It feels like it’s been minutes, but the wall clock tells me otherwise. I can hear it now, ticking and ticking, counting down the time I have left. Each tick grates at my brain, fraying at my nerves.
The keys are warm under my fingers, but I’m shivering. Everything, all the warmth in me has drained out, has bled into these little strips of black and white, leaving me hollow. But they are always greedy for more.

They stare up at me now, a mosaic of stark black against white, wanting…no…demanding more. Like weeds sucking the life out of soil, they are parasites.

I’ve given you everything! It’s on the tip of my tongue as I set my fingers in the beginning position again. By now I can find it with my eyes closed and spinning like a top. What more do you want?

But I begin again, out of habit more than anything else. It’s a vicious cycle, play, stop, and then start over. But I have to. As I play my piece again, I can hear the jarring notes, the times when it lags behind and I have to run after the piece playing catch-up. The chords just don’t seem to fit; always one finger out of place like the last piece in Jenga before it comes crashing down. It’s like I finish a puzzle, but one piece is missing. I search and search, under tables, in couches but it never resurfaces and I have to leave it with a glaring hole. It’s that infuriating, almost perfect, taunting me with a taste of heaven.

It’s not perfect yet, and it has to be perfect I tell myself. Just one more try. Even though I’m ready to scream, I force my fingers back on the keys, my white cold fingers and give even more.

I try to pour out my soul into the song like Grandfather says I should, I try until it hurts, but maybe my soul just isn’t the pouring kind. Maybe it’s more like hardened cement and what was supposed to sound like beautiful legato notes, contrasting short little staccatos, sound like chaos. Somewhere, I can hear sharps that aren’t supposed to be there and every time I fix them, they pop up somewhere else in a never-ending game of Whack-a-Mole.

Clenching my hands I hit the keys until my knuckles are black and blue, ignoring the pain. Hot tears leak out of my eyes, despite my best efforts to bottle them up. I build dams and they break. It was useless to even try; stupid to think I could get into this academy, I think as a sob spills over my lips. I work and work, give it everything and for what? My stomach churns murderously and I grab for the trashcan. It wasn’t perfect so what was the point? I’d cooked up a failure. A big burned failure, so bad that I should just give up and throw it out.

“Grace?” My dad’s tall shadow fills the doorway. The ceilings in our old colonial have never been high enough for his six-three, so he has to stoop to get in, especially up here in the attic space.

“What?” I ask, keeping my back to him so he won’t see my angry red eyes and know what I’ve done. I don’t want his pity, but I struggle to hold it all inside. It’s like trying to hold water in your hands.

“Honey, maybe you should stop now?” There it is his pity and I want to throw it right back at him. I’ll stop when it’s flawless, I want to yell, but I swallow my words. They go down my throat, hot and pointed and just as angry as they came.

“Yeah, I’ll be down in a minute.” I say because that’s what he wants to hear, and my fingers are already on the keys before he bends over to get out the door.

Dad hugs me. “It sounds great.” He tells me because he’s a parent and he has to say that. I bow my head, his blind praise bringing more tears. Why did he push me up on hollow applause when it just gave me further to fall?

But I hear my playing and it will garner me no praise, no applause. All it will ever get was an empty auditorium and a letter saying we regret to inform you….

I wait until I hear him yell at Mabel to get her toys off the stairs. For some reason only eight-year olds can understand, her dollhouse has to be built on landing in the stairwell and nowhere else can suffice.

The piano beckons again, like some sick sweet drug that I can’t bear to part with, even though it’s killing me for fear of the withdrawal. My reflection flickers in the plastic covering my binder. My skin is sallow; not having seen light in days. Time is flexible in here like silly putty; it stretches and balls up, minutes become hours and hours become minutes. Gray crescents seem to rise under my eyes, and when I shut my eyelids, I can see a growing moon, with a thick dark side. My lips are still stained from the last time I’d thrown up. But my stomach is still rolling in waves of nausea and I pull the trashcan closer.

Fighting the sickness, I pull out my sheet music, The Fall of Angels, which I chose because of its beautiful notes that start at the highest chord and slowly plummet down.

I’ll come out in a few minutes. I think, being like a little kid innocently asking for just one more cookie. Just one more run-through.

But that one grows, turning into two and then three, and finally I just give up and begin the cycle again, chained to the piano by fear of breaking the cycle.

It will be perfect! I tell myself, because it has to be. My sister Izabel has a talent and so does my brother. So I have music and that’s fine with me. I can see the beauty in the rubatos of Chopin pieces or an ornate Baroque playing style, where as my sister loves absurd things like balancing equations. I don’t understand Izzy’s insane delight with chemistry, and I don’t expect I will. What matters to my mother is that she’s good at something. Will any of them care if I’m not talented anymore?

When I was little, Grandfather had a beautiful Steinway piano; literally one of the best money could buy. He was a composer and I used to hide behind the tall planters in the room, which were more than adequate to conceal a little five-year-old, while he played. In Grandfather’s hands, music leapt off the page, a kaleidoscope of pitch and tempo and style. It was like being in the eye of a maelstrom full of music, being awash in a sea of song. You stood in the middle and watched the music become tangible, like the northern lights or ocean currents and you could feel it, not with your fingers, but with your soul. I’d hide there, as he played, not able to move, lest it disrupt the music.

But eventually all good things come to an end and he did find me in my little nest. Instead of scolding me for eavesdropping on a private moment, he took me up into his lap and put my chubby fingers on the keys. “This, Gracie” He said “Is middle C. Everything in music starts with middle C.”

After that, out came the piano lessons and music classes. My mother was over the moon at having another talented daughter. Gushed about me all the time with a ridiculously smile only a parent could pull off plastered on her face.

Grandfather’s decided to come down from his camp up in the Adirondacks for my recital. I got the letter just a few weeks ago. It’s rare that he ever leaves his little camp, claims that it’s better for his creative juices. He tells us every time that we come up, that he’s seventy nine and he’s earned the right to have people bend over backwards for him.

Thinking of the first time I heard him play, I set my fingers to the keys once more. I can barely make it through the first page without dissolving into tears, and by the second I slam my hands down hitting the keys abruptly. His disappointed face looms in front of me, and I clench my eyes shut. But its like trying to stare into the sun and a shadow of him haunts me even behind my eyelids.



Without even thinking, I knock down the picture of my grandfather so he won’t see the beast that is straining to burst out of my chest. The picture, which had been lined up perfectly on my obsessively neat piano top, plummets to the ground. The sobs I make have wretched my throat raw and they come in hics and bursts. I scream into a pillow, and press it against my face until I can’t breathe.

Once, I asked Grandfather if someone could die from holding her breath. He considered it for a second shaking his head, saying your body would force you to breathe. But now I wonder if I can.

The thought scares me, and I throw the pillow against the wall. My heart is a grenade with the pin out. A beast on a rampage consuming everything that it can.

I don’t know how I get in the corner, but I do. My temper and tears quiet, but shame hits me full force. I’m cowering in a corner ready to give up. Somehow, Grandfather’s picture has managed to stand itself up on the floor and his kind smile and eyes see right through this ghost of a girl. What would he do? What would he say?

I get up hollowly, all brittle bones and empty spaces and begin to play again. It’s my six stages of separation, my five steps of grief. I play like a statue, looking ahead, all from muscle memory. I hear the horribleness, but I keep playing to make it that elusive finish line.

I will not cry. I will not cry. I will make it through. My mantra keeps me going until the end of the song. But it doesn’t keep their disappointed faces at bay.

Clapping, rich melodious applause flows from the door. Izzy is there, in all her 5’11 glory holding up her phone. Her black curls fall to nearly her waist, a curtain she carries with her. “That was amazing Grace!” she says, and I know she’s mocking me. After all, this is Izzy who concocted up itching powder in our bathroom sink. A watermelon smile is curled across her face, her teeth so white it’s blinding.


“Shut up.” I tell her, “It’s terrible.”

Her smile doesn’t fall, doesn’t crumple like a soda can. She looks at her phone for a second. “You really can’t hear it, can you?”.

My song flows out of her speakers, a bit grainy and fuzzy, but still my song. For a minute, I’m back in Grandfather’s cottage listening to him compose this. I am five again, listening to him play from behind a plant.

The tempo and note problems are noticeable because they are missing. The song is perfect. I’ve achieved that fickle mistress that is perfection. “It’s sounded like that every time you’ve played it Gracie.” Izzy tells me and I wonder if I was just imagining those notes. Were they really wrong or did the stress and lack of sleep finally get to me? Somewhere along the line, did I break somewhere? I’d been feeling so sick, so horrible, could I have made myself so nervous that I’d start hallucinating?

I thank Izzy and she flounces down the steps, a prima ballerina. I gather up my things and leave this room behind me. I don’t need it anymore. Like all good things come to an end, all bad things have to too.

My step is jubilant, feet popping off the ground like it’s a hot day on a black road. I am lighter now; my shoulders are no longer bowed from the weight of the anxiety they were carrying. The stairs come two at a time, down another before I’m at the first. I have to tell my parents, to see the look in their eyes when they realize. See it warm their black depths into loving browns like camps in the Adirondack woods. All my worries are weightless, dust flying behind my coattails floating away to bother someone else. I can almost see Grandfather’s face so full of—

A blink of an eye. A click of a camera. A breath in and out.

My foot hits something hard, but that’s an afterthought, already behind me. Somewhere I see the florid pink of Mabel’s dollhouse tipped over. My breath is knocked out of my lungs, replaced by the acrid burn of shock and adrenaline. It whistles away, flying like birds migrating south. Spiked panic, not unlike the hit of a drug courses through my veins setting the sleeping beast in my chest on fire.

My mind is three steps behind me, barely comprehending the rush of colors and pieces that are so fragmented and disjointed that I can’t put them together before they are chased from my brain.

I am flying. I am bird, flying high above mundane pitfalls like imperfection and failure. I am almost at the clouds reaching…reaching.

But I fall, plummeting back to earth. Eventually everything submits to the never-ending march that is gravity. Inkblot bruises blossom across my torso and legs. My hands, which I’ve thrown out of blind fear, are caught between merciless ground and me. In a minute of pain so sharp it makes everything look hazy, something rips from my chest. A scream that sounds so animal, nothing held back. A wretched sound like nails across a chalkboard. My throat is killing me as if someone is scraping it with sandpaper. Through the veil of bloodcurdling sound, there is a definitive snap.

Pain makes everything hazy. Somewhere I can hear the ticking of a clock marching on oblivious to my injuries. Through the fog, I see my mother full out sprint towards me. That, if nothing else tips me over into panic. Never, not once in my life has my mother run like that. It’s a mad blinding sprint, arms flailing, all sense of decorum and poise lost.

She slides down next to me, screaming for my father who’s already emerged from the basement, smelling like chips and beer.

“Jane call 911!” He yells, and I can practically smell his fear. Dad grasps my hands and they burn white hot. Wildly I scream, forcing him drop them. He is whispering that it’s going to be all right.

But I know its not.

Because my hands are broken.