This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book “Desert Bloom” Down in the Dirt, v185 (the July 2021 Issue) Order the paperback book:

Order this writing that appears in the one-of-a-kind anthology Lockdown’s Over the Down in the Dirt May-August 2021 issues collection book		get the 420 page May-August 2021 Down in the Dirt 6" x 9" ISBN# perfect-bound paperback book:

Anamaria

Yehezkiel Faoma

    Anamaria first thought about giving piano lessons three years before their house fell into the sea. They would take place in the drawing room at the back of the house, facing the tip of the cliff where her husband fell into his death in the middle of the night. She thought the sound of the waves below that made the windows quiver ever so slightly would do good for the strings.
    The question then arose of procuring a piano. Their savings were not much and she would not sell any furniture because every piece kept the house in perfect balance. So Anamaria turned to God. After a day of fasting and prayer, she got her answer when her rosary was blown off the table by a sea breeze and shattered on the floor. A stray bead rolled across the house into their bedroom, went under the wardrobe, and nested between the covers of her husband’s journal. It contained the instructions written in a frenzy before the venom stopped his heart. First, one needs wood for the body. Anamaria took the axe and went to the copse of cypress at the bottom of the slope. Only when she had felled all of them did she realize that cypress wood was too hard for music. Returning empty handed, she noticed the willow tree in their garden, much larger now than back when the waves were still quiet. Anamaria swung her axe at the soft trunk. One year later it would line the vague shape of a piano.
    In the second year, Anamaria learned from her husband’s journal that one needs to coat the wood with lacquer. Lacking a source of sap, having felled all the trees, she opted for shellac. Anamaria took the rose that her husband had offered before he marched to war and stuck it in the soft earth of their garden. Every night a female firefly, whose hive would twinkle with joy two years later when their house fell into the sea, would find the semi-putrid nectar scent and fly into the bulb. Anamaria would pluck the insect from the glowing golden rose and ground her up with oil and water, the rumbling of the waves reverberating through her mortar and pestle. By the end of the year she had a barrelful of very shiny black lacquer.
    Her husband’s journal finally called for the strings, and Anamaria answered with her own hair. Sitting in the drawing room beside the silent piano, Anamaria looked at the tip of the cliff, which one year later would crack and fall in an avalanche of dirt and plunge their house into the swallowing sea. She twisted two long strands of her flowing hair and plucked them out, dipped the snaking threads into leftover lacquer and strung them out to age on the cliff’s edge where her husband had shot himself during an eclipse. Every time the waves struck, the ground shook and the strings reverberated with very faint notes, weaving into a hint of melody with every new strand. Anamaria would listen to it waiting for her hair to mend after picking her scalp clean. Through the months, as the waves grew more violent, the melody too had grown into a full song, engraving its notes in her bones and memory. At the end of the year the strings were ready to play and Anamaria had finished the composition by ear. She spent all day tying the strings to each key, cutting and spinning them again until each note sang like a bird.
    That night, amid a thundering storm and roaring shower, Anamaria laid her fingers on the eighty-eight black keys and began to play for the first time the song that, three hours later after the rain had stopped, was faintly heard by the villagers standing on the shattered cliff, looking down on the sunken ruins of a house as fireflies burned bright above their heads.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...