A Piano Lesson

Jim Hollingworth

A Piano Lesson

Peter wondered how sharks smell blood through water. When he was a kid, he desperately tried to pinpoint the taste of water. He’d heard that most of the sensation of taste was caused by someone’s smell. Crossed-legged on the kitchen counter, he’d put his nose so close to the water that he'd inhaled it, and it had gone up his nose. He’d cried.

Sitting out in the middle of the ocean, he hoped that water went up sharks’ noses when they tried to smell. Arms draped over the sides of a rotting plank, he felt the heat of the sun on his cheek and the heat of the board on his other. He let his cheeks try different heats as he turned to look at his companion.

“D’ya think that we’ll ever...I don’t know, like, get somewhere?” the kid said.

Peter’s eyes focused on nothing. There was no point in responding. He didn’t know if the kid was asking a rhetorical question or he was just stupid. He didn’t know where they were. He didn’t know if they’d ever get anywhere. He didn’t know if he even wanted to get anywhere. He sighed, silently.

“D’ya have a plan or something?”

Peter mumbled, caring enough to give the poor kid a response, but not enough to make any sense. He turned his head so that it faced down, and he could smell the wet wood and see through the little cracks in his board to the water below. It was nice; he felt like he wasn’t surrounded by the ocean. He felt isolated, calm, and it actually wasn’t that uncomfortable to have his head like this, straight down, even if the bridge of his nose was at a funny angle, he didn’t really mind, he focused below the water on nothing and breathed through his squashed nose like--

“I really, like, gotta get home...”

There was really no way you were gonna get home. Peter wondered what the kid really had to get home for. Was it for his family, for his life, future? Was it to get to a piano lesson? Was it to contemplate his life and reflect on his mortality now that he’d come so close to death, now that it surrounded him, blue and poisoned with the same stuff he’d put on his french fries the night before for dinner? Peter breathed heavily, once, inhaled so his body went rigid and he felt the tightness from lying on his chest against the wood, which cracked and creaked a little at the strain. Then he exhaled slowly, and felt weird, and his bottom half was used to the water and felt like it dangled into nothing, and Peter wasn’t afraid of the lack of feeling, it was nice, and he imagined that maybe someone else’s legs felt really good on some other city in the middle of land on the other side of the planet.

“Look man, we can’t just lie here.”

Peter could lie here. Peter had no deadlines, no family that he gotta get home to, no mortality to reflect on or future to ponder. No plans or deadlines to lie on his bed and contemplate as they moved around his brain like clothes in a washing machine, darks and whites together and the colors blended and he couldn’t tell his shirts from his pants and it didn’t matter anyway because he had no place to get dressed up for.

There was a cut on Peter’s leg, but his pain was blurred, like he was trying to see it through a foggy pane of glass. Distantly, he knew that there was blood coming from it, wispy like little red spiderwebs that glided through the water on a cool breeze. Distantly, the tour guide had pointed out sharks the night before.

“I wish we had some water. You like, can’t drink the sea right?”

Everyone on the deck had gotten their little cameras out and taken picture of the sharks. They’d pointed to their spouses, and some of the young girls had squealed a little to give their clay boyfriends an excuse to hold them. It had been almost comical to see the little fins just moving so slowly through the water, cutting the surface so cleanly, smoothly, like a finger through paint.

The kid put his finger in the water and licked it. He wasn’t really a kid. He must have been at least fifteen. Peter didn’t see age anymore. He’d had conversations with eight year olds, and he’d had conversations with forty year olds, and only the subject matter had been different.

“My friends must be so worried.”

Peter frowned. Why was this kid still talking? Couldn’t he see that it didn’t matter? That his important piano lesson was just half an hour of time not to spend wishing he’d learnt piano in thirty years?

“Mister, please do something.”

Peter was done with the kid and his pointless questions. Why was he expected to do anything? Peter saw his blood glide through the water through the cracks in the board. Calm broken, Peter no longer felt the comfort of the board, he felt the constraint. He wished that the kid would leave, he wished the kid was home, not because he deserved it but because Peter deserved to be by himself. The kid was a waste of time, the kid said things that had no substance, the kid was a full bag of chips that was deceptively air. He was annoying and Peter wished he could put a glass over his head, put him in the backyard like a housefly.

Drawn by the scent of blood, the shark broke the surface, and ripped the screaming kid from the board. The board dipped a little to compensate for the absence, and a little bit of water flooded up to Peter’s cheek.

Peter wished the kid was still there.

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Analysis:

           In the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn,

one of the key themes is the necessity of camaraderie in surviving tough situations. One of the biggest constant problems for Shukhov is his lack of food. In the beginning of the novel, Shukhov is herded off to the “can” per the insistence of the Tatar. He feels bad about missing his meal, and considers asking the gang boss to tell the Tartar that he doesn’t deserve any punishment. But he decides “he [doesn’t] want to irritate the Tartar. [His gangmates would] keep breakfast for him and didn’t have to be told”(6). Even though Shukhov is technically missing his meal, he is confident that his gangmates will help him, and he is so sure that they will save food for him that he doesn’t even bother to mention it to them. This is an example where camaraderie is necessary for survival in the camps. If the members of his gang had no sense of camaraderie, they would eat the meal themselves. Shukhov would then suffer greatly from even missing one meal, and the team would be less successful overall. Solzhenitsyn conveys a message that cooperation and camaraderie is necessary to accomplish goals and objectives, and necessary for individual success and survival in a hard situation such as a work camp. Later on, the importance of camaraderie is seen again. When the gangs return from a hard day’s work, they head towards the cafeteria for their daily rations. Escorted by guards, the cafeteria runs on a first-come first-served basis, so the prisoners are eager to arrive before other gangs. When the escorted prisoners and their guards spy another gang making their way to the cafeteria before them, they begin to run. As they sprint, Shukhov realizes that “even the guards [are] with them. They were all in it together” (101). This again shows a sense of camaraderie among the prisoners of the work camp, and how that cooperation is necessary for important items such as food. The boundaries of class and status are broken by a common desire: to get food before someone else does. Had a single prisoner been walking by himself, he would not have been spurred into running. However, the sense of camaraderie in a group such as this drives individuals to work harder to achieve their goals. People need people to help them survive.

In my flash fiction story, I too deal with themes of camaraderie, and the necessity in having people. One character, who doesn’t like others and wishes to be alone, is saddened when he finds himself truly alone. While, unlike Solzhenitsyn, I do not delve into the importance of camaraderie in achieving goals, I did write about how people need people, whether they believe it or not. The characters in the novel would be very lonely and depressed if they did not have the unity of their gangs to push them through the day. My character needs people too, needs a friend to be with in a tough situation. My story connects with Solzhenitsyn’s in the sense that both deal with themes of the importance of camaraderie and company in surviving hard times.