{This is one of my favorites out of all I’ve ever written. Please enjoy.}
The concert hall is dark. And empty. This year, not one soul will watch his performance. One footstep sounding, firm and determined, echoes up and down and through the darkness. Then another, slow and deliberate, as he stalks to the center of the stage. With an elegant flick of his wrist, the violin is resting beneath his chin. For a moment his eyes blink, then they close. His face is peaceful as he lifts the bow to delicately balance a hairsbreadth from the strings. A single spotlight focuses on him, dim, transforming his face into a craggy outcrop, dark with the infinite shadows of things that will never be. His shoes do not gleam. Not as they used to. Long ago, his clothing was immaculate, perfectly tailored. New. Now his shoulders have narrowed, his legs are sticks, and his shabby suit sags and hangs from his emaciated limbs. But he can never stop playing. Flourishing his bow above the string, he opens his eyes. For a moment his face is animated with a strange joy, and his eyebrows lift in anticipation, and his entire body is vibrant with energy, like a taut bowstring ready for battle.
It is an oasis in a howling desert. The nearest town is miles upon miles away. Vaporous clouds float across a distant horizon, but here the sky is white canvas pervaded by an angry sun, turning the land into a stifling oven. The oven is sometimes silent, sometimes roaring with wicked winds, cackling away on their path to greener lands.
None remember Maria’s coming. Alfonzo and her husband are dead now. People say she was a dancer, a ballerina. Rifling through old magazines, her picture appears now and again, that saucy, upturned nose, dark eyes, and flirtatious grin, and you can almost smell the silk and flowered opulence of a dressing room. Why Maria chose to leave that life is a question difficult to answer. Perhaps it was a scandal, perhaps an injury, or her husband’s will that spirited her to the desert to restore a ruinous inn and keep house among coyotes and scorpions.
But there were always people in her mind, faces floating in seas of whirling color, who she could not forget. There were dances in her legs, a longing to perform before the rich, to seize back her poignant power of reducing the most hardnosed New York baron to tears. A strange forcefulness entered her actions. Faces were everywhere, faces of her former managers, lovers, and rivals. They leered at her from the ceiling at night as she lay awake, listening to the sounds of the desert.
One morning, her husband awoke to find the bed beside him empty. Panicking, he rushed through the long building, slamming open the doors of every room. Maria was gone! He ran into the open courtyard at the front of the inn.
“Maria!” his voice cried out, sounding weak in the vastness of the desert.
“Maria! Alfonzo, come here!” he yelled for the handyman. “Maria!”
Alfonzo appeared silently, melting from the shadows to stand in his dirty overalls beside Jeff.
“Jeff. Maria is in the playhouse. There is something strange. . . .”
“What on earth!” muttered Jeff, jogging through the dust of the courtyard to the tumbledown block of a building across from the hotel. It had been a theatre years ago. With a slam he threw open the door, which creaked, throwing a bucketful of dust on his head from above. But all Jeff saw was Maria. Her tangled hair spread across her shoulders, loose and dusty. She was in her nightgown A candle lit her way as she painted the walls with graceful strokes of her bare, white arms. She was painting – Jeff stumbled over the descending steps from the doorway – what was she painting? He peered at the candlelit walls. Faces. Myriads of faces. Maria continued painting as he gazed at them, walking around him like he was a piece of furniture. Jeff noticed her indifference with annoyance.
“Maria.”
She turned her face, pale with dark circles under her eyes, to him at last, a halo of glittering dust moving in currents around her cloud of black hair. There was a streak of red paint on her cheek. In the morning sunlight streaming from the open door, her pupils contracted to pinpoints. Jeff could not find words. He took her in his arms, but she slipped away and returned to her painting.
Months passed, and Maria painted on and on. Because Maria refused to leave the playhouse, Jeff fixed it up with air conditioning for the day and heating for the cold desert nights. He brought her meals, set up a bedroom backstage, and replenished her paints.
The first day Maria’s paints ran out, Jeff found her slumped on the steps of the stage amid a mosaic etched in the thick dust.
“The pictures won’t stay,” she whispered, holding up her dusty fingertips in a gesture of despair. “They disappear when I stroke their faces. They leave me.”
Jeff set down her meal, told Alfonzo to watch her, and drove to the city, four hours away.
Maria was sleeping soundly on the stage amid her dust drawings when Jeff returned with the new supply of paint. A blunt pain hit him at the sight of her sleeping form, a pain that pierced through the numbness that had appeared the fateful day he found her in the playhouse. He took a deep breath, inhaling dust and coughing, his eyes watering as he tentatively ascended the steps. For a long moment he stood silently, staring down at Maria, paints cradled in his arms like a child. Tears splattered the dusty stage, washing away the silhouette of a leaping ballerina. Then he dried his eyes on his shirtsleeve, gently set down the paints, and left. As he walked out into the cold, desert night, Maria awoke with a start from a dream of swirling faces, grasped the paintbrush resting by her fingers, and began to paint.
In a swift moment he attacks, his lined face speaking the unspeakable, those glittering eyes keen and dark. Music rolls like thunder with an agonizing sweetness from the center of the storm, a thin, long legged, raggedy figure with a scraggly beard, a tormented face, and a violin.
With each note, if they could even be called notes, a bit of dust falls from the ceiling. Soon he is as white with dust, and his instrument’s strings are choking on their own voices. Soon whole chunks of the ceiling are roaring down to land with crashes on the empty seats of the concert hall. Yet he plays on. The music must not die.
There are now gaps in the ceiling, and one can see the sky in its indifference. One would think the very stars would be shaking, but they look down upon the scene with their usual benignity. Call them foolish to their faces, for the stars are so fat in their plenty that they do not see their own doom.
Before the first movement of the shattering is up, the concert hall is nothing but ruins. The skeletal figure, a ghostly figure, a white spider with strong fingers and a shaking wrist stands alone on the horizon.
The rest is of profound silence. The violinist lifts slowly the bow above the string. It lands, not with a thrumming or richness, but with a whisper. Alas, stars. A flash lights the sky as the first one falls. A queer, slow smile spreads across the violinist’s face. He draws his bow across the string in a single, tremulous note.
His work is done. He takes a bow. The applause is deafening as the entire sky collapses in a sea of rushing light. Raising his hands above his head, he bathes in the pre-collision nebula. In a moment, he is overwhelmed. Music is his life. Music is his death.
That’s so good, Amelia! I wish I could read your short stories for school; they are better written than most of the one I have to read, and they are much more enjoyable 🙂
Missing you,
Faith W