{"id":132,"date":"2012-09-30T14:38:11","date_gmt":"2012-09-30T19:38:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scorellis.com\/?p=132"},"modified":"2020-07-25T13:14:19","modified_gmt":"2020-07-25T18:14:19","slug":"how-to-write-a-short-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scorellis.com\/?p=132","title":{"rendered":"The Last Piano"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Fb-Button\"\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>
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A young, very attractive and elegant woman sits, watches me.\u00a0 I know I was killed, but here I sit, playing the Last and I’m fine. \u00a0 A woman, virtually untenable in her beauty, listens to me play.<\/p>\n

Mind this: she is not beautiful in that symmetrical, coldly compelling way that drives many men to great insanity.\u00a0 No, she\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0her strength and she\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0her innocence and nothing is layered over this.\u00a0 I can see it in the way her chin tilts just so, the way her eyes gaze knowingly and in the softness of the set of her lips. \u00a0I watch her lips when she speaks, I watch them in her quietude, I watch I watch I watch. Her movement is music; there: in the graceful poise of her hips; there: in the hands moving to rest placidly in her lap.\u00a0 Mark the time!\u00a0 I’m enslaved by her motion and I begin to play again, enjoying the silky smooth roughness of these ancient, ivory keys.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a91997 Scott R. Ellis\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Last Piano Player<\/strong><\/h1>\n
by Scott R. Ellis<\/pre>\n
I remember the blood soaked, black sands of the beach-head encapsulated within the prison star-world; the way the water teemed with stinging mantas and how the seascape seemed to curve upward to where the brackish blue of the sky traced out the \u00addisjointed curve of the horizon.<\/p>\n
As I stood sifting through the sand, the crashing ocean waves exploded behind me into frenzied sprays against the silver steel pinnacles and ramparts of the fortress-prison. \u00a0Its ugly spikes slid motionlessly out of the ocean to curl fortified arms around the island.\u00a0 Many men were imprisoned here, but only some of us knew that this was no island bastille—those of us who had not forgotten—to us it was a self-contained nightmare, floating in outer space.\u00a0 It was no Devil’s Island, I was no Papillon.\u00a0 No, I would escape this space-flung prison only through death.<\/p>\n
I am Benedict, and this is how it felt when death’s talon grip snared me:\u00a0 a penetrating thrust cleaving through my body to rest cold in my soul, twisting it—torturing me.\u00a0 And then my consciousness slowly abated;\u00a0 a need for reminiscence emerged from the coldness which encroached on the periphery of my vision, a need for some thread to coalesce, to gather . . . my thoughts drift like particles, drifting about in a sunbeam, searching for a place to settle.\u00a0 But my acuity fails to pierce through to the past. There is a veil….<\/p>\n
I\u00a0remember I died, but here I am again. \u00a0Only, it is no longer a prison, and she, this amazing “she,” with me, explains the prison is this: a\u00a0 place that people danced and listened to music, where troops gathered and formed to go to battle.\u00a0 A place where I fell in love again. Oh, and where they kept the Last piano. \u00a0She asks me, “How could you have forgotten this?” \u00a0She explains, “It has been\u00a0a century or more since your imprisonment, and since the once star-bound prison vessel crash landed, and cracked open its chrysalis to the free skies of Sanctucity.” \u00a0It feels rehearsed and so does my response. \u00a0“I don’t remember much about what happened before my return here.\u00a0 It seems so long ago—it’s a sanctuary now? \u00a0Really?”<\/p>\n
“Yes, my Bened, yes.”<\/p>\n
But, before I died, it was just a prison, a shell of a world—small, but somehow, through the use of science, warped to seem large. They, some of the interred,\u00a0 say the engineers added a fifth\u00a0 dimension.\u00a0 Time was the fourth.\u00a0\u00a0 And some said that when they built the Stellar prisons they didn’t add<\/em> a dimension; rather, love was removed.<\/p>\n
\u00a0**<\/p>\n
I am, returned from the grave, a very old man now.\u00a0 Gaunt, my skin stretches over my cheeks like paper and my eyes—eyes so stark that even a hawk’s stare would divert from them.\u00a0 The old piano is still in the rectory of the prison— I don’t know what else they call it now.\u00a0\u00a0 Prison is as good a word as any.\u00a0 My God, that piano is old.\u00a0 It’s small, and upright.\u00a0 The keyboard is perched high on the harp, like a spinet but this piano you have to climb up a small ladder to play.\u00a0\u00a0 I’d really never heard anything play that way, \u00a0play so beautifully that time loses you. Hit any rhythmic combination of notes and they play through the air with the bitter-sweet resonance and delicate timber only an age-old instrument can deliver. Beauty for its own sake. No one really even knows how it got there; perhaps its placement was a clerical error.<\/p>\n
Strangely, I remember the first time I ever played that piano and, as I remember that first time,\u00a0 I also remember the first death: bullets piercing my flesh,\u00a0 piercing my head, killing me, and the hot searing feel of it punching its coldness into, and through the base of my skull.\u00a0 They brought me before a small man, and first his assistant shot me in the leg.\u00a0 I fell—more because I knew I should than from any true feelings of pain.\u00a0 Then he handed the weapon—a projectile type—to the small man and he shot me in the head.\u00a0 They may have shot more than twice. I don’t know; I never felt a thing, except terrified.<\/p>\n
Some time passed, I think, and I drifted, trying to cling to life.\u00a0 I grasped for the scattering, filament-thin attenuations of consciousness and felt them slip through my clutch.\u00a0 Then: awareness returned to me, drifting lazily on outstretched wings, languorously soaring before taking purchase;\u00a0 and I was here, at the piano, playing.\u00a0\u00a0 A glimpse of memory of the darkly burnt cerulean blue sky, cracking open, etches a vivid image in my mind’s eye, a splash of multi-colored paints across a fresh canvas.\u00a0 Suddenly I awake and gasp for breath with unrestricted lungs.\u00a0 I look about; I am sitting at the piano.\u00a0 I look down;\u00a0 the keys are all where they are supposed to be so I know this is not just some post traumatic hallucination.\u00a0 I know, with an alacrity born of a hundred years of experience, that this is life, that this is real, and that, only a moment\u00a0 ago, I died.<\/p>\n
A young, very attractive and elegant woman sits, watches me.\u00a0 I know I was killed, but here I sit and I’m fine and a woman, virtually untenable in her beauty, listens to me play.\u00a0 Mind this: she is not beautiful in that symmetrical, coldly compelling way that drives many men to great insanity.\u00a0 No, she is<\/em> her strength and she is<\/em> her innocence and nothing is layered over this.\u00a0 I can see it in the way her chin tilts just so, the way her eyes gaze knowingly and in the softness of the set of her lips. \u00a0I watch her lips when she speaks, I watch them in her quietude, I watch I watch I watch. Her movement is music; there: in the graceful poise of her hips; there: in the hands moving to rest placidly in her lap.\u00a0 Mark the time!\u00a0 I’m enslaved to her motion and I begin to play again, enjoying the silky smooth roughness of these ancient, ivory keys.<\/p>\n
I stop, and I turn to her.\u00a0 She is radiant, smiling at me.\u00a0 I think I must have somehow become her hero.\u00a0 “How long have you been here?”\u00a0 I ask.\u00a0 To ask her how long I had been playing may have seemed senile.\u00a0 My voice is dry and I cough.\u00a0 I touch my face.\u00a0 It feels slightly different, but familiar.\u00a0\u00a0 She is youthful, attentive, and dressed in a black costume gown with white trim and an ankle length skirt.\u00a0 I look down at myself to discover that I, too, wear strange, costume\u00a0 apparel, complete with ruffles at the sleeves and a close fitting tunic which drapes beneath my knees.<\/p>\n
“Bened! You Silly.\u00a0 I came here with you on the shuttle.”\u00a0 She pulls out a small fan and fans herself.\u00a0 My hand moves.\u00a0 A chord strikes in the piano and in my mind.\u00a0 A harsh, dissonant chord, dark and foreboding.\u00a0 I wonder how I have so strangely escaped the prison, escaped death.\u00a0 How I have seemingly left my body and then returned again.\u00a0 Perhaps I am crazy, completely insane, and it is all a hallucination.\u00a0 No.\u00a0 I think, were that the case, I would have thought to hallucinate something a little less\u00a0extemporaneous.<\/p>\n
“I want to leave here.\u00a0 I don’t know why I wanted to come here to begin with.”\u00a0 I want to tell her that I have been a prisoner here, that being here torments me, that I had, in fact, been bludgeoned then shot to death—to death! not fifteen minutes ago in a steel room deep in the bowels of this monstrosity. I feel my face again.\u00a0 The corners of my eyes, are there more wrinkles now?\u00a0 I can’t feel to tell.<\/p>\n
“People are coming, you know, to hear your Improvisations.\u00a0 The troops will be forming up soon.\u00a0 We can go to the refresher area if you like, and you can have a drink maybe.<\/p>\n
“You are playing very well, though I don’t know why you started and stopped like that.”\u00a0\u00a0 She shakes her head slightly, her hair shakes at me but I only see my recollection of it, like a distant memory. She holds out her arm to assist me down from the piano pedestal.\u00a0 I gracefully accept her help.\u00a0 I no longer need to feel my face to determine my age.\u00a0 Simply moving tells me, and the sudden, needful way in which she moved to help me.\u00a0\u00a0 I am old.\u00a0 Very old.\u00a0 Much older than when they killed me.\u00a0 Senility will certainly be excused in a man my age.<\/p>\n
“Are you my lover?”\u00a0\u00a0 I ask her.\u00a0 She giggles. \u00a0I sigh<\/em><\/p>\n
“Love, of course I am.”\u00a0 She blushes and kisses me on the cheek.<\/p>\n
“Where is everyone—all the prisoners?”<\/p>\n
“Oh, Benedict.\u00a0 That was so long ago.\u00a0 Don’t you remember? ”<\/p>\n
“No . . . my love, I don’t.\u00a0 You are so pretty.”<\/p>\n
“Darling, I’m almost as old as you and twice as wrinkled.”<\/p>\n
“No,” I protest adamantly, “—you are young, sensuous, opulent.”\u00a0 She begins to blush.\u00a0 I see only this young, beautiful woman before me, and I am confused.\u00a0 I turn away from her and look up at the piano. It is almost all solid wood.\u00a0 They don’t make them from wood anymore.\u00a0 Actually, they don’t make them at all anymore, and haven’t since . . . since forever.\u00a0 They were never made in these colonies.\u00a0 It’s a mystery how this one found its respite looming over prison congregations thousands of light-years away from a woodworker’s rasp. I turn back to the woman and I speak to her, looking so deep into her eyes that I lose my sense of balance, of place. I am spiraling into her. \u00a0” I- I’m just an old man who doesn’t know what has happened since he has died.” She seems so familiar to me, as if I’ve known her all my life and have been with her for years.\u00a0 But I can’t shake the feeling I arrived only moments ago.<\/p>\n
I turned to her as we walked up the aisle toward the entrance at the back of the chapel, the prison sanctuary.\u00a0 The beginnings of noise were shaping outside in the mezzanine area.\u00a0 I could hear talking, and glasses chinking.\u00a0 “You are so kind,” I tell her. She strokes my chin and turns.\u00a0 We start to walk again and it is a slow process.<\/p>\n
“You were telling me–where are the prisoners?”<\/p>\n
“Oh, Benedict.\u00a0 That was so long ago.\u00a0 Don’t you remember?\u00a0 You escaped the prison a dead man.\u00a0 You were shot sixteen times, but somehow, you survived.\u00a0 The prison had docked here for repairs. . .\u201d<\/p>\n
It came to me as she spoke, I remembered.\u00a0 Well, I still only remembered the two shots.\u00a0 Sixteen was perhaps an exaggeration in the retelling.\u00a0 I was a young man then.\u00a0 Time was nothing to me, I had plenty of it.<\/p>\n
When I was told one day that I had killed a man in cold blood, I thought it a joke.\u00a0 When they told me they were putting me under the highest security available, I laughed in their faces and bet the judge my freedom that I would escape.\u00a0 You see, he knew of my past exploits—he knew I was a war hero who had been captured during the Wars and had led an escape from their dungeons.\u00a0 I had squirmed through half a mile of air shaft and battled insanity to gain my freedom.<\/p>\n
“You are a fool, Benedict.\u00a0 I’m putting you in Stellar H where, even if you escape, you won’t have escaped.”\u00a0 And then he laughed, a sinister sound to hear in the docket. Those were the final words of the judge.\u00a0\u00a0 He disregarded my bet and stood, dark and foreboding, laughing as he left the court.\u00a0 Black hooded guards led me from the chaos, bound and levitated.<\/p>\n
I imagine, now, that it was an ordinary chuckle, a good belly-laugh over an insolent convicted felon, but at the time I imagined it to be the most ominous bone-marrow freezing laugh that he ever chortled.\u00a0\u00a0 It echoed in the halls with the hooded guards, followed me, and continued to linger just on the edge of audibility for the rest of my imprisonment.<\/p>\n
I began pondered and planned escapes. One minute I believed that I would have to lead a full scale riot and take over the piloting of the vessel\/prison and dock her in some neutral territory in order to escape one day and believed I could re-materialize in another world with the power of my mind the next.\u00a0 I planned.\u00a0 And I planned.<\/p>\n
No matter how ludicrous or impossible, I considered it.\u00a0 I met other prisoners who were sympathetic, but most just wanted to go on with their lives.\u00a0 Most led lives of accep\u00adtance, of quiet, suffering desolation.\u00a0 I was, as you know, innocent.\u00a0 I had killed men in the wars, yes, but as a civilian I had entered into a career as a systems navigator.\u00a0 I was well paid, had a nice home and family, and was actually off planet on business, a hundred light years away from the murder scene.\u00a0 But, the common law held that computers and DNA and photon residual emission tests did not lie.\u00a0 I actually watched myself committing the murder in a computer generated, courtroom reconstruction of photon residual emissions and DNA extrapolation.\u00a0 I was getting convicted by a jury of my peers of premeditated murder.\u00a0 “Besides,” explained the judge, “everyone knows travel records can be forged by anyone with a moderate amount of travel computer codes.\u00a0 This court finds the defendant, Benedict Arnold, guilty of murder in the highest degree.\u00a0 We sentence you to Stellar H for life, up to and including Second Death.”\u00a0 He pounded his gavel on the bench. He almost seemed to be shaking his head as he did this.\u00a0 His white powdered wig shook its curls at me.\u00a0 They too condemned me.<\/p>\n
Think about it—I did. I even believed, for a short time, that I had done it, that I had killed.<\/p>\n
Then, I had an epiphany. Many years ago, the technology (in the Federation and the Reaches) had been outlawed and research halted and destroyed.\u00a0 The technology to modulate DNA using gene editing techniques had been destroyed and lost.\u00a0 But, what if, in a universe of trillions of humans, the possibility that my exact DNA structure could exist twice. . . it’s unfathomable, with millions of base pairs, the likelihood of another exact match would be\u00a0 1 in 9.3810… \u00d7 10^1926591.\u00a0 But aren’t all DNA (of humanity, anyway) 99.9% the same?\u00a0 The odds then become much lower, perhaps as low as 1 in a trillion, maybe as high as 1 in 100 trillion. What is the given entropy for the actual differences? How hard would it be to build a biodatabase of billions of DNA sequences, and use a biogenerator, or a bank of thousands of them, to just “roll the dice” and replace a native strand with an artificially selected “naturally” generated one? How hard would it be to convert a replicator of food into one of humans? And how accurate is photon emission DNA sampling? How effective was the clone purging? If the Empire had such devices in their creche vaults, how hard would it be for a Federated citizen to get the tech, or recreate it? I knew I was innocent.\u00a0 I realized then that, in our society, a man with the ability to alter his DNA could behave with impunity. . . my defense, I realized, had been tragically inadequate.<\/p>\n
I had not asked enough questions, and there is no appealing from Stellar H.\u00a0 Even the Warden is a prisoner.\u00a0 I could appeal, but no one would listen.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
The Warden of Stellar H was a small man.\u00a0 He had us digging through the sand sifting for gold twelve to fourteen hours a day.\u00a0 We never found any.\u00a0 We just got stung by the sting rays which infested the waters and every now and then they managed to kill and devour a man.\u00a0 They never bothered me though.\u00a0\u00a0 I discovered by accident one time that I could wade in the water and they would avoid me. It was the time the sky cracked open.\u00a0\u00a0 Funny, the expression on the faces of the men around me when it happened.\u00a0 As if they had forgotten what the real sky was like.\u00a0 As if they had forgotten how truly bright a real sky was.\u00a0 They cowered and covered their eyes with their arms as the dome above us split. Sting rays writhed and roiled,\u00a0 frothing the water up to my knees.\u00a0 I raised my arms in supplication as I stood naked and bathed in the natural warmth of the light. My legs had grown thick and powerful with the labor.\u00a0 For a moment, I beleived that I could fly and I leapt toward the sky. The ground fell away beneath me. The noise of the machinery operating the dome whined and screeched in protest, but I didn’t even hear it.<\/p>\n
And then they grabbed me and dragged me fighting and kicking down into the depths of Stellar.\u00a0 Their fists hammered me down again and again as I fought them.\u00a0 Blood poured from us and then I broke free from them and began to run toward what I believed was my escape.\u00a0 More uniformed guards came, captured me and they beat me till finally I submitted.\u00a0 I would fight another day, I vowed.\u00a0 I would return.\u00a0 They brought me through a doorway and into a room where a man sat on the floor.\u00a0 He was a small man and he sat there on a carpet and ate some spherical object that he seemed to be peeling.\u00a0 It looked like fruit, yellowish but with a reddish hue, not the color of anything I had ever seen.\u00a0 He looks at me, his one eye seeming to burst forth from his face and it penetrates into my thoughts and it sees my plans to escape.<\/p>\n
“Kill him,” he says. He resumes eating.\u00a0 At this point I assume they think I had opened the dome somehow.\u00a0 I begin to protest, to tell them I had nothing to do with it and that the true escapists are using me as a dupe. No words come out of my mouth.\u00a0 The bullet is already on course and I am already falling.\u00a0 I gasp, but I don’t feel any pain.\u00a0 “Wait!”\u00a0 says the small man.\u00a0 He stands then, and holds out his hand to the guard who just shot me in the leg.\u00a0 “I want to do it.” The guard hands him the gun. I turn away, I can’t watch it come.<\/p>\n
The second bullet pierced the back of my head and I felt the world, consciousness, whisked away, drawn away from me, attenuating to an\u00a0 imperceptible thinness.\u00a0 I drifted com\u00adpletely detached in a warm, soft haze as the skeins of death’s pirouettes danced around me in tattering shapes of white, black, and grey.\u00a0 I could hear nothing, feel nothing, taste nothing, smell nothing, and see only the grayish-white haze, like a thin veil all around me.\u00a0 And then it slowly dissolved as I began to hear music, and feel the pleasure beat of the keys under my fingers, the slow pulse pulse of the music’s rhythm cascades my senses.\u00a0 I ride the gestalt to awareness and then see that I’m in the prison ecclesia, playing the old piano with its archaic script across the front panel, spelling out in Gothic lettering “Last.”<\/p>\n
Now I’m led down the aisle by this sublime young woman who claims she’s my lover but, God (are You listening?!) it—it only seems like twenty minutes ago that I died and now a whole lifetime has passed and I’m back where it all started.<\/p>\n
I don’t even remember if I’ve done anything worth anything—I escaped the most secure prison in the universe and she tells me I did it by dying.<\/p>\n
I look to her.\u00a0 Seeing the love in her eyes discomfits me;\u00a0 I want to tell her, show her, somehow prove through some thing I do that I am worth it.\u00a0 Instead, I feel a binding in my chest, incredible pain shoots down my arms and my breath comes in short gasps.\u00a0 I realize I’m on the floor; she cradles me in her arms.\u00a0 I smile at her, and she smiles back.\u00a0 She is fragile when she smiles.\u00a0\u00a0 I tell her, “There was never enough time to . . . the things I want to show you . . .do for you . . .”\u00a0 and I watch as tears flow from her eyes.\u00a0 I see the piano, this “propylaeum”, rising over me.\u00a0 Too near to me are the arched sanctuary doors.\u00a0\u00a0 From a distance— I am far away now—I hear her whisper to me as she cradles my stilled body, she weeps, and says,\u00a0 “I don’t love you for the things you’ve done; I love you because you’re the one who did them.”\u00a0 I finally understand:<\/p>\n
There is nobody left now to play the Last piano;\u00a0 the push pull of the hammers tapping on the strings are stilled,\u00a0 and the stingrays glide through oceans without bound.\u00a0 This was the Second Death.<\/p>\n
\u00a0****<\/p>\n
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A young, very attractive and elegant woman sits, watches me.\u00a0 I know I was killed, but here I sit, playing the Last and I’m fine. \u00a0 A woman, virtually untenable in her beauty, listens to me play. Mind this: she … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bicycling","category-writing-and-speaking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scorellis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scorellis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scorellis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scorellis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scorellis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/scorellis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":692,"href":"https:\/\/scorellis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions\/692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scorellis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scorellis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scorellis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}