Because we have been born we have to think something and live. We have to earn our living. We can't keep quiet. If the desire is there, we'll achieve something. Otherwise, there is no achievement at all.

Buddha told,

"Desire is the root of sorrow"

But the opposite is also true. But it should not go beyond limits. The river should flow between two banks only. It can't cross this side or that side. So desire has margins on both sides ie upper limit is there as also the lower limit.

My desire was to achieve an engineering degree. Now I am retired and am working in the literature field and I want to write for movies the songs and jokes.

There’s a chest in the attic that doesn’t have a lock and doesn’t need one, because nobody ever opens it. The chest is old and wooden and there are cobwebs stretched around its outsides like stakes holding a tent in place against the wind. To the left of the chest is an old lamp with no lightbulb and a few sets of old pictures, tucked away in boxes. Sometimes Maria will bring a flashlight with her up to the attic and shuffle through the pictures, just to look and remember. One day, she thinks, she’ll put them all into a giant photo album to be passed down through generations. For now, it’s hard to look for too long.

Maria doesn’t touch the chest because she believes there is nothing in it, so there isn’t. But one day, Maria leaves for a weekend shift and forgets that the stairway leading up to the attic hasn’t been pushed back into the ceiling and hidden away like it usually is.

She’s managed to raise a curious daughter.

Maria encourages any and all questions, because she knows that allowing fourteen-year-old Elena to be privy to every tiny detail about her father and about the war he never came back from is the best way to keep her from running off to find her own answers. Maria never lies, but she doesn’t say everything, either. Mostly because that would be far too complicated and far too much.

But then she leaves the stairway to the attic open.

There’s never been a rule against Elena going up there, she simply never has. But it’s Sunday and all of her homework is done and it is one of those rare, rainy Los Angeles days. And Mom left for work and Elena is bored. And the stairway is right there. So she climbs up, and she finds the boxes full of photos. She’s seen them all before, but only a few times when she’d asked for them.

“It’s not good to lose yourself to memories, mija,” her mother had explained. “We hold onto him because he deserves to be remembered and because we will always miss him, but we do not fall so far into the past that we forget that we are here without him now. That we have our own stories to continue writing.”

Elena shuffles through the pictures, listening to the steady drum of raindrops on the roof. She tucks a piece of dark hair behind her ear, nose twitching a little at the dust settling around her. If there were any ghosts in the attic, they would perhaps smile at how similar Maria and Elena look when they get lost within their thoughts. Elena bites her lip the way her mother does, settles her spine against the wooden chest, and lets herself picture what it felt like when Dad used to hold her.

It is Sunday and all of her homework is done and her mother is at work and outside the rain still falls, so Elena does not brush at the tears that slide down her cheeks as she stares at each picture. When she's done, she places the photos back into their boxes and slides them back beside the lamp without a lightbulb. And then she turns to look more closely at the chest she’d been leaning against, brushing away the cobwebs until she can see the small, metal nameplate on the front: Daniel A. Badilla.

She smoothes her fingers reverently across her father’s name, pondering. And then, with a wary breath, she opens the chest.

The air shimmers and bends, and Elena can see small, rippling waves forming in the dust in the space above the chest. The dustmites twirl around each other like sparks from a fire curling up into the wind, except they do not disappear into the air. Instead, they solidify and take shape, twisting and swirling as Elena watches, open-mouthed.

And then he is there, and he is more than a photograph.

Her father smiles at her, and Elena can feel new tears sliding down her cheeks before she even forms a coherent thought about what’s just happened. And it must be an illusion, a dream, a fevered wish she’s urged to life inside the confines of her own head. It’s a stupid instinct, but all Elena can think to do is pinch herself. Hard. She is halfway through gasping at the unexpected sharpness of her own fingernails when the sound of her father’s booming laughter stops her short. She blinks up at him, shaking her head, and his laughter fades to a small, sad smile that pulls at the corner of his right lip in just the way she remembers.

“Don’t hurt yourself, mija,” he says. For some reason, Elena thinks he should be wearing his uniform. Instead, he is in dark jeans and a faded Black Sabbath T-shirt that Elena knows is tucked away in the upper-right hand corner of her closet. Sometimes it still smells like him if she holds it close and breathes deep enough.

“Papá?” she whispers, afraid that the dustmotes will suddenly decide to scatter apart, leaving nothing but empty space. But the mirage of her father remains, and it nods. Elena blinks and pinches herself again, though she’s not sure she wants to awaken from this dream.

“It’s not possible…”

“You know better than to question what can be possible, mi amor,” her father says. He stands with a straight spine and wide shoulders, and to anyone else he might be intimidating. To Elena, he has always just been Dad. “What does your mother always say, eh?”

“Miracles are born from our faith in the miraculous,” Elena recites automatically, blushing when she sees the pride well up in her father’s eyes.

“That’s right,” he says. “My god, you’ve grown so big. Almost time for your quinceañera, no? You think your tía will run out of tears before the party ends?”

Elena snorts a little, remembering how hard her aunt had cried when her cousin Leo had finally learned to ride his bike without training wheels. Then she frowns. Tía’s eyes had been red for months and months after Dad’s funeral. Her father watches her expression carefully, reaching down to brush one of the tears from her eye. Elena feels only a whisper of his touch against her skin.

Suddenly, all Elena needs is to feel her father’s strong arms around her again. She reaches for him and he pulls her against his chest. He is not completely solid against her, his form shifting slightly beneath her fingers, but if she focuses enough, she can almost squeeze him tightly enough.

“Why is it so different?” she asks, feeling childish for asking. Of course it would be different.

Her father shrugs. “I do not know all the rules yet, mija. But I bet we can learn them together. How does that sound to you?”

Elena bites her lip the way her mother does, and the ghost in the attic does smile at the similarity. “You’ll be here? You’ll stay?” she asks.

“For as long as you need me, mija, I will stay,” her Dad promises. “But you cannot visit every day or even every week. If there are things to say, you wait until many pages have been filled, and then you can tell me all at once. Do you understand?”

Elena nods. “I understand.”

“Okay,” her father nods. “And understand this, too: you are not writing your story only for me. I will be glad to hear all about the beautiful life you create, but you must remember that you are writing it for yourself.”

Around them, the dust has begun to stir again, a breeze with no origin curling up from the floorboards and slithering around the form of Elena’s father.

“I love you, Dad. I’ll come see you soon,” Elena promises, her bottom lip quivering.

“Te amo, mi querida,” her father answers, even as he loses his shape, dissolving back into the chest in a short, tiny whoosh of air. When Elena's tears have finally stopped falling, she slowly closes the wooden chest engraved with her father’s name, walks back down the attic stairs, curls up in her bed and goes to sleep.

The next morning, Elena brings Maria up to the attic, tells her not to be afraid as she opens the chest and waits for the dust to swirl. But the air remains still, the floorboards silent. Her father does not come, and Maria does not understand what she was meant to see. Elena is too upset to tell her.

Years pass, and Elena visits her father as often as she can. Tears made from tiny specks of dust slide down his cheeks when she shows him her college diploma. On her wedding night, she insists to her new husband, Jacob, that it will be easiest to stop by her mother’s house for the extra toothbrush she’ll need on their honeymoon. There is a small coating of dust along the bottom of her wedding dress by the time she makes her way back outside and into the car. Jacob doesn’t notice, and Elena doesn’t care. She’d gotten her father-daughter dance.

Elena gets a marketing job and then a promotion, and she tells her father about it with wistful excitement. The job is in Atlanta, and she and Jacob are already packing. She promises to visit soon, that she will have stories to tell when she returns.

The fire that consumes her mother’s house four months later doesn’t leave much in its wake, but luckily Maria herself had already evacuated a few days earlier.

Elena’s first thousand thoughts are for her mother, grateful for her safety but mourning with her for all that she lost to the flames. Her next thousand thoughts are for the wooden chest in the attic, the one she knows will no longer be there. When the fire is finally contained three days later, Elena flies home to help her mother sort through whatever might remain. She insists that Jacob stay behind in Atlanta for his own newly-found job, but he takes the plane seat beside hers.

It takes a long time for Elena to end her mother’s embrace after they land, neither of them ready to see what is left standing after the fire. But Elena thinks of her father, of the now-lost pictures in the attic and the strength he always carried with him and insisted she had inside of her, too. She rolls her shoulders back, lifts her head, and leads the way.

Elena stands in the middle of the rubble, her chest aching. After hours of searching, they have managed to salvage almost nothing.

“Elena,” Jacob says, so softly it is almost a whisper. “We should go back to the hotel. We’ll come back tomorrow, okay?”

Elena shakes her head, tears welling up behind her eyes for what feels like the millionth time today. Jacob frowns and cants his head, directing Elena’s eyes over to Maria. Elena’s mother is perched on the singed remains of a coffee table in what used to be the living room. Her legs are crossed, her thin arms are covered in a layer of soot, and she is lost somewhere inside her head, staring through a matrix of support beams that used to be a wall. Elena turns back to her husband and nods in surrender, and Jacob begins making his way through the rubble to get to Maria. Elena can’t hear what Jacob says to her, but a moment later, he reaches out a hand to help her up, and she takes it.

Elena sighs and turns to take one, last look at the rubble. A glint of something on the ground catches her eye, and she bends down to retrieve it, her eyes once again filling with tears when she realizes what it is. She runs her fingers over the silver nameplate, smudging at the ash until her father’s name can be seen clearly. Behind her, Jacob is leading Maria back to the car.

“You promised,” Elena whispers to nobody but the smog-filled air, her lip quivering. “You promised that you would be here for as long as I needed you, Papá. And I will always need you.”

Around her feet, the air remains still.

It is another, long moment before she can force herself to move again, but she finally manages to make her way back to the car where Jacob and her mother are already waiting, her father’s nameplate gripped tight inside her palm. They drive back to the hotel together in silence, the air around them thick with smoke and grief. As they make their way to the elevator, Maria asks her daughter to come to her room before she goes to sleep.

“Only for a moment, mija,” her mother urges when she sees the exhaustion pulling at her daughter’s eyelids. Elena nods and follows her mother into her hotel room while Jacob opens the door to the one across from it.

Once inside her mother’s room, Elena sinks down onto the mattress. “What is it, mamá?” she asks. Maria holds up a finger. Un momento. She shuffles over to her suitcase in the corner of the room, returning a moment later with an enormous, blue book in her hands. She passes it off to her daughter.

“What is it?” Elena asks, something fluttering inside her chest as she presses her fingers into the thick spine.

“Open it,” her mother says, settling into the mattress beside her. Elena does.

She gasps, letting her fingers drift along the outline of her father’s face from where he smiles back at her from a familiar photograph. She turns the page, and then the next, allowing herself to get lost in the memories she’d thought were gone forever.

“When did you...?” Elena asks after a moment, turning to face her mother.

“The day after you left for Atlanta,” Maria answers. “One day, my grandchildren will need to know who their grandfather was. I had time to pack a small bag before I evacuated."

Elena huffs out a breath, letting her gaze drift back to the photo album. “Do you remember when I showed you that old chest in the attic all those years ago?” she asks. From the corner of her eye, her mother nods. “It was Dad. He was in there, somehow. It was some kind of illusion or magic. I visited all the time, told him about my life. And now he’s gone. He’s really gone, and I don’t know if I can stand it.”

Maria runs a hand through her daughter’s long hair. “Oh mija, he will never be gone. You know this.”

“But it’s not the same!” Elena shouts suddenly, flinging the photo album onto the floor. She rises from the bed, pacing furiously. “He was here. I could feel his arms around me!”

To Elena’s incredulity, her mother laughs. “You think you are the only one he came to see?” she asks, shaking her head.

Elena freezes. “What?” she asks.

Maria chuckles again, but it is weary and filled with sadness. “Oh Elena,” she coos. “Your father comes to me often. Asleep. Awake. In the middle of a long work shift. I can feel his fingers in my hair. I can see his lip curl around that devious, little smile of his. The ones we love always find ways of coming back to us.”

Elena shakes her head, begins pacing again. “No, you don’t understand. This was different.”

Maria sighs. She gets up from the bed, retrieves the discarded photo album. Elena watches guiltily as she returns it to her suitcase. “It has been a long day,” Maria says. “Get some rest.”

Elena nods, hugs her mother hard before she goes. In the hallway between her mother’s room and the one she shares with Jacob, Elena tries to collect herself. She breathes deeply, pulling her father’s nameplate from her pocket.

The air moves.

Elena’s breath catches, and for a moment she thinks she imagined it. But then something shifts below the surface of the hallway carpeting. The fibers of the carpet straighten and then break off from the ground, swirling out into the space in front of her, twisting around themselves until he appears as if he had always been there, as if he had never left. Elena gasps, any words she might’ve said stuttering to a stop before she can form them. Her father speaks first.

“Mija,” he says, smiling crookedly. “I thought you knew by now that it was never about that silly, wooden box.”

“Papá?” Elena whispers, choking on the words.

Her father smiles softly, reaching to brush away the fresh tears on her cheeks. “I am here, always,” he says, gesturing to encompass the space around them. “I am in the wind that curls around your hair. In the spaces between each breath you take. In the beating of your heart. I am everywhere you go, Elena, because you choose to take me with you.”

Elena curls her fingers more tightly around the nameplate, smiling through her tears. “As long as I need you?” she checks.

“As long as you need me,” he nods, holding her gaze.

“Okay,” Elena says.

“Okay,” answers the memory of her father.

The air shifts again, his form rippling and shimmering in front of her. The last of his visage fades back into the hotel carpeting. Elena smiles.

I couldn’t look away, couldn’t move no matter how many tripped over me on the sidewalk. My ten-year-old soul had been pierced by an invisible string, and I was tethered to this spot, only a thin pane of glass separating me from this wonderous creature.

She also stood motionless and silent, curves stained a dark cherry, neck long and black with four silver lines descending her front. She said nothing, but I heard her like chimes. She begged me to touch her. She promised she would sing if I did, me and no one else. All others ignored her.

But all I could do was stare.

Night draped a cold blanket on the world, and the shop owner locked up, chasing me off in the process. As I neared home, I heard shouting and entered through the broken window in the back rather than announce my presence by negotiating with the crooked front door.

Sweeping a meager handful of crumbs off the counter, I crouched behind the hole-ridden chair in the corner of our one-room shack, ate, and listened to the rhythm of the bellows. The words were different from those spoken in our town, their meaning lost to me, but the melody they wove warned me to stay hidden.

My father pleaded. The stranger wearing a soft suit demanded. Father was scared. The stranger possessed no mercy, teeth sharp like a dragon’s, mustache shaped like a bull’s horns, eyes round and dark in the shadow of a top hat’s brim.

Gentler voice gliding between the stranger’s, Father backed toward the counter. Was he aiming for our only knife in the drawer beneath the sink?

Is this the only way? I wondered, gut clenched so tight it was surely about to snap my spine. This scary man is so big. Father can’t fight him alone. Am I meant to help? Do I jump out now or wait until he has passed?

Fingers dug into my bicep and yanked me from behind the chair, my breadcrumbs flying. A hand on either shoulder, Father stood me in front of him, speaking more fervently. I tried to step back, to lean against my father, but he pushed me toward the stranger.

Arms crossed, the large man sounded dismissive and derisive, like the snap of a heron’s wing as it leaves you behind.

“Sing, my child,” Father whispered.

I couldn’t, not with my heart blocking my throat or my diaphragm hiding in my toes. I shook my head.

“You must sing,” Father hissed. “I would give you to this tycoon to pay my debt, to save my life and the lives of your siblings. He won’t take you if he thinks you’re worthless, and singing is your only skill.”

I gasped. Father was supposed to protect me, not hand me over to monsters. He told us that every night, that he would always protect us. But when danger drew near, he shoved me at the monster, both our knees shaking.

Father was a coward, and so was I.

I opened my mouth to do as I was told, but only a wheezy croak emerged, like a toad getting stepped on. The stranger scowled and hollered over my head.

Do not disappoint Father. Do not let this man hurt your family.

The words became a beat in my head, giving my heart something to follow. Slowly, it slid out of my throat, and my voice grew stronger, high and clear, like the song of a nightingale, the bird for which my mother named me: Kocho.

Father always thought it was a stupid name for a boy.

I sang of the freedom of the ocean and the wind. Of how the rain roamed but always came back again. Into the music poured borrowed emotions wrought from when my mother had sung the same song. I knew nothing of the sea beyond the stench of the harbor, yet I sang as if I had tiptoed along the crests of its waves. All I knew of freedom was running through crowded streets just fast enough to avoid being crushed by carriage wheels. That feeling, too, was knit into the music.

The song took all of me, and I didn’t notice when the shouting stopped. I fell back into reality only when the stranger’s hand clapped over my mouth. It smelled of foreign spices, skin as soft as a kitten’s fur.

He knelt, an odd glint in his gray eyes. “This shabby town is not worthy of such art. You could compete with any of the pet musicians back home.”

He threw me over his shoulder.

***

This room was thrice the size of our shack. I stood in the center, surrounded by cushioned divans and glittering lamps. The suit I wore was a miniature version of the master’s, with a short breast and long coattails, but I had grown considerably in the month since he first brought me here. The pant legs revealed my shins, and the coat restricted my breathing.

Based on the visit of a man with a measuring tape that morning, I hoped a new, larger outfit would arrive soon.

This evening, another stranger stood before me, holding a curious case. It called to me, a low hum, the purr of a cat, with the high-pitched jingle of a bell. It wanted me to open it, to set the contents free, but Master didn’t like when I opened things. When he was displeased, I received no food. When he was pleased, I had more than enough.

Even the dumbest of creatures could understand that.

So I held back, hands shaking as the call grew louder. I stared at the case, a harpoon shot through me, digging at my insides as I disobeyed its tug.

“Eyes like a starving man’s,” the newcomer chuckled, propping the case on a couch.

This must be a truly valued thing if it’s allowed to touch the cushions.

I wasn’t allowed to touch the cushions.

The man spoke more, words too fast for me to catch and squeeze the meaning out of. Master replied in kind, leaning forward on the largest of the divans, elbows on his knobby knees as the elongated case flipped open.

Breath left me.

Polished cherry wood gleamed in the flickering chandelier light, again crying for me to touch it. What started as the tinkle of a lone bell rolling across the floor grew into a cascade of chimes pouring off a balcony, each one landing on my head and ringing in my ears. I could no longer ignore the harpoon drawing me closer, my hand lifting, fingers stretched.

I stopped, frozen, the pull still loud and strong, but Master’s gaze was on me. With effort like pushing a boulder uphill, I turned my head to him, all my strength stuffed into staying still, waiting for permission.

He nodded, explaining something I couldn’t hear and wouldn’t have understood anyway.

The newcomer held the instrument out to me, telling me her name: Violin.

Tentatively, I ran my fingertips along her edges: the ridge where her faceplate met her sides, the c-shaped niches at her waist, the pins on her head, and lastly the strings. They were unique, arranged from thinnest to thickest.

The newcomer, a teacher, impatiently shoved Violin into my arms and grabbed a smooth stick lined with fine hair. Arranging Violin’s body at my chin, my left palm supporting her neck, he fit the bow into my right hand and glided it across her strings.

She hummed one note, a question: What did I want her to do?

Teacher turned me toward Master and let go. A grin tugged at my lips, and a song sizzled within my veins, smooth and quick like raindrops.

I pulled the bow back across the strings, but Violin was nervous of my touch, shy, and she sounded like a cat choking up a hairball.

Master threw a book at me, and I managed to turn, shielding my new partner.

Sing like I know you can, I begged her. Don’t bring shame to your family.

Another book hit my back, corner leaving a sting beneath my shoulder blade, and this time my pull on the bow was more insistent, more forceful. Violin cried, giving voice to the color blossoming across my back.

As my fingers flitted over the strings, she responded with new pitches, tones higher the closer my hands came to one another. The less my hands shook, the harder I gripped, the stronger her voice became, shyness vanishing, and I dared turn back to the master.

***

I stood tall, not as tall as Master, but as tall as I would ever be. In the largest room I had ever been in, floor and columns of marble, I only saw the beats in every movement. Master’s collection surrounded me, a menagerie he trusted me to master. Each of them was a part of me; their voices were woven into my blood, and my songs flowed through them.

It was said I could upstage any pet musician, but I didn’t see it as a competition like that. The more voices there were, the louder and longer we all poured everything we had into the blank, bored air, the more music won.

Silence constantly fought to crush me, and the members of my menagerie were my comrades, my armor, giving me the power to fight back.

Here in this grand hall, onlookers clapped a beat, drawing a path for the sound to follow. My fingers ran along the piano, and it giggled, voice wavering, spiraling three notes at a time, striking the bottom as a flute met my lips. With its astronomical, clear chortles, the melody returned, describing the movements of the dancers’ feet, the swing of their hips and arms.

They stopped, but the path didn’t end there, growing wider, golden and brilliant. I soaked in its radiance and channeled it through me, fingers buzzing as the flute slid back to its stand and I caught up Violin.

She sang one deep note, and someone grabbed my arm. As I stared at him, brows furrowed, someone else took Violin.

“You cannot be a pet musician anymore,” her captor said. I wanted to reach for her, but the first man’s grip on my arm was as unyielding as a statue’s. “You are free.”

I shook my head. “I just want to play music.”

“No. You must be free.” His eyes were a glittering crystal glass filled with insistence tinted dark with concern. “The new law says so. You must be something else.”

But I didn’t know how to be anything else.

***

Shoes were this factory’s business. Music was forbidden to me, stuffed and sealed inside because it would draw the wrong kind of attention. I was to let no one believe I had ever been anything but a cobbler.

Pet musicians were useless, lazy, dirty.

Yet, as my new comrades and I worked side by side, affixing soles to footwear, the beat of our hammers called to the music I tried so very hard to keep within and hidden. When I willed my toes not to tap, my leg shook, and if I leaned an elbow on it to force it still, I felt an explosion might take me at any moment.

“Boss,” a new worker said behind me as our employer led him around on his initial tour, “at your brother’s factory, a musician plays fast ditties to keep our hands moving.”

“As if I’d ever hire one of them filthy creatures,” Boss sneered.

My shoulders hitched closer to my ears.

If he knew…

“Just a suggestion,” the newbie waived, voice reedy like an oboe’s. “Maybe try it and see how production goes? Your brother’s factory does often beat you in productivity.”

I chewed on my lower lip, hammer fallen still as I strove to wear silence’s uniform. It didn’t fit me. Sometimes it was ripped to shreds when the brilliance in my veins seeped through my skin.

“You make it sound like it’d be so easy to find one. Most musicians are scam artists, and they’re harder to get rid of than fleas.”

They were almost to Boss’ office. Chance flowed through my frozen fingers.

Tell him! Tell him! the hammers whispered, and before I knew it, I stood, workload clattering on the table.

“Boss!” A rough blast from a trombone. I flinched at my own voice, shoulders trying to cover my ears again.

The boss turned. “Yes?” His eyes flitted over my name badge. “Kocho?”

My hands became wooden boards at my sides, stiffness crawling into every part of me as the hammers slowed and stopped, all eyes watching.

“I know how to play a little music.” My timbre was as soft as a harp’s, but I forced my chin level and looked at the boss. He knew I wasn’t lazy, I wasn’t filthy or a con artist, didn’t he? Would he throw me out because the blood that ran through me was tainted with sound? Because it burned within me? Because I was too weak to hold it in anymore?

It took over. I wasn’t aware of any response. Hammer back in hand, I pounded a beat as nails slid home and I sang. The inferno that had built, trapped for years with no outlet, poured into the factory. It massaged and scraped my throat, saturating the room and echoing back as ripples and waves, and I crashed through them, creating more, throwing everything I was and ever would be into the organized chaos.

One-and-two-and-three-and-four-and one-and-two-and-three-and-four.

Over and over the beat cycled, raging high and simmering low.

One-and-two-and-

Blankness took three, my arm swinging too far and clunking late on the table.

I blinked. The workload was done. There was nothing left to be hammered.

The sun had moved from its mid-morning slant to its late-afternoon blaze, highlighting fountains of dust as it streamed in the windows near the ceiling. Everyone’s piles were neatly boxed and stacked, their attention fixed firmly on me.

I dropped my hammer, its clatter giving me the beat on which to turn, a slow, tentative rotation toward Boss, who stood halfway out his fancy rolling chair. His gaze was like the stranger’s who had taken music away, spindly brows low over clear blue eyes dripping in concern.

No.

I couldn’t be a soldier for silence anymore. I didn’t believe in that fight, and it was killing me. My knees shook, and the scene blurred. Before I could fall, I ran.

All I could be was a musician. That was all the music would let me be, and if that was wrong, why was I in this world? What was my purpose?

A glint caught my eye through a shop window, and I barged in, wiping tears from my eyes. There in the corner of a dingy pawn shop, mostly covered in rags and knickknacks, Violin slept.

Scooping her up, I cradled her to my chest, back scraping against the papered wall as I sunk to the floor.

“Sir, you can’t sit there,” the counter man rebuked, glare both chiding and expectant.

Violin’s silent chimes jingled. They described the uncertain footsteps of a child drawing nearer to someone barely remembered. The closer they came, the louder the bells rang, their strength and confidence overwhelming me, towing me to my feet.

Holding Violin tighter against me, I scrambled to the counter, my last pennies dug from my pocket and pressed against the glass, their clinks reverberating through my fingertips and into my bones. Violin wanted to answer their call, to sing the song trapped within me.

“It’s worth much more than that,” the man scoffed, his spittle landing on my face. My gaze dropped to my shaking hands.

I knew it wasn’t enough. I alone knew how much Violin was worth. She was a piece of my soul, and souls were not to be bartered with. They didn’t belong alone in a pawn shop.

So I returned to the corner, leaning against the wall as I held the missing part of me.

***

As the sun burned red on the horizon, Boss stormed into the shop, a policeman at his heels. Their thick shoes spelled a heavy rhythm on the wooden floor, saying everything.

I’ll be taken away.

Panic pooled within me, igniting the fire again. I wanted to scream, anything to scare off silence’s approach. It would kill me this time. My own blood would incinerate me from the inside out.

Why can’t I release my music into the world without disturbing anyone? When did they start to hate clapping the rhythm for me? What happened? When did this blessing become a curse? When did music become a bad thing?

I hugged Violin harder, her strings protesting against my shirt, an awful, pitiable sound.

Boss knelt. “We’ve been looking for you.”

I stared, not daring to move. Could he see the fire burning in me? My eyes were dark; flames should have been easy to spot. Father used to say eyes were the window to the soul and mine only opened the door to a useless place.

Silence claimed Boss for several moments, posing him with pursed lips. I waited, cherishing what time I had left with Violin.

“Are you a real musician?”

I nodded.

“I’ve never heard anyone sing like that. You’re like a bird.” He chuckled. “And you kind of flew off like one, too. Can you play these instruments as well?”

“Yes.” I sounded like a frog, and I hated it.

I am Kocho, the nightingale. Why should I have to deny the music that weaves me?

I frowned, and Boss’ brows knit together. “Which one?”

“All of them.”

I am the master of the menagerie.

His eyes widened, then he pointed at Violin. “But that one’s your favorite?”

I let silence win one more time, but he saw the answer anyway.

Holding up a finger to tell me to wait, Boss approached the counter and spoke with the man there. Money notes were exchanged, and Boss returned to drag me out of the corner and usher me out the door.

I kept my head low, arms crossed over Violin as I concentrated on keeping beat with Boss’ footsteps. The policeman outpaced us, disappearing in the crowd on the sidewalk.

“Did you just…buy me from that shop?”

“I bought that instrument, and I’m giving it to you.” He smiled, and I didn’t have any idea what it meant.

“Why?”

“I don’t believe in magic, but I do believe in things I’ve seen with my own eyes, and I saw more get done in a few hours today than in most weeks. I think I might finally be able to beat out my brother if you come back to the factory. I’ll pay you to work that musical magic again and again.”

A new song welled within me, taut and high with hope, rich and full with purpose, one thought darting through my mind: Is this finally where I belong?

I knew part of the answer. I belonged wherever music did.

Yesterday I gathered all of Helen’s long red hair up from the marble floor and snipped it clean off with a pair of kitchen scissors. It was getting long enough to draw attention. I told the children it was cornsilk. Who knows if they bought it, but they left me alone after that, and anyway I am sick with longing. Now the piano just looks how a piano looks.

She fits inside the piano as though she were born in it. Beats all when you consider how she got there. She fell sixty stories straight into the living room. Sixty!

The children looked up and saw her shadow falling and closed their eyes and I said “uh,” and then I closed my eyes. When I opened them I saw that I had caught her in my arms, which were outstretched, held open in the shape of a cradle. Down she went ker-swoosh into my cradled arms which nearly snapped in half and definitely would have broken had I not been so full of longing.

But then out of longing I trapped her in the piano.

The piano is a Steinway. People think music can’t loom. I assure you, it can. “Who are you?” I asked her. She said, “Helen.” I said, “I don’t know how much longer I can live without you, Helen.”

Paul maybe doesn’t get the looming as much because he’s deaf as a doornail. He doesn’t play nor can he hear music unless he gets down on the ground and puts his ear to the marble floor. Meanwhile I sit at the piano every night. I sit at the bench and hover my hands over the keys, an inch above the keys at most. The children laugh. They don’t get it. What is so funny? I am full of longing and I imagine playing the piano with a supreme longing that is beyond what they can even conceive of.

Since music is forbidden I imagine music, and I imagine that music is the swell of love.

I hold my hands over the keys and I imagine love pouring out of the piano as a river and I imagine love as limestone through which the river is carved. I imagine love until the piano shakes. The children gape. Then, without fail, they put their grubby unimaginative hands on me and weep. But not with longing, which is beyond them. “Oh, dear,” they say. (They don’t know my name.) “What is that funny cornsilk-looking stuff sticking out of the piano?” They are afraid. Fear also looms. It leaves a dampness on the glass of the glass room that Paul has made for us.

Helen is in the piano now, right now as we speak, and Paul has no way of knowing. Unless I invoke one of the rules of knowing. He does not know what we know, which is that Helen is right now reaching hundreds of her invisible arms through the strings and holding the million green piano hammers down one by one with her teeth. She’s like a wild animal trapped in there, bending the music into a rage.

One day all the music Paul can’t hear will come pouring out of him and fill the little glass room in one long howl. Tears will run down my face into a bowl. Paul will stand there steaming like a bull and strike a match against his own heart.

“Why did you do it?” (Paul writes on the glass.)

I assume he means about the deafness.

One night when we were just married I set off a baking soda bomb in the bed while he slept. I don’t know why. Who knows why? He was deaf as a doornail after that.

“Because you made the room out of glass!” (I write back.)

He is clearly shocked.

So am I.

I always thought I loved the room precisely because it was made of glass. River and limestone and ash and such. Flames now threatening to reveal Helen, still trapped inside the piano.

“Because I am full of longing,” I write.

Paul climbs up on top of the piano to escape the fire of his heart and opens the bones of his rib cage one by one. Something we know and possibly have seen before will now fly out of Paul.

What will it be? He has invoked one of the rules of cages. Children, close your eyes. Don’t let it be a bird! Don’t let it be a bat! We’ll make him blind. We’ll take the light out of his eyes and throw it inside. Don’t let it be that.

Don’t let it be that.

#music #love #longing #child #piano #man #glass #knowing #child #bird #bat #cage #match #fire #ash

Summer makes me nostalgic, but for a life I never had. Imaginary adventures I only went on in books, in songs.

King, and Simmons, McCammon, Gaiman, Lumley; they drugged me, carried me out into a world that was dangerously safe. It was a hell of a lot better to fight monsters that lived on a page instead of the ones that lived across the hall and in my head.

I died, on the final pages, only to be reborn on Chapter One, of whatever book was next.

And when it was too hot to read, when I needed to let go, when I couldn’t use my brain, I drowned in music. Eclectic at best, some days it was Kershaw and Williams, some days Sinatra and Martin, and when I needed reminders that anger was beautiful too, I delved deep into Slayer, Pantera, and Lamb of God. I went on manic dance parties with rancid and the ramones, and I found heavy melancholy with Cohen.

Summer now...it has no definition, no markers to separate it from winter or spring or the abyss. It’s all just the same now, the magic is gone. We pretend like that’s normal.

”Let's talk about anything. Anything in this world, but politics, religion and her.”

I enjoy the ones who use words like paradigm and empirical.

Those folk surely have it all together

Not me, though. Little me. I’m just a rotting vegetable eating meat sack, marinating and languishing in my own juices.

Having said that, yesterday, the veins - my veins - broke through this crazy, crawling concrete skin, exiting out and snaking off in all directions, seeking something, anything to bond with other than me, their host.

At least that was the impression I got based on available evidence.

This made me quite a bit sad. Have I become so difficult to live with that my insides want to be outside?

Betrayal is not a strong enough word.

Taking stock of what was left of myself, I tried calming and centering, adopting an arbitrary approach to what was clearly an outrageous and embarrassing situation.

I spoke in thought to my evacuating innards, explaining to the tyrannic tributary traitors

that without me, they were nothing. This was a codependent coexistence and I was its front man.

Prying a pulmonary from a chair leg, I carefully folded it back inside my chest cavity, only to have the mutinous bastard work its way back through my fingers and wrap itself around the TV.

This vena labyrinth of tissue and plasma that had invaded my once living room was now a prison.

I resembled a grotesque, emaciated octopus. Or that alien from Alien 2.

I've dealt with rejection all my life, but nothing could ever prepare me for something of this magnitude

Hell, I've had the pin pulled on me by the best. Generally what happens is they walk away shaking their heads and blaming our association on either a momentary lapse of reason or alcohol or both. I never worried that much; never been big on attachment anyway.

I was an only child that was very much poisoned early on by his own company.

Never always this detached though.

The kicker was the day my imaginary friend ripped my heart out.

“Its not you, it’s me,” said Randell, as he left via a portal at the rear of my closet. I shut down that day.

Moving along.

I haven't budged from this blood soaked sectional sofa in something like 22 hours.

The veins - my veins - have anchored themselves to a variety of heavy objects, and I am pinned down and being held to ransom by my own body. A body I thought I knew well. A body that, until recently, I had no reason to mistrust.

I hate to moan, though. We all have our problems in life. This just took me by surprise, is all, and I really need a change of underwear.

I'll bounce back, no doubt. I always do, albeit anemic and pissed off. And I will extract fair revenge.

I will hammer each and every one of those traitorous scumbags with whatever low-grade heroin I can find, or I will die trying. This is personal.

Cheers

Dearest Reader,

When I picture you, you're at a desk. Hopefully you are fortunate enough to be elsewhere, like under a 100 year old tree in a part of the world where the breeze is warm, the grass needs cutting, and the feel of the bark at your back is as hospitable and trustworthy as it could be at 100 years of age. But under my suspicion, we are in someway similar to each other. It's more likely you are contained between four walls in a slightly uncomfortable chair and you freeze even at the thought of going back outside because the snow ball from hell came back from it's spring vacation, however short it had been. That being said, I guess my hope for you is that within your four walls, there is a window.

Now that I have you here, I have a confession. My name isn't Ann Cost, shocker, I know. As much as I wish it was, Ann Cost is actually a character I had created in a NaNoWriMo tribute in high school for my English class. I have now adopted the name as my pen name.

The text she inhabited only consisted of twelve pages. Within those twelve, she was daring, witty, and honestly, the best version of myself. She would sleuth along side a character named Jimmy Devly, a young writer searching for inspiration, and Morgan Gren, who was sort of a sheep, truth be told. These twelve pages were crafted in freedom because the only way my teacher could grade it was by word count. (This many words gets you a C and so on.) But the longer I wrote, the more attached to the characters I became and my mission evolved. If I was going to write, I was going to write well. 

And so I edit and rewrite. I learned I could say more with fewer more vivid words but, that left me with fewer words. I emailed it to my teacher anyway. By this time, because of my editing and rewriting, the month was over and I had to turn it in anyway. 

Feeling the weight of my grade being, for a lack of a better word, doomed, I went to bed dreading make up assignments and feeling so stupid for not just repeating what everyone else did. Which was what I thought of as very very very very lame. 

The next day I received an email. It was from Mr. Palmerton my English teacher about my NaNoWriMo assignment.

Good work. You are very talented. I enjoyed what I read.

Your grade = B

I know you were a bit short of the word count for this, but I think you deserve an upgrade. 

That was it. Having never getting praise from a teacher in my whole adolescent career before this email, it opened a window for me. I can do what I love really well and it was different. 

This is how I connect to the world, to all the people just like me in contents of their four walls. I hope for all of you that you have a window too. 

Sincerely,

Ann Cost