🔴 THE PIANO STARTED PLAYING ITSELF RIGHT AFTER THE FUNERAL
I swear to God, I bolted upright in bed, heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. The old upright in the living room – the one nobody’s touched in years – was tinkling out “Clair de Lune,” note-perfect.
Goosebumps erupted all over my arms, even though the summer air hung thick and heavy. Dad always played that piece, his fingers dancing across the ivory with such ease. Mom would sit and watch him with this adoring smile… “Play it again, Robert,” she’d always say, her voice a low murmur.
But Dad’s gone now. He died last week, suddenly, a massive heart attack. The house has been eerily quiet ever since. Too quiet, until now. I crept to the doorway, the floorboards groaning under my bare feet, and that’s when I saw it. A faint, shimmering light hovering above the keys.
“Dad?” I whispered, my voice cracking. A low hum filled the room, and the music swelled, louder, more intense. Then, the piano lid slammed shut.
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The silence that followed the slam was absolute, a heavier weight than any sound could be. My heart didn’t slow; it beat a frantic, trapped rhythm against the sudden, suffocating quiet where the music had just been. The shimmering light was gone, utterly vanished. I stumbled into the room, hands trembling, and ran them over the closed lid, then the keys. They were cool, inert. There was no hum, no light, just the oppressive stillness of the empty house again. Had I imagined it? Had grief finally frayed the edges of my sanity?
I sank onto the worn velvet bench, the familiar dip in the cushion under me. I stared at the keys, the same keys Dad’s fingers had danced over countless times. “Clair de Lune.” Of all pieces. It was their song, his and Mom’s. The thought brought a fresh wave of tears, hot and sudden. And then, slowly, the fear began to recede, replaced by something else. Not terror, but a profound, aching tenderness.
Maybe… maybe it wasn’t a haunting. Maybe it was… a farewell? A last echo? A way of saying goodbye through the language he loved most, through the music that held so many years of shared moments, of love exchanged in quiet evenings by the piano. It was too beautiful, too perfect a rendition, to be something malicious or random.
I rested my forehead on the cool wood of the lid, breathing deeply, letting the tears fall onto my hands. The house still felt empty, yes, but not quite so silent anymore. The melody lingered in the air, not heard by my ears, but felt deep within my chest. Dad was gone, but his music, and the love it represented, wasn’t. It had played him out, a final, perfect note of his song, fading gently into the silence. I stayed there for a long time, just sitting in the quiet, letting the memory of “Clair de Lune” play on in my mind, a bittersweet lullaby in the wake of loss.