Music

In this old house there were ghosts, some old and some new. Some of them I knew, some I did not. One lurked in a hallway and could go nowhere else because something had happened there and there the thing was, like creeping mold, a swirl in mahogany, a fray in the wallpaper. Another crouched in a corner at the bottom of the basement stairs. One glowered morosely behind the purring furnace amid boxes of forgotten, worthless stuff. In that house I found as well a heart. It was a heart that could only be summoned by a pressing of the proper keys. No, not a pressing. A caressing. At the piano, I called out to the heart and the heart responded according to the touch of my fingers. Together, we activated living things, called them into the dead silence of the world, living things like yearning, and grief, and love, and glory. This old house sang for hours on end. And in that time, the ghosts would emerge, and drag their chains toward the sound of the singing, weeping, beseeching, soaring, joyful thing. They made the hair of my neck stand on end. What did they want? What other than to be free? In those times, according to that music, every prison door flew open, and that old house itself shattered from within, and there was no longer a wall or a beam or a root top remaining, but the stars shone unfettered overhead like a million piercing beacons.