• Her fingers are long spider webs, spanning octaves and more. Her pink skin stands out against the ivory keys, and her nails are rose petals settling and lifting and blowing around the keys. On sharps and flats they never stay long (she likes natural notes the best). As her hands move along the keys her toes press down on to the pedals. The ringing of the strings echo through the house. Playing piano is her dream. When her fingers touch the cool cream keys, her eyes become notes, her hair the staff, and her plump lips, the clef. All she knows is music. It's all she's ever known and all she wants to know.

    Her mother sits in the kitchen and drowns herself in wine when her daughter plays. The booming melodies make her shudder. Music is foreign to her. But across the hall, the little girl at the piano smiles. Music is the one thing she doesn't have to share with her mother.

    The piano is her only friend now. She knows everything about it. She knows that if she plays a B flat in the second octave, the key will stick. She knows that the F in the fourth octave is 14 cents sharp, and each key will suspend one and a half seconds without the pedal down. She tunes the piano her self, she's even replaced a string in it.

    It is her piano sitting in the day room. There's a window in the ceiling above it. Her name is all the finger prints on every key, and when she plays, with the sun shining down, she looks like an angel. Her splotchy, pale, pink skin gets highlighted, and her dull brown hair turns to a luminous chestnut. Her eyes become stormy gray, and her lips red. Her father thinks she's like a flower. He wishes he named her Violet, but instead he called her Catherine. It was her mother that picked the name.

    Catherine always hated her name. She thought it wasn't musical enough. She prefers Georgia or Emmalee. Those names always rolled off her tongue so easily. Her mother wanted a simple, plain but beautiful name. To Catherine, her name was dull. It was the melody that never soared. It was music without dynamics or articulations.

    Her piano is all she needs to become beautiful. Her piano is all she wants to know in life. Her piano is her.