My try at this.
________________________________________________
A young man is playing at playing on a piano in bedroom of a small apartment. The notes come slow, unsure or perhaps just thoughtfully. A young woman is listening to him think while she reads at the foot of the bed. Finally, he turns to her and breaks the quiet with an uninspired "Well, what do you want to hear?"
She looks at him with wise but forgiving eyes. Again, he breaks the quiet "Anything..."
Perturbed at his insistence she replays "Anything?" and following with "Anything at all?"
Wounded at her lack of trust in his talent he defends his proposition with more detail. "Mozart, Chopin, Copland,..Anything." to put a point of it.
Rolling over to hide her face she pronounced her challenge. "I want you to write something for me, Two pages." With an idea picking up steam, she rolled back to his eye line, "but not just any two pages."
"What?" he replies, sensing the danger ahead.
She begins "In the 19th century there was a legendary French composer who wrote two pages a day and in the evening erased what he had written to start again. He had lost his wife and child when he was a young man, and he did this to remind himself of how unsubstantial life is." She touched his arm and looked into his eyes. He stared back. "Someone is here, they live and breathe and act and then they are not, and life washes away all real trace of them."
She broke his glance and reached for to pieces of musical sheets "Near the end of his life he reflected that of all the times the two pages were written and re-written, one day stood out among all the rest. That day was the second day of sunshine after a week of rain and grey skies. It was in the spring and all the expenses of the house were taken care of. He remembered that time seemed not to exist as he wrote, that the clock ticked the same tick moment after moment never advancing, never pushing him into the next minute or the next day. All of his experience, life outside and life inside, all his talent, developed and polished, and something more, of unknown origin, went into that piece, only two pages long."
He did not know if she was making this up or it was real. ""When he wrote it if course, it was just one more exercise, no more special than any other. Well, maybe a little more special. But later, thinking on those two pages he realized they were musically perfect, flawless."
She placed the paper on the piano, arranging the two empty pieces as if they were completed works being made ready to play. Then she finished him off. "Those two pages are what I want you to write for me."
She them rolled of the bed and walked into the kitchen, leaving him defeated and in shock.
Copyright John C Benson 2004
Last edited by Darth Brooks on Mon May 28, 2007 11:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
|