situated between the front window that looked out onto the shady street and the smaller window in the corner with the bedside table next to it. In the hallway outside the bedroom, we stopped to admire the large prints of medieval paintings that were hung on the wall, depicting the gathering of saints and the madonna with the child on her lap.

There was a second bedroom in the back where my wife noticed a nice little jeweled music box sitting on the dresser. She picked it up and opened it so that it would play. But just as the figurine dancer began to turn to the halting labors of the music box's tinkling mechanism, my wife looked up and noticed a little girl with a blue ribbon in her hair standing in the doorway. The girl startled her and the music box slipped out of her hands and fell to the floor. The little girl's face scrunched up into a smoldering angry glare. The figurine had come loose and it lay on the floor beside the music box. My wife picked them both up and reattached the dancer to her mount inside the music box and she tried to show the little girl that it wasn't broken.

But the little girl was not satisfied with this, and her anger was not assuaged. She demanded to know why we were in her room messing with her things. My wife tried to apologize, but the little girl insisted that by touching anything, anything at all in the house, we were violating our legal pretense of being there as prospective buyers of the house. The second we touched something with the slightest finger, we went from being buyers to being trespassers in their home. As the little tyrant began to list off a number of statutes and precedents that bolstered her case, my wife gently returned the music box to its place on the dresser and we both gave each other a look, agreeing that it was probably a good time to leave.

The little girl followed us downstairs still reciting all the laws we'd broken and the minimum sentences we could expect to receive for our crimes. We found the girl's mother in the kitchen preparing dinner. We told her that the home was wonderful but we were probably going to have to pass on buying it. The little girl was still there at our heels continuing her stream of legal invocations against us, but the mother didn't pay her any mind. She just nodded and said that she understood our decision, and she went back to stirring her pots and slicing her vegetables. The little girl followed us out the door and across the yard to the driveway. She stood there by our car, still chastising us for messing with her music box. We rolled up the windows, muffling the sound of her voice, and she was still there in the driveway yelling at us as we pulled away and drove off down the street.