His Spotlight | fermata
The piano resonates. Each note whistles.
Is it a curse, to appreciate something but never be the create such a something in return? Seated at the spotlight’s edge, I watch the light lap against my feet. diminuendo. A flash of lightning illumines. His body under that cone of light becomes suddenly petrified. And at the snap of the music-sheets, that marble exhibits come to life with twitching hands; with shifting eyes; all his body all contorted, arms forever swaying in locomotion. And with jaws slightly agape, with eyes bulging he scans the crowd with the intensity of a catatonic. lento. My breath edifies as the audience all around heaves inward. We fill our lungs with stagnant air, and the seething sigh forms a chorus. A mortal chorus that climaxes and diminishes into a still and silent sibilance. And he takes one last breath too.
staccato. The piano resonates. Each note whistles. Surging. Surging upward and out of the cavern of that cold instrument. Burning now, the air full of notes. And they fall like cinders in an absolution. Flaming arrowheads piercing down through his every limb. In the desperation of the hunted, eyes darting, he opens his mouth and a single high note rises from the gurgling depths of his throat and into the open air for all to savour. We lean in. Our ears sense the feasting to-come. moderato. moderato. moderato. Too late now. His voice roves frantically. Leaping from one note to another, each syllable of each word shattering into tones and unknowable little noises that conform to biology. My hand twitches at my knee, fingers lifting, as if to clutch at something just beyond reach. We lift our heads to the light.
fortissimo. The ground thunders as chords rippled deep below the wooden floors, first an incessant dripping, now a roaring flood as notes coalesce into notes — deep below the floorboards a river widens into the yawning maw of an ocea. His body lurches forward — as Prometheus bound upon that high cliff at the edge of this world — each muscle and each ligament straining — each vocal cord sublimating into a mass of movement and gushing blood. fermata —
— His arms tilt skyward. The light dims. His solo is over.
