*I’m apparently making a habit of this. Here’s August’s short story, a little late but hopefully an enjoyable read. I aspire to not be late with September. We shall see.*

It started with the old church piano. I’m not sure how it made its way to our house, but one stormy, late summer day, it arrived via Mr. McCoy’s red and white pickup truck.

“A little serendipitous, isn’t it?” My mother stood in the doorway, watching Mr. McCoy and my father unload it. “It’s been raining all day, and that instrument gets here right as it stops.”

“Mmmm,” I answered, through a mouthful of cherry popsicle.

My sister said nothing. This was not unusual, as Callie hardly ever talked. She could, and sometimes at night, we’d sit together in our room and talk for hours. But she seldom wanted to. She told me once that most people talk too much and don’t say anything. I think I was probably one of those people, and I was fine to fill the silence in her place.

The day the piano came changed everything.

We didn’t have much room in our house, and so my mother decided the piano would sit in the dining room, scrunched against the back wall right behind the table. That first night, Callie stared at it all through dinner. Hard not to, given that it was massive and dark and made that back wall look a little like a cavern. But Callie looked curious, not concerned. At least, to me she did, and I’d like to think I knew her best.

“You can try it out,” my father told her. “Won’t do anybody any good if nobody plays it.”

She nodded.

“If you like it, maybe Mrs. Mavis down at the church can teach you to play.”

Callie nodded again.

As it would turn out, she didn’t need any help at all.

We all turned in that night at about 9:00. Callie went straight to bed, her back to me, and I sat at my desk in the corner of our room, working on a story about an old man I’d talked to outside of the general store. That was the thing with talking – people tell great stories. But Callie didn’t look at the world quite like me, and that was fine. I liked to think about her, to consider what she might be feeling. I liked figuring her out, I guess, and I was good at it.

Sometime later, hours maybe, I heard a rustle from Callie’s side of the room.

“Callie?” I whispered.

I got no answer. At first. Minutes later, I heard the distinct tink, tink, tink of one of the highest piano keys. Then the deep bellow of one of the lowest. I rolled out of bed and made my way downstairs, and in the darkness of that tiny dining room, saw Callie’s back, stick straight. There on the piano stool, for the first time in my life, and in hers, I’d wager, my sister looked right at home. I didn’t say a word. I just stood there in the dark, and watched her plink away. I’m sure my parents heard her, too, but they didn’t get up, and that morning, no one said a word.

I don’t much believe in magic, but I’ll say this: Whatever’s out there in the universe, whatever force exists to make me, me and you, you, it made Callie for music.

Every night for weeks, she’d tiptoe down the stairs, and she’d sit and plink.

“Driving me crazy,” my father would say.

“We should put her in lessons,” my mother would reply.

But Callie didn’t want lessons. She’d shake her head, fast and hard, anytime either one of them offered to take her.

“Why in the world not?” My mother finally asked her one night, whether out of frustration or curiosity I can’t say.

Callie didn’t answer at first. She just stared ahead. And then finally, slowly, she said: “I like the way I feel when I play.”

My mother shook her head – that was exasperation – and trudged into the kitchen to start dinner. But I understood, or, at least, I understood about as well as anybody.

“You feel free when you play, don’t you?”

Callie nodded.

“Like nobody can tell you what to do.”

She nodded again.

“That’s how I feel when I’m writing.”

Callie smiled, and we both went up to our room to do homework.

It was really as simple as that, in the moment. Whatever skill Callie developed at that piano, it would belong to only her. I was a little jealous, truth be told. Teachers were always picking apart my stories, looking for spelling mistakes and grammar errors. But sitting at the old church piano, Callie could be free. And free she was, like an animal in the forest, like a bird in flight. When she played, the rest of the world drifted away for her, and she went somewhere else.

Callie never talked much, but she played.

She played and played, and days became months became years. And as she played, she learned. She could read a page of music like I could read a page in a book, and I have no idea how she figured that out. The marks looked like chicken scratch to me. And she could create her own songs, too, sitting in the dim light on Sunday afternoons, just enjoying the intervals between sound and silence.

I asked her once, just flat out asked, how she decided what notes went with the others, and how she wanted the song to sound.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It just kind of comes to me, I guess.”

“Do you ever write it down?”

“No,” she answered. “Then it wouldn’t belong to me anymore.”

“My stories still belong to me,” I told her.

“In a way,” she said. “But they also belong to the people who read them.”

She was right, of course, though I’d never thought about it that way before. But I wish she’d written down just one song, even just a portion of one song, because when we were eighteen and just about to graduate from high school, Callie died.

I don’t know how else to say it. It’s strange how people sugar coat dying. She was alive one day, and then she wasn’t, and the silence in our house became unbearable. Callie never talked much, but her quiet was a calm quiet. Her music was her voice. And in her absence, in her place, this new quiet felt heavy and hard and sharp around the edges.

“This house just feels different now,” my mother said

It got to all of us, eventually. My father kept the television on. My mother sat by the radio in the kitchen.

“It’s something,” she said. “It not enough, but it’s something.”

And I – I suffered. My escape had always been my writing, but writing’s quiet, too, and I suddenly found that I just couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand sitting alone at my desk with only my own thoughts ringing in my ears, surrounded by Callie’s absence and the unbearable stillness she left behind.

And then one night, I’d had enough. I lay in the dark, in the room that now belonged to only me, and I thought, well, there’s only one thing for it, isn’t there?    

I tiptoed downstairs to the dining room, and I sat on Callie’s piano stool. My hands shook, but I forced my fingers to the keys, and just like Callie had, all those years ago, I plinked. First the highest notes, then the lowest. Then some in the middle, and then a few together. And finally, I felt some of the tension leave my shoulders, felt my jaw unclench for the first time in weeks.

I will never be the musician that Callie was, but I’ve kept that piano all these years, and I sit down every day, and I play. When I play, it’s like a piece of her sits with me. And in the intervals between sound and silence, I can almost feel her there, whole and solid and alive again.

************

Thank you for reading! This is the eighth of twelve stories I’ll write for my 2023 Short Story Challenge. The theme this year is: Wild.

Here are the first seven, if you’d like to read them: 

Dark, Dark, Dark

Fairy Tale

Spring Mountain Child

Holley’s Flood

The Ledger

Dandelion Days

Muddy Water

I hope you join me and write some stories of your own this year! It’s fun, and I hope this will be a happy year full of good stories. But just reading is fine, too, and I’m glad you’re here.

The next story will be posted at the end of September.