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Aleksandar tiptoed out the front door, latching it quietly behind him, and ran for his uncle’s, but it was too far. He was too late. By the time he reached the house, flames erupted from where the wood thatched roof used to be.
Up close, the fire was much louder than he expected. Glass shattered, flames spat and roared, and the wood beams glowed molten red, groaning like they were dying. Smoke stung his eyes and scratched the inside of his throat as he watched the fire consume his uncle and his things.
Aleksandar should have been sad—distraught even, but he felt nothing. Like he wasn’t in his body. Like everything that hadhappened to him had really happened to someone else. A distant siren called. He backed away, then turned, and let the woods swallow him up. He would come back tomorrow night and see what was left behind.
Once home, Aleksandar stripped and stuffed his dirty clothes in a trash bag so he could get rid of them at school the next day. Then he stood under the shower, washing his skin and his hair over and over again until he didn’t smell like smoke anymore, which was impossible, because everything smelled like smoke and he would never be clean again.
When Aleksandar wokethe next morning, the fire was still burning. Smoke suffocated the town, shadowing the sun with a dirty haze that cast the world into a hue of melancholy. Ash fell from the sky and didn’t stop, so that every breath Aleksandar took served as a grim reminder of his cowardice and everything he had lost.
The fire devoured the forest around his uncle’s house and burned all the way to the edge of the river before the fire crews were able to stop it.
That night, Aleksandar sat in front of the piano at his own house. He hardly ever played his father’s piano. It was more a status symbol than an instrument, and his father didn’t like him to play it, but Aleksandar had already skipped one day of practice. He wouldn’t skip another. He wouldn’t let his uncle down again, and besides, he needed it.
His emotions were too big and uncomfortable. He had to put them somewhere.
Aleksandar sat straight, lifted his hands over the keys, and began to play, but stopped immediately, curling his fingers against his palms. The keys were covered with silky ash that cutlike broken glass beneath his fingertips. He brushed the ash away with his sleeve, the piano protesting with loud jarring notes, but the keys still weren't clean enough, so then Aleksandar bent down and blew the soot away, over and over until he was lightheaded, not stopping until he could no longer feel grit under his fingers.
In the fraction of a second between his finger depressing the first piano key and the hammer striking the string, he worried that he wouldn’t be able to play, that as penance for letting his uncle die, his music might have died with him. He didn’t know whether he was disappointed or relieved when the first note reached his ears, stringing together with the next one and the next one into a melody that fluttered out the window and through the dark forest, some of them lost to the river and its current, the rest continuing onward over the burnt out woods on the other side, all the way to the ruins of his uncle’s house.
He turned his mind off, losing himself to the music, disappearing inside of it, disintegrating into sound waves, so he wouldn’t feel pain or love or loneliness ever again. He was music turned sentient. Senses without emotion. Sound, sight, scent, touch. He closed his eyes and let his music paint over all of his thoughts and feelings until the only thing left was a starless night sky.
After Ivet went to bed,Aleksandar snuck out again. The cloud of stale smoke dimmed the light of the nearly full moon, making the journey more difficult. It didn’t help that his uncle’s side of the forest was burnt down to charred stumps and spindled trunks that ended in jagged burnt-off ends so that the once recognizable landmarks, and the path itself, were lost.
When Aleksandar finally found his uncle’s house, he didn’thave to search for the key. The door had burned down and he could walk right in, the sounds of his footfalls muffled by the thick layer of ash covering the floor.
It was difficult to remember which rooms were which when almost everything inside was destroyed, but Aleksandar found the room he was looking for on his first try. In the corner, a large pile of embers still smoldered, a thin cloud of smoke drifting out a nearby window.
The piano was still standing. Barely. The piano lid had burned through completely to reveal metal strings curling away like they’d tried to escape. Aleksandar and his uncle’s initials were no longer carved into the side of the piano. He touched the spot to be sure that not even a shallow etching remained, but the wood crumbled to ash beneath his fingertips.
The fallboard was blackened and cracked like bark on a tree. Piano keys warped by heat no longer lay flat, but like crooked teeth.
Middle C had survived. As the name implied, Middle C was the centermost ‘C’ key on the piano. It was the landmark from which all pianists oriented themselves to the piano, and sheet music. “This is the only note you need to learn,” his uncle had said. “If you know where it is, you know where everything is.”
Aleksandar pressed down on the key and the sound that didn’t come hurt his ears. He lifted the key upward and pulled hard. The piano put up a fight, like it didn’t want to let go, but in the end he was stronger. Wood cracked like branches snapping and then the front half of the key broke free, sending him falling backward with the jagged key held victorious in his fist.
He didn’t care that the key broke in the process. What he had in his hand was enough; it was the part of the key that his uncle had touched, proof that his uncle had existed, no matter how his father had tried to erase him.
The piano would never make music again, but Aleksandar would take the key with him, and he would never forget.
He pocketed the key and turned to go. He still had to clean up and hide the key before Ivet woke. In his haste to leave, Aleksandar tripped on something hard, something so heavy that it didn’t budge when his foot hit it. He bent down and brushed the ash away, revealing a rectangular metal box with a mechanical lock. A fire-proof safe! The spot for the safe was interesting. Had his uncle hidden the safe beneath the piano, revealing it only after it burned? He lifted the safe. Heavy, but he could manage.
On his way home, he stopped at the carcass of an ancient tree downed during a storm two years before. The tree lay on its side on the forest floor, its twisted roots, thick as branches, left exposed when the fall ripped them from the earth.
His uncle had told him that decades later, a row of trees would grow from the trunk, nourished and tended as the elder tree decayed. A nurse tree was what it was called. “The tree’s sacrifice will lead to new life,” his uncle had said.
There was a shallow hole hidden behind the dangling roots and Aleksandar stashed the safe there. He would come back later and try to crack it.
After locking his bedroom door, Aleksandar crawled under his bed, and lifted the loose floorboard his uncle showed him years before. Aleksandar’s home had been his uncle’s home first.
Inside, Aleksandar kept a velvet pouch filled with colorful shards of stained glass that glittered like gemstones and a tiger carved from amber wood. He put the piano key inside and replaced the floorboard with a small thunk as it slid into place.
He felt more settled now that he had the key in his possession. Less empty. Less alone. A mean, ugly voice in his head reminded him that if he’d been brave, his uncle wouldn’t bedead, and his things wouldn’t be ash, and the key would have been in the piano where it belonged.
Overnight, a strong wind blew through the town, sweeping away what remained of the smoke, so that when Aleksandar woke the air was clear, the sky a cloudless bright blue, and that was worse, because it meant all he had left of his uncle was the piano key under his bed and the lockbox in the woods.
Oh, and music. He had that too.
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