The storm fell on the mountains like a dog on a bone. Wind howled over stump and tree to tear at him with knife-sharp teeth and cruel groping claws. Snow sprayed his face as he stumbled through waist-deep drifts, wood stacked chin-high in his arms.
The cabin was close. He couldn’t see it, couldn’t see anything near it. Just out of reach the world turned to a swirl of white. But he had six long years’ knowledge of the mountain in snowstorm and sunlight. Her bones shaped the drifts, and he knew them through the crunch of crystals under his feet.
Every step was a struggle. The storm fed on earth, branch, and snow, an endless avalanche scraping the slope raw as a wound. His breath brittled under his nose. Precious wood rattled and slid as he stumbled, then righted himself.
The door coalesced from the blizzard. He drove himself to one last effort – five more steps and he was home to walls and hearth. Four. Two. Now the fire crackled in the hearth of river rocks, and he stacked the wood beside. Now he slumped in his chair, just for a minute.
The fire was lower and the wind no louder when he woke up. A log for the fire before he took off his coat and gloves to sit at the keyboard. He made it himself: a pine bough planed flat and smooth, keys painted on in shark-eye black and bleached bone. It looked wrong – odd keys in each octave, the minor keys in particular often misplaced and too many.
He knew it. He knew the sounds of his instrument as well as any made by man. He knew the touch and action of these flat lifeless keys. He could close his eyes and let his fingers summon triumph, heartache, love, loss, and every tint and texture of the heart. Felted hammers on taut wire could not match the beauty his mind heard.
He looked down into the valley, down into the lighted orderly streets of the city. The lake lay still under a sheet of ice, just as it had six years before.
[...] new stuff next door at One Draft for the first time in a while. I’m thinking of expanding this piece into something longer, [...]