Fingers curved over keys. The melody stutters. You’d think music would be able to tell these things, would be able to draw feeling from heart like venom from bite. It can’t. Sometimes song fails. Her fingers splay across the piano, frustrated chord. She should be anywhere but here, really. Stringent sting of ammonia and sick in her nose. There’s a musical word…stringendo. Progressively quickening in tempo. Doesn’t quite capture the feeling. The way the hours have been speeding up. They told her six months. It turned into two weeks in a single staccato beat. They always gave measurable amounts of time, impersonal and sterile. Never “your brother’s dying.”

Crescendo grow of cells they sped too quickly and he couldn’t catch up. They showed her a picture of it, pointed out the dark lump. It was small, the size of a ping pong ball, maybe. She pushed her fingers into the key, pushed the left pedal. Una corda. One cord tying her brother to her mother when he was born. They had asked her father if he had wanted to cut it. She could hear as if remembering the hoarse incredulous laugh. The joking, awkward refusal. Snip. Here’s your child. You can keep him for twenty years, and then you have to give him back.

Guilt like acid. Like rotted something, syrupy in her chest. Should be in the hospital. They don’t have music there. Beep of machines and quiet wheels on tile. They are far too efficient to squeak. There is a piano in the lobby. Old and out of tune, never played. If you try the nurses give you pitying glances. She tried. The instrument wouldn’t talk back to her, so she gave up. The self-conscious tenor of her brother’s voice ran through her head. That piano wouldn’t do it justice. How he would steal her harmonies when they were singing along to the radio. Laugh at her when she scolded. No strength to sing, now.

Doesn’t want to check her phone. When she does, there isn’t a message. Mother is there. Father is crying in the bathroom, trying to hide his tears. Brother is on the second floor. She loves him too much to tell him that she loves him. That isn’t their rhythm. He knows. He must. There are so many things for him to forgive her for. She doesn’t know where to start asking. Puts her head down on the wood. Bach fugue for mourning.