If you missed last year's festivities, Short Story Week is when I spend an entire week churning out never before seen (by you) material in a personal challenge to bludgeon the creative side of my brain into productivity. Sometimes it involves taking half-to-tenth written stories and dusting them off. Sometimes it's going through old files and finding limestone shards that never quite made it to my blog. And a few times throughout the week I'll probably be staring at a blank screen for a few hours; moaning, crying, and yelling at the phone until a few somewhat related keystrokes of gibberish appear courtesy of me banging my head on the laptop, which I'll refer to as 'experimental literature'.
So let's dive in with a piece that's probably a spiritual relative to The Carousel. It was going to be Caris as the protagonist, but I found that the concept doesn't work anywhere in Caris's whole life, so here instead is the stand alone version.
Playing a Glissando
It was not the divorce that continued to to grate under my skin like an allergic rash; having married a divorce attorney, I had probably been preparing myself for the inevitability ever since I threw on my wedding veil. Nor was it the fact that the alleged 'settlements' had left me in roughly the same straits I'd been in when Mr. Stipulation had promised me the moon and stars three years prior; again, the warning signs were blinking in bright neon. I had even moved past the shock of being cheated on and blamed (twice, alternately) and finding out the details from his second mistress's conscience-driven e-mail apology.
It was the fact that I was still saddled with his leftover shit cluttering up my apartment.
I just wanted him gone. I wanted everything about him erased. Every shirt, sock, sports flag, and shot glass out of my sight, mind, and life forever. It had likely been this sense of desperation that had provoked me into signing my name to an 'agreement' that I would return every one of his belongings to him. Myself. No help from him. Unharmed. Not in the pile of shredded and burnt fabric from which I would have taken so much recompense in depositing on his doorstep.
For months I'd been making special trips to and from his downtown office, cramming my tiny car with whatever would mostly safely fit, and dealing with his instructions on where and how to carefully set and fold every single item in my possession once I'd delivered them. No, I couldn't just drop off the packages. I was under a damned contract that required me to lay everything out for inspection before the bastard would sign off on them. And just to add fuel to his amusement, if anything from his extensive list turned up damaged, his law firm would be charging me for the sum of everything. I swore I would never write my name on anything ever again.
The coffee table had eaten up my remaining sick day, as I'd had to tie it to the top of my car and lug it at 15 miles per hour in the middle of the night when traffic was light enough. Counting both times the police stopped me to make sure I wasn't high, that trip took four hours. And then my ex arrived at his office an hour and a half late; I could tell from his expression that he'd done it on purpose. I didn't make it into work that morning.
I was one obstacle away from finally ending the ordeal, but it was a leviathan. That damn piano. I don't know why he bought it or where it came from, but the week before I'd had a heavenly dream about taking an axe to the thing. That had been my last night of decent sleep, because ever since then I'd woken up from nightmares about having to push it down the street.
See, in addition to all of these other enduring attachments to the enthusiastic split, my ex husband had seen fit to instill a deadline on the process. My sweet dream was on the eve of what I thought would be the end of it, a full week before his self-imposed cutoff date. And when the moving vehicle I reserved turned out to be a hitch trailer capable of transporting...I don't know, a sheepdog? I was none too jovial with my comment card.
I had to reschedule. And getting a proper sized set of wheels sent to the piece of shit outlet to which I had access was going to take a week -meaning: I would be dropping this damn piano off on the last damn day of this damn contract or get dragged into another damn court battle to deal with whatever amusing hoop Mr. Attorney at I-don't-even-know-how-to-play-the-damn-piano could devise for me to leap through.
The morning-of came and I'm quite sure I didn't sleep. I may have passed out for a few minutes here and there, but overall my brain wouldn't shut up. I wound up driving to the outlet an hour earlier than I was scheduled, in hopes that I could get this all taken care of before the sleep deprived hallucinations set in. There was nobody there when I arrived, and I waited.
And waited.
I'm not sure when my creeping sense of doom caught up to me but I began to take note of the realization that I wasn't seeing any kind of movement from within or outside of the office. I didn't want to get out of my car, so I let it roll forward until I could make out the handwritten ink on the piece of cardboard taped to the front door. 'Out of business' it said. I may have bitten a piece off of my steering wheel.
I was in tears by the time I reached my ex-husband's office, with mascara I'd forgotten to remove the previous evening now dripping down my cheeks. As I'd predicted he wasn't there (it was a Friday after all), but I wasn't there for him. I was there to see Kent, the mechanic who had set up show across the street from him.
Kent and my ex had been friends since before I'd fallen into the picture. And as such Kent and I did not share any affection. But my ex had granted Kent the third party power to oversee any of these numerous transactions in his absence, and I'd been seeing quite a bit of Kent in recent weeks.
My poor car groaned at the steep hill that led from the street to his service area, and I'm sure the familiar sound drew his attention because he was outside my driver's window before I noticed him. Kent took one look at my appearance and let out a gleeful snort, which only made me hate him more.
"Kent?" I tried to sound scolding, but my voice quivered. "I HAVE to get that piano out of my home."
"It sounds like you've got a problem then," he chuckled.
"Please?" I swore I would never ask him for help, but I was beyond the point of keeping promises to myself. "I can't do this anymore!"
He nonchalantly retrieved my ex-husband's final document from his desk and handed me a pen. "He says all you have to do is leave the piano in one piece in his office lobby and you're in the clear."
"I can't GET the piano here, Kent! I've tried!" I was sobbing now. I started explaining what had happened that morning, but he was taking too much amusement in my plight to really listen to the details.
"Here-" he interrupted me, tossing a set of keys in my direction that I promptly dropped. Kent pointed to a fairly large pickup truck that he'd apparently been working on for someone. "I didn't see you borrow it." And with that, he was back in his office enjoying whatever phone call I'd made him put on hold.
This was the kind of truck that scared the hell out of me as a pedestrian. Now that I was fully covered behind the wheel of one, I was petrified. I'm quite sure I was taking up multiple lanes and the occasional sidewalk, and it's a wonder I didn't get pulled over. Maybe even the police were afraid of the tank I was driving. I actually wouldn't have put it past Kent and/or my ex-husband to report the vehicle as stolen just for their own entertainment. But I managed to get the parade float home with no sign of having run over any hybrids. And when climbed down from the seat there were no flashing lights nearby which granted me relief, a feeling I'd nearly forgotten.
Getting the piano into the back of the truck had also been a culmination of karmic pity, as the construction workers down the street chose my near-breakdown as their bid for angel wings. They lifted the 88 keyed monster up like it was a trust fall exercise and tied it off with bungee cords. Twenty minutes later I was back on the road.
I drove slowly. I would have given anything to just floor it and be done with this chapter of my life, but I needed to get the piano there undamaged.
That damn piano.
I noticed every time I hit the slightest imperfection in the street I got a response from the thing in the back. A discordant collection of notes, almost in protest. Even if I couldn't feel the vibrations of the potholes all the way up in the cabin of the monster truck, the piano let me know it was displeased. And each time one of those chords struck, it startled me. I thought, did one of the legs just break?
I had to keep pushing away the compulsion to stop the truck and check on my passenger, no matter how many times it called for me. I sort of wondered how much more stressful transporting a live jaguar would have been. Even turning up the radio didn't drown out the snarling of the beast in the back.
The worst one was the hill to Kent's service area. I think all 88 keys sounded at the same time, and I jumped. "Please don't fall out the back," I whispered twice. My ex-husband, in his infinite foresight, had neglected to rent an office with any kind of parking lot. There was his front door, the street, and the driveway up to Kent's. I wasn't going to park an arguably stolen vehicle three blocks away while I pushed the massive instrument across multiple intersections.
So naturally I pulled up to the service area, and there was no Kent. He'd put up his sign claiming to return by three in the afternoon. I just stared at it, harboring some strange hope that I could will the sign away. But, no. The sign was there. And I knew he'd done this on purpose, just to hit one last nerve with me. I slowly drew in the deepest breath of my life and screamed "Son of a BITCH!" holding onto the last word like it was the final note of the opera. Eventually my lungs gave out, thus confirming I hadn't the raw power to shatter the glass of windshields with my voice.
Fury led to determination as I resolved to get the damn! damn! damn! piano out of the truck on my own. I had two problems: getting the piano moving, and not dropping it out of the back. I came up with one solution for both: Kent's hydraulic lift.
I pulled the truck's front tires into the service area and put on the emergency brake. Then I got out and went over to Kent's control panel (that he always left operational, because he's a moron) and activate the switch that operated the lift. Kent's lift moved slower than those of more professional mechanics, and that gave me plenty of time to initiate phase two of my plan. If I could get the truck at enough of a slope, the tailgate would touch the pavement. Then I could undo the bungee cords and gravity would take over. It sounded so simple in my sleep-deprived head.
I was surprised when the giant keyboard didn't so much as flinch once I'd freed it from its restraints. The truck was at enough of an angle now where I should have gotten some kind of reaction. And so, like a dumbfounded Wile E. Coyote, I started testing the wheels to see if they had a kind of locking device.
In retrospect, the wheels may have built up a little bit of rust over time, but that didn't occur to me then. But then the impossible chord struck again as if a wild animal was waking up, and I jumped back. For a second, the damn piano and I just looked at each other. And then whatever had prevented the wheels from rolling gave in, and the ivory remains of elephant tusk lunged for me.
A stream of profanity poured from my mouth, quickly devolving into gibberish, as the instrument scooped me up like an amateur matador and carried me down the concrete hill. The street traffic was kind and sensible enough to form a crosswalk for me while I wrestled against traction with my shoes. Gravity was clearly on the piano's side, but I was not going down without a fight. I struggled, and I think the rubber on my shoes was burning. And right when I reached the door of the law office, I apparently did something impressively agile. I spun at just the right time and wedged both feet against the wall, my adrenaline absorbing all the weight of the runaway piano.
Everything came to a standstill. And then I heard the shattering of metal. And somebody in a car started yelling. I didn't want to look, but I couldn't block out the knowledge that I had left the hydraulic lift running.
The truck was almost vertical now, and the front end had torn the roof of the service area off of its support. It landed on the pavement where I was hoisted by the piano like a judo flip, and the truck rolled backwards on top of it. And it started sliding down the hill.
There was only one thought in my head, save the piano. You know that condition where moms can lift cars off their children? I must have tapped into it somehow, because I pushed the bane of my existence out of the oncoming headlights just as they smashed into my ex-husband's office door and continued on into his hallway.
You know the funny thing? I hadn't figured out how I was going to get the piano in one piece through his door. I hadn't even thought about it until that moment. But leaving it in his office turned out to be much easier than I would have expected.
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