(My entry to Writer’s Digest Your Story prompt, summer,2021, based on the prompt photo above)
As Warren lugged his electric piano into the newly rented cottage, he said to me, “Sis, this place is perfect. No jangling phones, barking dogs or noisy neighbors! I can write music without distractions!”
“But Warren,” I said, “you’re in a deep forest, on the far edge of nowhere. Who knows what wild animals will be prowling around? Won’t you get depressed here with no cell coverage or internet, and no one to talk to?”
“Sonya, chill! Trust me on this. I’ve got my life under control now: I’m done with counseling and I’m sober 26 days and counting!” He flashed his irresistible smile, against which I’m defenseless. “I’ll thrive here, I promise.”
So many promises made, none kept, all forgotten whenever he invited Jack Daniels in for a drink. Warren had started attending AA meetings dozens of times, and his personal best for sobriety was 33 days. I’d lost count of his many counselors. And with every failure, his little sister would have to step in to get him back on his feet.
I repeated to myself, “Warren will be fine!” all the way home.
The house in the woods at first seemed cozy and inviting, so I couldn’t articulate why the setting unnerved me. Was the forest really “looming”? Was the lush clearing projecting aloofness, or was it hostility? Perhaps my strained history with my brother colored my feelings.
Tracking Warren’s progress was not easy, since I had to depend on snail-mail, and his post office was seven twisty miles away.
After he was there a week or so, I received his first new composition, which I immediately plunked out on the piano. I hated it.
Warren called his niche “post-grunge punk classical,” the last tacked on because he wrote for full orchestra. “Post-grunge” gave him license to throw in loud and dissonant solo instruments, random drum rhythms, and disjointed tempos. Melody was a distant, unfulfilled hope. I described his music to my friends as thirty teenage band students playing thirty different works as fast as they can, during a thunderstorm. His music always made my teeth hurt and gave me an hours-long headache. Warren loved to hire musicians and a recording studio, but as we left each session, I noted the disgusted expressions of the instrumentalists. The music’s dreadfulness was obvious to everyone—except Warren. Since no one liked his music, the professional recordings were vanity events, financed, of course, by Little Sis. I’d recently told him he was on his own for future sessions. He’d shrugged it off as if it didn’t matter.
I received a new work from the forest every few weeks, never with a personal note of any kind, and I assumed Warren was doing ok.
Until last week. The first two pages of “Opus 42” were the usual note salad—hold the harmony—but on the third page, the notations stopped abruptly, in a musically nonsensical place. He had marked the rest symbol, meaning “don’t play,” with “ff,” double-forte. Even beginners know it’s oxymoronic to mark a rest with a volume notation! The rest was accompanied by the symbol for infinity, the horizontal “8”.
The postmark was yesterday. I broke the speed limit every mile of the two-hour drive, nearly becoming part of the forest in those last few minutes. I sprinted up the winding path, the greenery no longer verdant but now seeming lurid and coarse.
The gloomy forest and antisocial setting foreshadowed the tragic scene. Empty whiskey bottles littered the house; the fireplace smoldered with unburned fragments of music paper; more snippets of music, hastily shredded, covered the floor below Warren’s dangling feet as he hung from a banister.
Warren had finally achieved unity, conflict and resolution, just not in his music.
His last notation now made a sort of sense: eternal rest, fortissimo.