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Piano at Night


Governor Laslow brought a piano. 


It was heavy, a pain to lift and a terror to see swinging over the side, looking like some clumsy black angel against so much grey sky. But, it was the pride of the Governor, what he’d chosen to bring even over his own wife from so far away, and so the crew was gentle with it. 


The piano touched new ground before any colonists disembarked. 


Sky. Sea. Stone. That was the essence of this place, unfinished by God and then cast away to an especially desolate ocean. It was all giant, broken cliffs and menacing mountains swept bare by furious winds. What little that did grow was hard and harsh, stubby shelled plants clinging to usually frozen soil. Of the animals, people knew little and saw less, and more than a few sailors whispered amongst themselves that whatever lived here could not be natural, instead having been the transformed remnants of ancient castaways made into beasts. At night, when the Moon came from behind so much cloud to scowl at them in silvery silence, there were long howls. 


That first night it played, a lone music on a place that only yesterday had endured ceaseless millennia in a natural silence. The notes drifted and echoed, danced up mountain sides, fell into the foaming black water. It was like a reverential tombs silence broken, and all those newly arrived souls sat in their chilly beds. Listening to the notes, to the wind prying at their wooden walls with an eagerness to send them all flying back from whence they’d come. 


It played, night after night. Night after night, moonlit or dark and cloud-drowned, came the piano from the Governor. It came in the nights after the days even when he had gone unseen, his whereabouts among so much dark rock and low lying growth unknown. The piano played. 


The piano played, too, on the night warships came under the cover of blackness. 


The piano played as everyone fled, the town burning in raging flames that ate up all the meager achievements they’d accomplished, like it had never existed in the first place. There, small and cold and afraid, scattered over the lightness swells— the music came, faraway and haunting.

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