Paper Piano

Too broke to play the real thing, the boy gathered, cut and arranged eighty-eight pieces of scrap paper across a table. He drew black keys as they were meant to sit and define the white land in between; a stretched, flat place full of the promise of highs and lows. Then he watched others play on a screen; telescoped his gaze towards their dancing fingers and listened to the notes as they rose and fell under skilled steps; racing, pouncing, hovering and alighting across the ivory. After a while he’d memorised and heard enough to graduate from screen to paper, to the real thing, and back to paper again. When he’d mastered the cut-out version years later, he would sometimes make mistakes. I made a mistake, he’d say, no longer a boy. You can slip up on a torn piano, he’d come out laughing; fall the wrong side of the white space, hit the bum notes. Today, he’s trained himself to hear his mistakes each time as music. Less the hopeless thud of soft-tipped bone on wood, with a cruel whisper of regret in return, than a sketch that sings off the table; fingers that catch and scale the wind, each time it fails to land in the same way. 

First appeared The Chalk Butterfly (Cinnamon Press, 2022) 

Jane Monson is a Specialist Mentor for disabled students at the University of Cambridge, prose poet and researcher. She edited British Prose Poetry: The Poems without Lines (Palgrave 2018). Her solo collections with Cinnamon Press include Speaking Without Tongues, The Shared Surface and The Chalk Butterfly. A fourth collection is in the making. 

Copyright © 2024 by Jane Monson, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author