She's Playing Piano Again

Tuesday August 8, 2023 1:15 P.M.

"God is an American. I'm afraid of Americans" ~ David Bowie

The lonely night sky reflected an apathetic moon onto the dull puddle in an urban alleyway downtown. The scene was completely motionless, an almost perfectly still frame interrupted only by the occassional subject entering from the main roads to descend down this forgettable shortcut in the hopes of returning to the popular streets having saved a few seconds of time. Their intrusive traversal would disrupt the clarity of the image in the film of oil and water over the cobblestone, distorting the mirrored sky. Everytime this disorder returned to stability, it was only a minute longer before another figure in a trench coat would fufill the prophecy of entropy and return the scene to a relative chaos. Unknown to the eye of the average passerby, there was a symphonic arrangement of events here that would usually go unnoticed. These people grow dull to the delicate after enough stimulation. There's too much static here. The endless drone of the telephone wires fight with the plumes of rising steam from the sewers as a quiet and mindful dying rat cries out from behind an array of dumpsters. It all blurs into one sound and is then cast away as "noise". But there is a story here.

After the next few urban nomads make their safe passage through the concrete valley, A man stomps into the puddle and stays there, his pointed boots permanently altering the reflection. His feet are positioned as a wide angle, one facing down the predetermined and well traveled path, and the other towards a humble dive bar that had went effectively unnoticed to the last eight people traveling through here. He stares at the black brick exterior that seemed to crumble just from looking at at it. After a couple more moments of indecision, he heads towards the soft neon glow of the sign above the door. He swings open the door and descends upon the lonely room.

She's playing piano again. He goes to the bar to order his old-fashioned and sits in hs booth by the stage. The walls next to him are covered from top to bottom with magazine clippings and masked with a film of soot that abstracts any of the paragraphs on the pages, so that only the headlines are visible. One reads, "It Looks Like A Memory".

His ears return to the ambience as she repeats a song he doesn't recognize for the fourth time that night. He watches with a misrepresented mask of intention and purpse that is further unmasked as he consumes his next few drinks. For a moment of genuine curiosity, he focuses in on her fingers as she plays. They seem delicate but also sluggish, like him, except they perform a soft dance on the keys with purpose. She doesn't waste a single ounce of energy when she lifts her wrist above the Steinway logo to descend again while utilizing gravity to support each crescendo. Once she executes this piece, the man clumsily stands up to claps his hands together, making sure that he is the loudest one in the room.

As the crowd slowly disappears over the course of the night, the room finds itself to only contain the pianist, and the man, along with the ones passed out or too far gone. She is coming back to the stage from a brief intermission when the man stops her again to parade her with ramblings about the strength of her ability. He doesn't know anything about music, and much less about piano, so that the compliments remain loose and broad and utterly meaningless.

He ask this with another false intention. The response was too abstract for him to remember. She opens her small mouth to speak silently, but usefully.

She opens her eyes wider as she speaks her last few words, as if to let the whole city inside. As she talks, the man fidgets with the ring in his pocket. The outline in the skin around his finger pulsates. He then takes a moment to acknowledge her image with a relative clarity made only possible to the intoxicated by reducing the distance to the subject. Her young shoulders rest below the plane of her torso as she crosses her hands over her stomach. the black dress she wears compliments the paint of the piano, and hides the natural curvature of her body. He burns her round heels into the memory centers of his mind.

All of the sudden, the rain starts to drip outside intermittently, and then in a great mass as this sound subdues any other sources in the auditory ecosystem. The lights start to flicker. The man walks out of the bar with the woman as they vanish down the street. The lights go out.

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this has been one nightmare i was hoping to forget.

Tuesday August 8, 2023 05:30 P.M. ~jj

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