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.

Sunbeams

A neighbor of mine invited me over to see her flowers. She led me to a sun room in the back where several flower pots were clustered on shelves enjoying the light that shone in through the bay window. As I stood among these flower pots, I noticed that, at least to my eyes, the leaves and stems of many of the flowers were arranged in ways that resembled human poses. One appeared to lounge in a suggestive arrangement of hips and thighs. Another seemed to peek shyly from the petals and foliage of the other flowers grouped around it. One near the window held a pensive leaf against her petaled chin as she peered out into the yard. Once I noticed these poses, I began to riff on the idea, providing backstories of unfulfilled love lives and spring mornings of quiet melancholy. I gave them names that seemed to suit them, and I cupped an ear to hear their secrets, as they blushed in all their varied colors. The neighbor just laughed and rolled her eyes as she took up her watering can.

In Vacant Fields

Baseball was our favorite game in the neighborhood where I grew up. We always played in this open field across the street from my house. The grass was worn away in the corner that we used for home plate, and there was a dark wooded area which neatly marked the edge of the outfield. One day as we were playing, a goat demon came strolling out of the woods to talk to us. He had cloven hoofs for feet, and when he doffed his hat, we could see that he had two little ivory horns sticking up out of his curly brown hair.

The goat demon told us that he hated us playing baseball. He said that it caused a lot of noise and commotion in the realm where he lived. He explained that goat demons sleep during the day and haunt the world at night, perpetrating their mischief most effectively in the dark, and he said that all the constant racket from our baseball game was keeping him from getting the proper rest. We didn’t quite know what to make of any of this. We looked back and forth at one another, scratching our heads. We’d never considered the possibility that our innocent pastime might be causing distress within the goat demon community.

Finally, the captain of our team, the oldest kid in the neighborhood, came forward and promised that we would keep it down and try to play more quietly from now on. The goat demon vehemently shook his head. He insisted that there was no good and quiet way of playing baseball. He insisted that the game was torture for him by its very nature. He decided that he was going to demonstrate this by playing an inning or so with us. The team captain shrugged as someone tossed him the ball, and he headed over to the pitcher’s mound. The goat demon picked up a firm black wooden bat, and he took his place at the plate, grinning a wide evil grin that curled at the corners of his mouth and showed a row of his big sharp teeth.

He connected with the pitch and belted it into the air with a soft pop. He hit it so hard that it actually exploded in the air over centerfield. The center fielder just stood there forlorn with his shoulders slumped as the white powdered remains of the exploded ball rained down on him. The goat demon skipped in a gleeful, taunting way as he rounded the bases. He whacked the first baseman with his hoof as he tapped the bag. Then he stomped on the second baseman’s hand, smashing it between the bag and his hoof. He kicked the third baseman hard enough to leave a cloven imprint on his forehead, and as he came rounding for home, gnashing his teeth and narrowing his burning eyes, the catcher wisely got out of the way, and in fact, took off for his own home, shedding his mask and his hat and his glove on the ground as he ran away crying.

This goat demon was starting to seem like a real jerk. Next he wanted to show us his pitching skills. We tossed him the other spare ball that we had. He didn’t even bother heading to the pitcher’s mound, didn’t even bother with the pretense that we were still playing an actual organized game. He just wound up and threw a surprise fastball to the girl in right field. The pitch was so fast that the sight of him hurling his arm and the whack of the ball hitting the girl’s glove all seemed to happen in the very same instant, even though the girl was a good twenty or thirty yards across the field.

And that pitch had to sting. The girl hissed as she grit her teeth and gingerly slid her glove off. Her hand was throbbing red and a welt was already forming on her palm. She went up to the other players waiting by the bench along the first base line, and she tried to see if any of them would take her position. She held out her marked hand to show that she couldn’t play anymore, but the other kids shook their heads adamantly and backed away as though her hand was hot and could burn them if they got too close to it. None of them wanted to be on the receiving end of another pitch like that.

The goat demon went over and picked up the ball where the girl had dropped it in the grass. He twirled it around in his hand and he asked if it was the only ball that we had left. I reluctantly admitted that it was. Overjoyed by this answer, he started to gnash the ball with his sharp teeth until there was nothing left of it but shreds that he spit into the air like confetti. He went over to where all our bats lay in a pile, and one by one he snapped them in half across his knee, flinging one half into a ditch, another half into the trees, and sending another half sailing into the sky to land on the roof of a house clear across the neighborhood, lodged against the brick chimney.

We just stood there helplessly as the goat demon pranced around ruining our equipment and reveling in the destruction of our game. When he was done, he just grinned that big sharp grin again, a few pieces of stitching and twine still stuck between his teeth. He tipped his hat at us as he slipped it back onto his head, and he headed off down the road, whistling some infernal tune as he headed back to the tormented realms of the demons in all of their various goat, pig, and rodent manifestations. We all just looked around at our decimated field and sighed.

The Creekside Sonata

I was a violin player in the local symphony orchestra. Early one October evening, I was walking down a country lane with a few other members of the string section. We were all headed for a performance at the town hall. We all had on white shirts and black bow ties. My hair was slicked back and wet, and my freshly shaved face stung in the crisp air. I was carrying my violin case and a handful of loose sheet music, and as we were crossing over a cobblestone bridge, a gust of wind caught the pages of sheet music and blew them out of my hands. I grabbed for the loose pages in the air, but the wind swept them over the side of the bridge and down to the muddy bank of the creek that ran beneath it.

I told the others to go on without me, and I said that I would catch up with them after I went down and gathered up the lost sheet music. They shrugged and continued on their way. I climbed over the railing of the bridge and stumbled down the hill to the bank of the creek. I had to grasp at the loose soil to keep myself from falling a few times, and already I had mud splattered on my sleeves. Still, I was trying to keep my clothes as clean as I could, even as I felt the heels of my dress shoes pressing softly into the wet mud. I had to resist the impulse to brush off the few loose specks of dirt that were stuck to the front of my white shirt, because I knew my dirty hands would only make the mess worse.

Finally I got down to the edge of the creek where the pages of sheet music were scattered. I grabbed a page by a corner and carefully peeled it up out of the mud. I worked my way a little down stream, towards where the creek flowed under the bridge, gathering more pages, until there was just one last page that was just out of reach. The bank had washed away at that spot, and I had to place one foot on a smoothed stone that was out in the water. I braced my shoe against the stone and stretched to reach the paper, but just as the tips of my finger got a hold of it, the sole of my dress shoe slipped off the stone and I stumbled on my knees into the water and the mud.

I cursed and swore, looking down at my shirt and pants that were completely wet and filthy now. But then I looked up and saw something on the page of sheet music that I had been trying to reach. The mud had somehow spattered on it in a pattern of musical notation, eighth notes and half notes, beats and measures, sharps and flats. I could kind of make out the tune from the notes, and I hummed it a little to myself, trying to get a feel for it.

But I had to play it to really hear it. I popped the clasps on my violin case, and the violin sat in its pocket, clean, the wood perfectly polished. I grabbed the bow and took up the instrument in my muddy hands. I pulled the first sweet note across the length of the bow. From there the melody mounted in clips and steps, building to some fragile height. It trickled on soft fingers through the water. It quivered in the trees all around. The falling leaves seem to drift to Earth on trembling currents of vibrato as I slowly drew the whole notes across the strings. It was the most heart-breaking piece of music I had ever heard or played. And there was no one, absolutely no one, around to hear it.

Perennial Regards

I flew back to visit my family in Ohio. My mother was living in an old red brick house that had ivy along the walls. She had started a flower delivery service with her sisters, and they ran the business out of her house. I took a nap when I got in, and after I woke up, I found them all working in the front room. One of my aunts was typing out the messages for the cards on a black typewriter; another one was running a sewing machine, embroidering these silk cloths that they wrapped around the flowers; and my mother was at the island in the kitchen, clipping and boxing the bouquets and getting them ready for delivery. There were pastel colored rotary phones, pink and orange and blue, all around the room, near where each of them were working. From time to time, all the phones would ring at once, and they would all grab for the call, and whoever picked it up first would take down the person’s order.

There was a pot of coffee made, and my mother still had the same coffee cups up in her cabinet that I remembered. I poured myself a cup and took a seat in an armchair in the corner and I watched them all bustling around. I sipped my coffee and listened to the whir of the sewing machine’s needle and the punch of the typewriter keys. My mother got off the phone and called over to me from the kitchen. I brought my empty coffee cup to the sink, and she pointed to a set of keys hanging on a hook near the wall calendar, and she asked me to go to the garage out back and get their delivery vehicle and pull it around to the front of the house.

I threw on my coat and went out. There were a couple of acres of land out behind the house, and as I followed the long dirt driveway, I passed a couple of greenhouses set up in an open field. The driveway wound around under the shade of a few maple trees and eventually led to the very back of the property where there was an old carriage house that they were using for a garage. The doors to the garage were open and there were standing puddles from the recent rain in the muddy yard in front of the garage. Parked just inside the doors, there was a shiny black station wagon with the front end pointing out and ready to go. The name of the flower delivery business was stenciled in white on the side of the door with the phone number underneath. In the back I could see the loose clippings and fallen petals and snagged thorns from countless deliveries. I jangled the keys in my hand and smiled. It was nice to see that things were going well back home.