The Piano Room
*
She takes her seat beneath the Venetian chandelier in the peach satin armchair positioned just to his right and slightly behind, so as to be out of his direct line of vision. Silence surges from the floorboards and up through the soles of her feet. She seems to remember having been happy in this room, that this was a room in which she had always been welcome. Silence cuts across her flesh and mixes with the marrow of her bones. She lifts her fingers from the arm of the peach satin chair, and someone grips them hard in his, someone who never in all his life would walk out of a room and leave her behind.