Down the lawn's decrescendo, on the curb, a blocky Mercedes, older than sound. I pull behind it, drop my things like kick drums to the ground. The door opens: a chorus of can I help, what can I take? And the quarter-rests of a fight interrupted. The whole affair like a sore wrist.
He has a violinist's chin, soft but pallid, pocked, from losing a battle with teenage skin, and here is the ochre noise of his voice a can on rocks; my father's was a stone in a guitar.
So this is the new arrangement. A leitmotif that trails at her heel, that tears at every quiet measure; the whole hall hears her uneasy with the next note. This is no melody, I know, but it is the new arrangement.
When she is old and failed, her conductor's elbow fallen mutely to her side, what will she think of the first song she ever made?
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