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Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

My Music Soothes the Sweetest Soul  
by Donna J. W. Munro 

During his long absences I keep myself busy.

I read philosophy. I study things. I’m even able to travel.

All things I wouldn’t have been able to do in my other life.

Death is kind to me.

He doesn’t talk much. I know when he needs me. Something inside draws me back to his bright mansion full of doors that lead to the whole wide world. Full of light I can’t understand.

There are no beds.

No sinks or stoves.

No need.

There is only the chair for him, my piano and all of the doors.

When he is there, he nods at me.

I wish he’d speak, but he saves his words. Perhaps he gives them only to the souls he delivers.

I sit at the piano and begin to play remembering how in Vienna I’d been so well loved. How I’d had a future that stretched from the orphanage all the way to the palace. I’d played for the queen and her ladies when the black spots came. I’d made them weep with sadness at the songs I made up as I played, slow songs of loss. I played my father’s death and my mother’s suicide. The keys wailed for all of the beatings and so did the queen. But under my robes, buboes.

He came for me that night, passing by the room of the queen and the king, coming for me first.

That’s the only time he’d ever spoken.

“Play for me,” he’d said.

And I did.

He took the king and the queen that night. Took most of Vienna. But me, he brought to the mansion. He showed me how to travel. The buboes were gone and so was my life.

But I still have a heart.

So when I play for him, I play the joy of that day he saved me. The notes tell of how I see the world when I go looking. The songs are all about my love for him.

They told me to fear death. I cannot.

I know he doesn’t have time to love me.

But when he comes, I tell him how I feel with my fingers on the keys and sweet phrases in my songs.

.

Fiction © Copyright Donna J. W. Munro
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from author Donna J. W. Munro:

Revelation: Poppet Cycle Book One

In a dark future, people with money live in doomed cities and use the recently deceased as
repurposed servants and workers called poppets. Ellie DesLoge is the teen heiress of the
company that makes and distributes poppets–your basic reprogrammed flesh robot complete
with training chips and kill switches. If Ellie does everything her Aunt Cordelia says, she’ll have a
life of wealth and power. If she chooses to be what is planned for her, life will be perfect.
Everything she ever dreamed. But something about her sweet poppet Thom goes against what
Aunt Cordelia and tradition have taught her. Will she choose to believe what everyone knows is
true or will she follow what her heart tells her about Thom? Her choice will change the world.

Available on Amazon!