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| The Music of Affairs This may sound as awfully predictable to you — if not utterly boring: having an affair with your piano teacher. How many books have you read, how many movies have you seen where a common passion for music developed a sticky side, hot and a little off key, only to dwindle when the music was all played and done? Yet, it happened. Miss Lydia was a slender, greyish creature; she seemed to have just stepped out from one of those sepia-faded pictures that people usually keep on their piano as an excuse for not playing: “We mustn’t disturb Grandma, you know, she always feared drafts...” Her big eyes, in which the colour seemed to have been desaturated by the clever application of a Photoshop tool, had that dreamy quality that some artists have, giving the impression that their reality isn’t located in your world but somewhere else entirely, a quality which makes you want to grab and shake them or — as in this case — to lose yourself in the faint pool of luminosity that comes from within. In such a mind, depth must be found per force, even if just a sterile extent of desert dunes. The usual hoax. Fittingly enough, when I first seized her, I found that she smelt like a piece of music — Shubert’s “Trout” to be precise—an odd mix of a fishy smell that may have come from the binding on her score book with a musty scent of decayed paper like something a bookworm might have chewed on melancholy for a while and discarded for a more substantial cantata. A woman made of paper, with a taste of something — animal — in the background. Alas. I looked for that animal but could only find a wet fish. I searched for the depth within but faced an empty room, a dusty attic abandoned by its occupants while moving on to a rosier place. Frantic for the passion I knew must be somewhere — how could she play without it? — I rumpled and crinkled and ruffled her paper-thin skin, leaving hungry bruises, sparks that should have but did not spread a fire. I became desperate. That’s all I can say. She was too fragile for music. Her books were sturdier—they gave me a hard time when I tried to set them alight. She burnt without a flame. |
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| Nathalie Boisard-Beudin |
| Nathalie Boisard-Beudin is French yet currently living in Rome, Italy, working by day as in-house lawyer for the European Space Agency and by night scribbling furiously, with results being published in the multi national anthology "Wonderful World of Worders" (Guildhall-Press) in 2007 and, on-line, in Six Sentences, Crime and Suspense, Micro Horror, Pen Pricks Micro Fiction, Qarrtsiluni and Membra Disjecta. |
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