Sonata
The noise the piano keys made was not ugly, although a man had just fallen dead across them. Indeed, I found that black and orange jangle of notes the noblest utterance the instrument had made all night, coming as it did at the end of some trifling baroque minuet whose name neither the dead maestro nor the audience cared to recall. The concert hall was reduced to silence. The only sound (if it can be called sound) came from the mirror-like blackness of the Steinway itself, which, in its repose, seemed to zing with a kind of heartless perfection. It was inside that same blackness that, moments ago, I’d been watching the reflection of the pianist. The Maestro. He was like an oversized, top-hatted face on an old vaudeville poster, hypnotizing me, beckoning me forward until my cold forehead touched the cold piano lid… Me. It was I who had died. The fact momentarily eluded me, because, like most people, I am unfamiliar with the back of my own head. Seeing my cranium there, cheek squashed...
