#mac solo

Malcolm sat in the music room, staring down at the keys. He looked at the sheet music he had picked out that afternoon, it was basic. He hadn’t played it before, but he shouldn’t have any trouble playing it. He surpassed the level of music long ago. 

Let’s try this again. He told himself. 

He started the music, and in the first measure, he was fine, but by the second, the music sounded wrong. He looked down at the keys, drifting across the keys. They looked out of place. Slender fingers, ones that had long since memorized every key and every note. Muscle memory that had been set in stone for years. His hands should know this piano better than the piano knew itself. This was their home. 

Yet they didn’t belong. The keys wouldn’t lend themselves to him. The notes wouldn’t harmonize. The music wouldn’t play. In frustration, he slammed his hands down on the keys, and the sound the instrument made sounded much like the noise in Malcolm’s head. He leaned his forehead against the wood of the piano. “I’m sorry.” He whispered. 

Any good musician cool feel and instrument like a living body. They sang, they reacted to the mood of the player. They breathed with the musician. Lately, the piano seemed more human than Malcolm did. And it was rebelling. Rejecting someone that used be able to make it sing, breathe, and sometimes even cry. Yet now, it just seemed to be screaming in his ears. 

The piano was out of tune. 

Or, Malcolm was out of tune. 

He couldn’t deny that something just felt not quite right. A strange sense of dysphoria that usually he could push away. Mostly, he only felt it late at night. When he was laying in bed beside Tessa, who was sound asleep beside him and he suddenly felt as if he didn’t belong there. He was wearing the skin of a a soul he had stolen, and the body was rejecting him now. 

Yet the piano had never rejected him. For every mood, angry, frustrated, depressed, in love. It had always played with him, feeling his emotions and easing his troubles. But it was refusing to sing, refusing to react. Refusing to be anything but a simple piano, dusty due to the loss of the one person that had cared enough to take care of it. 

He swiped his hand and the sheet music went flying. He put his elbow down on the keys, making another disturbing protest. He put his fingers to his lips and took a deep breath. He was upset, he felt betrayed. As if a life long friend had turned against him. Taking one more lung full of air, he moved, going to play again. 

I’ve played this riff a million times. I can do this. 

He thought to himself as he started a common riff. It was supposed to sound upbeat, light hearted. Fun maybe. But instead it sounded like nails on a chalkboard to him. The tempo was off, the notes were either a hair sharp or a hair flat. He was a note behind. There were a million problems with notes that were engraved in his very bones. He let out an angry shout.