Figure Study (2023)

Sweetened-up strings hold fast to your fingers—you hear resonance like a false harmonic when they unstick. You hammer wrought-iron fingertips into its long neck’s ebony; the vibration through your knuckles rings familiar and mechanical.

Punctuating your collective frustration, you draw the bow in a quick chop in front of the bridge. You peer through its f-hole (you’re intimate).  Amidst breadth of dust hides a deceased Czech’s last name and a serial number tracing to an old tome. You blow into it, but nothing will ever escape its chambers.

Pizzicato feels like raindrops falling on your fingers. A little warped like you, it wears the grey gum of centuries; its pegs only budge after a thick coat of graphite or lipstick. Maybe she’s born with it—maybe it’s Maybelline.

In its satin-lined coffin are a tin of Pirastro rosin and a plastic tube keeping a humidifier nonsensically dry. On a velour bed, a rogue piece of music which had been pressed into the strings’ form after having the lid shut on top multiple times. Between a good bow and a heavy one that murders your knotty fingers, a picture of you and your little sister at a pumpkin farm in 1996.

It is a member of the family, its scroll a binding ketubah.  Expensive like a marriage, the thought of losing it gives you anxiety not unlike a marriage. Its voice is close to Astrud Gilberto’s. Buying and selling it ends here, and it will be buried with you, like an ancient pet in its sarcophagus.