The season for days blanketed by the intense sun, and sapphire nights dancing with stars is here! And of course my favorite thing about this season is the abundant time I have to read and write!
I have created quite the summer reading list. One I kept dreaming about during the last few weeks of school.
First up on my Summer Reading List is none other than '"Juliet" by Anne Fortier. I have read this book a couple times before, but it's enchanting world of Romeo and Juliet still has an affect on me. There's nothing quite like warm, golden Tuscany to kickstart Summer. Of course it also helps that the most romantic of all couples are the center of this novel.
Here's a book trailer for this romantic tale.
And if you also want to get reading for the summer you can start with my short story that was recently published in an art journal if you would like.
The Hushed Tone of a Symphony
She had fingers
designed to romance piano keys, the woman whom my father had loved.
Occasionally, when dusk would drift in through the windows of our home, father
would sit at the family piano and trace the instruments black and white teeth.
No one in our family had the talent that is needed to entice a piano to sing,
and yet in every childhood memory there the piano was, guarded in the
background. Father was the only member who was allowed to sit at the piano
bench. At times when I was supposed to have been tucked away in my bed, I would
sneak down to watch father’s hands fall over the forgotten keys, his fingers
like kisses upon the worn ivory.
When dusk made way
for the moon father would get up from his spot and join my mother on the porch,
their hands blended into one flesh. My mother never questioned the reason for a
piano that no one played and took up such valuable space in her parlor. She
dutifully dusted it, and made sure us children only grabbed it with our eyes.
Once when I was
seven and had entered into the phase of life where curiosity filled my mind
more than playground games, I opened the lid on top of the piano bench and met
the matured photograph of the woman whom my father had loved. She was posed by
the very piano I was standing next to, her classic hands draped over the keys,
sharing secrets. My seven year old brain didn’t understand the heart’s
melancholy memory. That evening when father came home he was at a loss for why
I handed him a picture of my mother and told him I liked this one better.
Father didn’t
realize I had found the picture of the woman from his youth, who had married his soul until I was sixteen
and had tried to sneak out to meet a boy. We sat across from one another at the
kitchen table etched with devoted dinner conversations. He slid a cup of coffee
to me, “You want to tell me why you were out whispering on the front porch when
you should be sleeping?” I gulped down the coffee in reply, my cheeks still
burnt with the fever that afflicts young hearts when the moon was entirely too
silver. Father looked down into his own cup, his smile reflecting off the dark
liquid. “Love is always the strongest at the most inconvenient times isn’t it?”
“Maybe we are the
inconvenient ones.” I prodded the coffee mug back to him.
Father nodded. “We
can be.”
“Were you ever?”
He clinked our
mugs together. “Fathers are never inconvenient.”
I thought of the
woman in the photograph, her eyes the shade of promise. “You weren’t always a
father.”
He looked over the
mugs, the photograph mirrored in his aging face. His eyes dropped with
remembrance as he stood. “That was a long time ago, sweetheart.” He moved past
me to the stairs angled near the piano. “Go to bed now.”
My eyes followed
his leather shoes up to the room he shared with my slumbering mother. When the
door clicked close I tip toed to the piano. I hovered my hand over the reserved
keys, my fingers too unholy to graze something so sacred. It was a long time
ago, father had said, and yet it could have been yesterday. A moment gone but
still treasured in memory.
I didn’t learn to
sympathize with the piano until I walked around with a tarnished engagement
ring hung around a chain on my neck. It was my constant companion along with
the empty echo of vows never declared. My siblings had all spread their roots
from the house of our childhood, but I had returned much like the way a horse
finds home when abandoned in the forest. I learned to spend my days in a
delicate manner, not leaving my room until dusk wrapped its arms around the
world in a quiet goodbye. When the orange light strolled in through the windows
I would sit by my father on the piano bench, which had now made room for two.
“You never learned
to play.” I told him.
“Never.”
I watched his hand
comfort the sad smile of the piano. “She—She didn’t teach you?”
Father played a
note. My ears buzzed at the piano’s peaceful voice. “No. She didn’t need to.
Watching her play was the point.” He hit another note that mingled in with the
dusky air, rising until it wasn’t a part of us anymore.
“Why do you
remember?” The engagement ring fell across my chest.
“Why would I
forget?” He picked up my hand and laid it on the keys, the recollections of a
protected antique love that dreamed inside the piano rippled through my
fingers.
“But she only
lives in your memory.” The engagement ring sighed against my skin.
Father pressed my
hand down, sending up a melody, “Then she still lives.”
That night I laid
to rest my engagement ring next to the photograph of the woman my father had
loved, not in a grave but in an eternal treasure. The lid closed not with a sound of finality that I had expected but with
the hushed tone of a symphony.
