The Cellist

She plays cello by the dead, you know.

You wouldn’t really know it if you glanced at her, actually. A bit too young to be middle-aged, a bit thick around the middle, and the area around her dark eyes a bit absent of too many laugh lines. Bits of lots of things, truthfully, pasted and pressed into a woman-mould.

If you look at her hands, though, you’d start to suspect something wasn’t quite normal with this woman. She’s got calluses all over her fingers, and no matter what you say, she won’t get them taken off. In fact, she’s never messed with her hands in any way, except for trimming her nails every week.

She says the calluses help it hurt less, in fact.

The first person that she played for was her father, as he wasted away in his hospital bed from some sort of cancer that she won’t (or is it can’t?) specify. He looked so sad, she decided, that she’d play some music for him---he had always told her that he loved hearing her practice.

So, she slowly set up her music and her instrument, her chubby fingers pausing every so often to fumble around with a note. Her father smiled at the six-year-old’s rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” his grey eyes watering.

He died a few days later.

The second person that she played for was her best friend, seeing her get into a car for the last time in her life as the bass was shaking the sidewalk and the thirteen-year-old thought that life was awesome.

When she heard the news of the friend’s death, she slowly hung up the phone, and pulled out a piece of music, beginning to practice her cello almost double the amount that she had been before.

At her friend’s wake, she pulled out her cello, staring holes in her music as her long fingers played a jazzy tune that would have had her friend shaking her hips and pouting her lips. Her own lips were bitten and chapped nearly to the point of bleeding as she lifted her fingers off of the cello’s neck while applause rang softly in the small room.

The third person that she played for was her mother, after walking into the kitchen and finding the older woman’s body facedown on the floor. Suicide by poison, the doctors deemed. The seventeen-year-old nodded slowly, and didn’t wonder what she could have done to stop her mother.

The sounds of cello music echoed throughout the empty halls of the house, well into the night.

She couldn’t play during the funeral or the wake, because she was the only child of the woman and she had to manage the funeral and such. After the funeral, when everyone had left, the young woman walked out of the house and drove to the burial site.

Using the gravestone for a seat, she played a series of etudes, the simple practice songs that her mother had loved for their simplicity. Others that were visiting their departed ones looked at her strangely, but she didn’t mind.

Her fingers were long, muscled, and heavily callused, last I saw. To this day, they still are, and she still plays, and I’ve got a hunch that it’ll be like that for the rest of her life, no matter what she does.

-End.