The Key to a Nightmare

Mother sat near to the edge, eyes wide and scintillating, but not with joy. Her intense gaze followed close like a stalking lion as I crossed the stage and sat down at the piano bench.

Twisted perfection, suffocating perception. It all came down to that moment.

Mother had spent the last fifteen years of her life raising me to be the best musician in the world, and I submissively followed her dream. There I sat, in one of the biggest, most well-known auditoriums in the world, preparing to play a song that I'd been ceacelessly practicing since I was thirteen.

The notes met my fingers with ease. I felt relaxed, calm, yet vitally aware of my mother's fierce stare lingering to the left of me. The auditorium breathed and rocked with the music. The curtains shivered in the corners, draped loosely beside each other in the wings like disillusioned soldiers preparing for war. I took a shallow breath and continued.

Then, a key sprang up from beside my right hand. It danced and jingled by itself, seemingly unaware of the song it was ruining, and the audience giggled and snickered at the unusual commotion. I ignored its relentless tapping and tinkering and continued, but soon, another key sprang up. More began to jump, falling from the piano like dominos and leaping over each other with the briskness of grasshoppers. I gasped and tried playing with the small number of keys I had left, but they shuddered in their places and threatened to abandon me too.

Then, the cover of the piano swung open with enough force to kill me. I slid further back on the bench as a wiry mouth of brass strings curled and shot upwards, attaching to the cover with an unpleasant twang, slamming it down just to force it upwards again. The piano was attacking me.

Curtains flailed in their places, encircling me with their heavy, breathless skin. I struggled and fought through them as if I was tumbling around in an ocean wave, searching for air and hoping with every ounce of soul in me that I might live. All while I struggled, I saw my mother in the audience, face unchanged. She waited eagerly, disappointedly, for me to return to my playing, but the piano was far away now.

The thing I loved was destroying me, forcing itself so horrifically upon me that I had no room to breathe. That dreadful, beautiful intstrument was the very source of my torment, and the only one who might have cared pushed and pushed at me until the last shred of desire I had for playing music was torn straight out of my being.

I scrambled in the red curtains, screaming as keys laughed and jingled mockingly around me. I shot forward through the abyss, shoving that piano off of the wooden stage until it slammed into the opposite wall with a murderous crash.

The audience was silent, and my mother turned away.