Weekly Writing – September 30 2023

The piano was a more gorgeous inheritance than Tabitha had ever have expected from her grandmother, stout as an oaken castle, gilt with golden fairies and petals in mother-of-pearl. It barely fit in the combined dining and living room of her apartment, looming over her card table and ratty secondhand sofa with what certainly felt like her grandmother’s disapproval.
She hadn’t visited that stern old mistress of her bloodline as often as she should have in the latter years, but still, she was very close to certain that she’d never seen this piano in her grandmother’s spacious parlour or pristine, almost entirely unvisited suite of guest rooms. It must have languished for all those years behind one of the doors always locked, buried under sheets or dust and its one condition.
One song she was never to play on it. The card tucked under the piano’s lid, slashed through with her grandmother’s fierce handwriting, had been very clear about that. One fairly simple tune, which she might have been able to play by ear even so many years after her last childhood piano lesson.
It did feel like just the sort of way her grandmother would have soured a gift. A new doll, but only to admire on a shelf, never to play with. A box of chocolates, but only because a sigh of disapproval made it clear she’d already ruined her figure anyways. Nothing around that strict silver woman, taking on tarnish herself the last time Tabitha had seen her, had ever been allowed to be just good.
The piano had come with an equally pretty little stool. She could likely have sold them both for enough to move to an apartment that would have had room for them.
Perhaps she would. But, for the moment, she settled herself on the stool, squarely in front of the polished white keys, the way her grandmother would have scolded her into doing. The stale, mean silence of her apartment dared her to break it with anything as beautiful as music.
The piano dared her to try to make it sing. But not that song. Why not that one song?
Just so that nothing could ever be just good? Maybe she would play it. Just to prove otherwise, to break that spiteful little lock her grandmother had tried to place on her inheritance. Then she would do whatever she saw fit with the piano afterwards.
She placed her fingers on the keys. They still knew their places, more naturally than she would have imagined. Perfectly poised, her back as straight as her grandmother’s had still been the last time she had seen her.
Despite the silver and tarnish and the long, long years of tarnishing everything around her. Perhaps Tabitha should have been grateful for this peace offering from beyond the grave.
But she was alone in a stale, mean little apartment, and her grandmother’s card still seemed to glare at her through narrowed cursive where it lay on the card table. So she tilted her foot to rest against the rightmost pedal, where she would need it for just the last lingering note, and began to play.