Dampers

The Attendant Spider Ushers in A Very Small Fly by Bill

Fall, you say. One last tickle. A grand sound full of the dust of stars. Dying and sad swinging in the middle of the room, glaring at the ring of the telephone, a sound like an angel disguised as us.

The way I feel under your command.

Fingers might have once been enough. We could have been free long before this, now all we have left is the waiting. The long and terrible waiting, like the mail too slow and all of a sudden gone left unfilled with nothing but a senseless card, giving away soap, or sugar. Better it were woad, or a sword. Lips might have once called us home, and all the words I cannot say because I left them with you could have opened the door. And there is no sound left with the power we need.

The head of the hammer drags across the floor, and the head strikes the strings somewhere in the belly and we can no longer afford to lift this awful sweet sword but the hammer we somehow get up even as we stagger under the weight and once more the ending has arrived, the concert is done and over with the doors closed and staggering barely able to see we cut ourselves stumbling in the wreckage as the rumbling final notes roll away through the dust, waiting again, waiting now and then and forever except we can bear it so long as it sit aside your indignity, because we know you have nothing to say, no other critique, except that it took too long.

***

Instrument by Forrest

The brothers, selling their next-to-last piano before Berlin fell, found better peace in a nest of spiders playing inside what remained of the last. It had never been used—a showroom-only model the elder treated as a souvenir snowglobe, growing fond of it over the years from its uselessness, while he regarded the younger inseparable from his ledger, knowing there was nothing to write in it. He had meant to ask him about that. For as long as they could remember, the elder lived in the room a floor above the piano while the younger kept the basement; and, with both closely equidistant to it, the piano held them in fixed orbit while the building crumbled, each withholding entreaty from the other, When do we sell? It was not to be a question. It was the first and last thing they saw each and every day, and it made the brothers forget they were the last person they saw before retiring. In the dark they watched them, even scurrying across the ceiling. It's good, they both thought separately, there are still spiders he cannot see. Some would fall upon his brother from slender threads, they both knew, failing to sense the tautness apart from a joy dampened in another room.

***

The Last Thing to Go by Alan

The last thing to go before one leaves this plane is sound, they say. First the vision. Then the touch. Then smell. Then taste, believe it or not. One would think taste would go much earlier.

They say one can hear the passing as if in a wind tunnel. As if cupping the ears when concentrating really hard. That’s when a slight tap behind the skull can be become thunder. That’s when the avalanche starts. And then one thing ends while another continues.

For some, it’s as if some aged instrument remained in an empty room, the house vacated. The note still reverberates. Over and over. And the instrument, too heavy now to be lifted, staid but never quite finished.

***

The pianist had had enough by Lyle

He'd taken his lumps because the pay was good, but the lobby got more crowded and fewer people came to see him until he was under the stairs, the plashing of the fountain drowning out the tinkling vestige of himself (not to mention Chopin) leaking out around the balustrade and perhaps, he mused momentarily happy, lifting a rich woman's short skirt. His fingers began to slow, where they should have, to be sure, but did not pick up again. This last thought, crackling vaguely through his brain, melded with the final ping as he let his finger rest on the key and exhaust itself.