Hotel Piano

Your lid was up when I walked in — someone left you open like a mouth mid-sentence — the fallboard propped on its own hinge. The felt is worn where middle C has taken all the weight of every song that ends the same. I sit on the bench and the bench remembers someone taller, someone who pressed the pedal down like they meant the sustain to outlast them. You hold a Tuesday someone played when the lobby still had flowers. You hold a chord that outlived the argument it scored. You hold the ring a bourbon left beside the music stand — you hold what people set on you and call it The wire inside you is the same wire that holds a vault up — tensile, patient, tuned to bear a weight it never chose. One key sticks. I press it twice to hear the effort, the small mechanical ...apology. The room hears everything and gives it back a quarter-second late — the particular silence of a lobby at this hour. You hold a scale a child abandoned at the seventh note. You hold the damper's slow release — that breath between the struck and the still. You hold the draft that finds the strings when someone leaves the door ajar — you hold what passes through you and you call it I could tell you what I haven't told the room, the ceiling, the damper, the bench that remembers someone taller. But you already know the key I keep returning to — the one that sticks, the one I press twice, the one that answers effort with effort. You hold a song I'm not going to finish. You hold the pedal's sympathy — the way a note forgives the finger that struck it wrong. You hold this hour, this lobby, this particular draft — you hold what I put down and never...