Bird Songs WIP

I sang like a bird; nothing natural, my voice was sand-papered to round off the pointed edges of once unreachable keys and stretched until it swung around the room with the strength and certainty of a robin in flight. My teacher said I always had the capability but was lacking the desire.

Oh, yes. My teacher.

He was very old and very Italian, to say the least, a shadow of a tenor that had long since dimuendoed from its vocal peak. His hands had learned to outplay his voice and he played the piano with more skill and primordial intensity then anyone I will ever hope to meet. Kindness was sparse; old men aren't always "cute". He certainly didn't want to be.

"Straighten up, stolto, I am not teaching little girls to stretch out their necks like geese!"

"What was that? You express as much emotion as a board of wood!"

Things of that nature.

You see, angry men have angry pasts, and he wasn't any different, though he pretended to be. He hated the sight of red roses—I learned this on one of his most disastrous birthdays—and he played Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" whenever it rained.

He was always very distant when it rained…

I was a fidgety, duck-like little girl who only sang because her mother wanted her to. There is something overbearing about mothers and their desires; as daughters we're forced to remind them the difference between loving and puppeteering.

Little girls aren't much for bravery, though, and I never had the heart to tell my mother any different.

Sometimes, when I felt sneaky, I'd tiptoe out, pianissimo, in the early hours of the day to listen to him play the piano in the foyer. I didn't know it then but my mother was poor; He was poorer. I didn't know where he slept. I didn't remember that he had a family. He simply seemed to exist, playing piano at five in the morning with crooked fingers and a receding hairline.