A Ballad of Birds

By Emily Harris

At the crossroads between the stage and auditorium doors, Winston’s mother has her hands wrapped around his wrists like prison shackles. They are to be separated in three minutes, but he has a feeling the stage will be an even worse cell. His mother is looking at him with more hope in her eyes than he has ever seen before. 

“You are my everything,” she says, her voice impossibly gentle. Her hands are trembling, and it’s making his skin crawl. Beyond the walls they can hear the girl before him playing, stumbling over the notes. With every mistake she makes, Winston’s mother seems to grow a little bigger, her eyes a little wider. They sparkle like she can already see the $5,000 prize money, even though it’s only the qualifying round. 

“Do this for me,” she says, “and I will be happy.” 

He nods and cradles her words inside his head. He imagines himself pulling his mother out of the bedsheets that swallow her every morning. He imagines holding her hand and walking her four years into the past, into their old home and his father’s warm embrace. But he knows he can’t do that, so he smothers his discomfort beneath his mother’s beating heart. He won’t play for the judges. He will play for her. 

As Winston walks out from behind the shadow of the curtain, scared his new shoes will squeak, he wishes there was more than just a piano on the stage. The Steinway, all alone in an ocean of darkness, makes his heart sink. He feels the emptiness on top of the piano, where Claude the cat always curls up at home, tail swinging off the side like a metronome. He feels a prickle in his eyes and blinks quickly. He had promised his mother he wouldn’t cry. He had promised he would be perfect. 

He sits down on the bench. In the glow of the spotlight, the dust floating around him looks like stardust, as if he’s ended up in outer space. Without turning his head, he glances at the audience, but there’s nobody he can see in the darkness. There is only the stage, the piano, and Winston, but somewhere unseen his father’s ghost is listening, like he always does. Winston looks back at the top of the piano. Despite everything, Claude is still here too. He’s just invisible. 

The silence in the concert hall feels like a sheet of glass. Winston puts his hands on the keys, takes a deep breath, and shatters it, plunging into the music.  

From a single note, the rest spills out like boiling water from a teapot. The steam fogs his eyes—it’s too much all at once—so he closes them. This happens every time. 

“Open your eyes,” his mother always tells him. 

“I can’t,” he always tells her. “I can only see with my eyes closed.” 

Winston’s little fingers move like feathers, and in the darkness of his mind, he sees birds. The beginning of the song is light and airy, and the birds flit and flutter between two tall trees like they’re chasing each other. They chirp and swoop while Winston’s fingers slide along the treble clef, and dozens more hiding in the leaves take to the sky. They swirl in waves and dance among the clouds, rising, rising, as the notes pile on top of each other, his hands moving swifter, his fingers dancing too. More and more birds fill the skies until there’s no more blue left, only the black of these birds moving and melting together. The flapping of their wings almost drowns out the piano in his ears. 

Then, suddenly, he lifts his hands. He holds them in mid-air, palms spread open like a holy preacher, the birds paralyzed and awaiting their ultimate judgement. One second later, after the echo of the last note finally dissipates, his hands fall upon the bass clef and the birds plummet, their wings broken. They are a sea of fallen angels, their descent painful and slow. Now his hands move like a cannonball under water, dragging through a current where the laws of gravity are thickened. The deep, rich notes resound through the body of the piano, through the body of Winston. Boy and piano are the same, one heart pounding on the same hammers and keys, rising and falling and everything in between.  

When his hands gently slow to a stop, he’s breathless and empty. He always feels like this after playing a whole song, like someone could toss a stone inside his body and watch it bounce down a well. I thought we were friends, he tells the piano, as the last note echoes in vast silence. Why must you take everything from me? 

His new shoes squeak as he stands up, and he tries not to wince. He keeps his jaw tightly shut, trapping his breathlessness inside his small chest, clenching his trembling fists. His mother had told him not to show any weakness. He steps away from the piano and turns toward the auditorium. For a moment, he desperately searches the front row for the face of his mother, for her distinct crown of curls and cloudy eyes. But he has to bow, and then he can’t find her. She is lost in the darkness. With his body half bent, he hears the smattering of applause. It seems hesitant and stunned, like all five judges are waking from a deep dream. One person claps louder than the rest, and Winston hopes to God that it’s his mother. 

The lobby is large, with a ceiling that reaches to the sky and walls made of windows. It’s a gloomy day, so the sunlight is a muted gray blanket draped over everyone sitting and standing in twos or fours, waiting with patience masking impatience. He was the last child to perform, and now they’re all waiting on the judges’ decision. It’s quiet, like even the walls and the floor are holding their breath. There are different kinds of silences, but this kind is Winston’s least favorite, as fragile as a bubble and in constant danger of being popped. He’s careful not to tap his foot as he and his mother wait on a bench off to the side, but she carelessly clicks her nails on the metal arm of the bench. Her nails are long and uneven, each tap a different resounding note. He reaches over and grabs her hand, squishing her fingers together to stop her, but she smiles thinly at him with eyes unfocused, misinterpreting.  

When she woke him up this morning, he barely recognized her. There was life in her face for the first time in four years and she had her hair nicely pinned up, wearing fancy clothes he hadn’t remembered she owned. And being awake before him was unusual too—he still had ten minutes ticking down on his alarm. The sunrise was in her face, and it was beautiful. 

Now, her curls are coming loose, and her eyes are losing focus again. He can see the energy draining from her veins, and he can’t help but sigh. He had hoped it would stay for just a bit longer, but it’s watery and slips through her fingers no matter how hard she tries. 

He observes the other children. Kids fidget with their ties, bows, and suit jackets, pulling and twisting them like an itchy layer of skin. Winston remains perfectly still. His mother made him wear his new suit all day yesterday, so he wouldn’t fidget like the other children. No weaknesses, she had said. He must be different. He must be perfect. 

Suddenly feeling eyes staring at him, Winston turns to see a girl standing with an older woman. The girl’s dress is red, redder than the tomatoes Winston’s grandmother grows, and her fiery eyes feel like they smolder his skin. A matching red bow ties up half of her hair and she stands straighter than a stick, the woman’s hand resting on her shoulder. Winston’s breath catches in his throat and his face heats up—the hatred in her stare is all too familiar. His friends, the kids whom he used to play and laugh with, looked at him the same way just a few weeks ago, the second he lifted his hands from the piano keys.  

This is the reason he doesn’t want to be here, in the middle of a lion’s den where every pianist is both predator and prey. He can’t find kindness in the face of anybody in the room. 

 The older woman’s gaze shifts to stare at him too, and her face looks just the same as the girl’s. They must be mother and daughter, he realizes, beginning to sweat. The woman leans her head down to whisper something to the girl, and she nods curtly. Winston wonders if, without her mother’s hand on her shoulder, she would float away like a balloon.  

Twenty minutes later, it’s announced that the results are posted. When Winston and his mother reach the sheet posted on the wall, she runs her finger down the list, searching for his name. When she finds it, her face instantly lights up and she squeezes his hand, her nails digging into his soft skin.  

“You did it, Winston!” she tells him. He wishes he could capture that light inside her eyes and hold it there forever, so it never disappears again. 

On the drive home, Winston’s mother shakes her head, eyes still stuffed with fireflies.  

“The final round is tomorrow,” she says. “You’re gonna win. I just know it.” 

“You really think I’m better than everyone else?” he asks. He doesn’t think he’s better than anybody, but maybe if he keeps her talking, she’ll stay afloat. 

“You are. You will get that $5,000,” she says, her cloudy eyes losing focus. “It’s you and me against the world, and you’re my secret weapon.” 

He wonders why they’re fighting anybody when music holds everything he’s ever lost. He is still learning the world in all its immensity, the changeable and the unchangeable. His father has been dead for four years and that’s a fact, and facts are unchangeable. He knows from watching his mother that when you try to fight the laws of the universe with tooth and claw, you break instead. He has spent the last four years trying to put her back together like a shattered piece of china, but until now he had no idea the glue was in his own hands and the way they glide over black and white piano keys.  

It was only two months ago that she learned he could play the piano. 

He had been playing it for the past four years at his grandmother’s cottage, on the ancient Steinway tucked away in her attic, where he stays every summer. It began the summer after his father died, when he and his mother fled their house fruitlessly to escape the storm of grief. Her pain filled every corner of the cottage, and when it was hard to breathe, Winston escaped to the dusty attic. Downstairs, his mother was lost and drowning in sleep and bedsheets and tears while his grandmother searched for new houses for them to buy, always wearing a complicated expression. She had never liked Winston’s father for reasons Winston never knew, and then suddenly his father was gone. Sometimes, from upstairs, he could hear his mother snap at her like lightning, calling her “evil” if she smiled and “fake” if she cried. Most days, the summer thunderstorms were inside the house. 

Upstairs in his own little world, alone with the attic stardust, Winston would try to play from memory the songs he had heard on the classical radio station his father listened to all the time. He would plink along on the old, loose keys, the sounds of the notes rich and resounding and sometimes wheezing, like a charming old man. But he stumbled often, pressing the wrong keys and starting over again and again. He wished so badly to get the songs right, to sound just like they had on the radio, but he didn’t know how. His grandmother would sit in a nearby rocking chair, the one that used to be his grandfather’s favorite, and listen. After watching him struggle, his head in his hands and tears sliding off the white keys, she wiped his tears and started teaching him how to play. She told him stories of how she had been a talented concert pianist in her early twenties, but eventually gave it up to have kids and settle down. She would hold his small hands and spread them wide against her own, showing him how his fingers were long and stretched wide, calling them “piano hands.” She told him he was born to play. 

Just before school started, they moved into a new house, and Winston stayed at his grandmother’s cottage over the summers. As he grew past her teaching, she would sit back and silently listen to him play. She was proud of him, but she never made it seem extraordinary, so Winston never thought of his talent as anything special. He simply liked the way the familiar songs sounded on the old piano, and when he closed his eyes he could feel the warmth of his father’s hugs, the rumble of his chest when he laughed, the scratch of the stubble on his cheeks giving him one last goodnight kiss, over and over and over again.  

Without even realizing it, his talent on the piano had become a secret between him and his grandmother, falling between the cracks of the life he shared with his mother. Until two months ago, when she came to pick him up at the end of the summer. 

That day, he was alone in the attic in the middle of the afternoon. His grandmother was out running errands and his mother wasn’t supposed to arrive until the evening, so he played the piano with Claude the cat curled on top, tail swinging in time. He should’ve been getting ready for school or thinking about all the friends he hadn’t seen for a while, but his favorite time to play was when he was alone like this. Every time he pressed the keys down, he could feel his father listening. Even if he could see, behind his eyelids, oceans roaring with waves of white-foamed teeth, his father was in the clouds with his crooked smile. As the water swelled and crashed, sailboats in turmoil, he could feel his father’s hand on his head, ruffling his hair like he always did.  

Sailboats tipped and spilled screaming men into the sea. When Winston’s right hand danced and twirled, the waves swelled like they were inhaling the salty air, but when his left hand slid down the keys, the water stilled and rippled, his foot on the pedal, echoing. 

Suddenly, a loud THUD startled him, his hands jerking and stumbling into a sour note. He turned around and saw his mother standing in the doorway of the attic, her heavy purse on the floor next to her feet, her mouth open and eyes wide. 

Winston blinked at her and said, “Oh, hi. Grandma will be home soo—”  

He was pulled into a tight, crushing hug. She was on her knees. 

“Why didn’t you tell me you could do that?” she asked, her voice unsteady like the sea he had just seen. 

He opened his mouth, but he couldn’t get any words out. Even if he could, he wasn’t sure what to say. She released him and held his shoulders, and he saw that her eyes were watery. She was expecting an answer. 

“I don’t know,” he said. She stared at him. He could see the gears in her head turning, and then finally she pulled him into another hug, but a gentler one. 

“This is amazing,” she whispered, her words melting into the air above his head. “This is incredible.” 

A week later, she found a competition for young pianists. It only had two rounds, a qualifying and a final, and the prize was $5,000.  

“I don’t want to,” he had told her, in the car driving home from school. 

“Why not? I’ll get you a piano and you’ll have two months to practice. That’s plenty of time.” When she moved to turn the volume of the music down, he could see that her hand was trembling. 

“I play for fun. And that’s not fun,” he said. He would rather play soccer with his friends after school than practice for a competition, even if he wasn’t very good at soccer. They still cheered him on anyway, and it made him feel good. 

“But, what’s the difference? You—” she sighed and fell silent. He listened intently to the quiet Chopin, remembering it, and trying not to hear all of her unspoken words. 

A minute later, she tried again. 

“Winston,” she said, more gently, “could you do it for me?” 

“For you?”  

“Yes,” she said. “It would make me happy.” 

Since then, he has been sitting for endless hours at the new Steinway his mother bought as his only birthday gift, even though his eleventh birthday wasn’t for another month. She had spent almost all of her savings on it, already searching for future competitions with three figures of prize money. He hates the way the notes sound on the piano, tinny and new, and misses his grandmother’s ancient Steinway. But he plays songs over and over again, and dreams, and dreams, and dreams, the white keys sapping more and more of his energy each day. Whenever his mother isn’t around and leaves him to practice alone with Claude the cat, he sits on the bench in silence. Although his hands don’t move, he can still hear the music, echoing in an infinite loop in his ears, rising and falling, breathing and dying, ending and beginning. It is only in his sleep that he feels the rests, but even still, his life is the longest sheet of music he has ever seen.  

He can barely see his friends over the top of the piano or hear their voices beneath the sound of his playing, so they never come over anymore or ask him about soccer, knowing his answer will always be “I can’t.” At school, he drifts, no longer inside the inside jokes and cut out of their circles as they giggle at the sound of the word “pianist.” He never told anybody about the competition, but words spread like wildfires do, burning through his mother to other parents, to the parents’ kids, and from kids to other kids. When the fire reached him through stares and whispers, he felt his skin burn little by little. One day in music class, the teacher had smiled at him and said, “I heard we have some talent in our class.” 

Among the sea of chairs, he had wanted to shrink into something smaller than the dust on top of her classroom Yamaha.  

“Winston, would you like to play something for us?” 

He was too afraid to say no, crushed beneath the weight of his classmates’ eyes, so he nodded and sat down on the bench. He closed his eyes and played the first thing he could think of, Chopin’s Nocturne Op.27 No.2 in D-Flat Major, but he couldn’t remember all of it, so he only played half.  

In his mind, he saw rain. He watched the drops of water slide off tree leaves and slither down windows like tiny streams, clear and cold, like angels’ tears. 

When he stopped playing and opened his eyes, his friends and classmates all looked at him like they had never seen him before. The teacher was the only one who clapped; the rest stared with hatred burning in their eyes. He wanted to run away, but he rejoined them  and tried not to cry, not understanding what he did wrong. 

That same day after school, when his mother came to pick him up, the teacher took her aside for a moment. Winston slowly put his notebooks in his backpack, listening carefully to their hushed voices. 

“Are you sure he’s doing alright? I’m just a little concerned, since the other kids don’t seem to play with him anymore.”  

“Oh, he’s doing just fine, no need to worry. His competition is coming up, so he has a lot to focus on.” 

“That’s right! Well, that’s exciting. He must be very busy, but I hope he still has time to hang out with friends.” 

“Of course, of course.” Her voice was hollow like a dead tree, and when Winston turned around, he saw that her cloudy eyes were unfocused, staring past his teacher’s shoulder into a distance that didn’t exist. Winston stared at his mother and felt himself crumbling into ashes. 

It’s the final round of the competition, and Winston stands once again in that dim concert hall of floating stardust and a lonely Steinway, wishing that flowers would bloom between the floorboards. Maybe it would help keep his shoes from squeaking, maybe it could bring some life to the lifeless stage. Five minutes ago, in the lobby, Winston saw the girl in the red dress leave the stage doors crying. It was like the red of her hair bow had melted onto her face and Winston hoped that heaven could hear her sobs as they ripped into the fragile silence of the lobby. Maybe God is more merciful than the judges. 

Now he stands behind the velvet black curtains, about to walk on stage, worrying that his fingers will skip and tumble like that girl’s did. His mother’s happiness is hinging on this singular song, and mistakes are a death sentence. But Winston knows that if he closes his eyes, he’ll be able to see everything beyond the earth and beyond the sky, even the face of his father, and his hands will not stumble.  

He reaches the bench and sits down. I’m back, he tells the piano, please be kind to my mother. He straightens his posture and sees that sheet of glass silence. He likes this kind of silence—the kind that he can control. He waits a second too long, savoring it, and feels the gaze of the audience—more than just judges, this time—start to fill with question marks.  

He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and plunges into the bass clef, shattering the glass. Bold and dramatic. Behind his eyelids he sees the shards scatter around him, and he holds his fingers there, letting it ring.  

Then he lets his shoulders relax and eases into a low rise, watching the light shifting in the prismatic shards, slowly at first, until his hands swiftly slide into the treble clef and the rainbows start spiraling. It’s a spinning dance of color and light, around and around in circles, and he almost gets dizzy. After a few pounding notes, his fingers slowly lift like they’ve lost weight and he starts pressing the keys softer, more gently, butterflies rising in waves straight from the colors of the rainbows. With iridescent wings, delicate like stained glass, they flutter and drift, but lethargically, like they’re waking up from a dream. His hands start moving in rhythmic steps and the butterflies swirl into the shape of a ballerina, leaping and twirling on feet lighter than feathers, a learned dance etched into her weightless bones. 

After watching her dance for a while, his fingers itch. They quicken faster than her toes can handle, and the butterflies burst into an explosion of color, raining color, and his fingers are running down the keys like a stream of water, spilling out of him almost faster than he can handle. The muscles in his hands start to ache and the darkness of his eyelids begins to bleed through the waterfall of colors, and he’s losing himself, he can feel it. There’s an old door in the corner of his mind that he doesn’t like to touch, but through his dreaming, it creaks open as his fingers dance, and suddenly he sees many things at once.  

The sunny day of his father’s funeral, every tear glistening sharper than the edges of diamonds. The shadowed face of his mother in the kitchen telling him they can’t afford Claude anymore. The black of his fur between Winston’s fingers as he holds on, the cat yowling, never letting go until his mother gives in, crying. The eyes of his friends staring, glowing red like bats in a cave, setting fire to his skin, watching him scream and shrivel up and die alone.  

He’s breathing heavily now, and his fingers do one long slide down the keys, landing heavily on the last deep, resounding note, and half of the weight is exhaustion; his muscles really do ache, but now he’s in a hall of mirrors. Each one is warped and distorted like a carnival ride, and as he spins in circles, he watches his head blow up like a balloon, then shrink into a pea, and his arms stretch into twigs, then condense into stumps. He starts running through all the mirrors, desperately trying to find himself. The notes rise and fall again and he’s a blur of a human.  

A rest. He lifts his hands for just a moment, and the last mirror he turns to is empty. 

He plays. He plays and plays, and sees the face of his mother replace the face of God up in the clouds, and in his mind he falls to his knees, praying even though he’s never prayed before. There is worship caked beneath his aching fingernails as they run and scream across the keys, swooping with broken wings. He sees the birds and the angels falling from the sky once again, even though it’s a different song than yesterday it’s somehow all the same, and he almost stumbles, amazed for a moment that he is seeing a dream repeat for the first time in his little life. 

When the song finally ends, and his hands slow to stop, his fingers are so weak and shaky that he can barely move them. He almost forgets to open his eyes, but when he does, for a moment he can’t see a single thing. He blinks the whiteness away, but the edges of his vision still crackle with static and his heart is beating faster than he’s ever felt before. He doesn’t have the energy to think a single thought, his body running on autopilot, only residual panic stirring in his stomach as he tries to stand up but can’t. His legs are so wobbly they must be made of liquid and his heart is pounding in his rib cage and the static in his vision grows, enveloping the piano until he can no longer see. He thinks he hears clapping, but all the sound in the world is muffled like he’s underwater, his ears start ringing, and he’s still trying to stand up—he needs to stand up, and he needs to bow and smile and be perfect for his mother, but his legs don’t listen and he crumbles and the last thing he sees are the floorboards, and for some reason, right before everything goes black, they remind him of prison bars.