Refrain

by NTSTS

Rating: teen
Tags: Original Character, Octavia, Other, Slice of Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Sad
Length: 24703

My name is Octavia. I play the piano. I'm not sure that's the best introduction, but it's the one I've used for most of my life, so maybe it will do for now.

Octavia has always played the piano. From a young age, it was her mother's dearest wish that she would learn, and she couldn't let herself disappoint her mother. So she played the piano. But that isn't to say she wanted to.

This is the story of her life, told by her. It's a story about music, family, and self-discovery.

Written for the /fic/ May Write-Off, in which it came second place (to DuncanR's amazing Erase and Rewind).

Edited by Vimbert.

Published 2013-07-16 18:40:02 UTC
Last updated 2013-07-16 18:40:02 UTC

Chapter 1

The first thing I can remember is music, in the form of my mother’s voice. No words, but her voice, singing to me. I never considered my mother’s voice to be particularly harmonious—it was, when she spoke, stately and elegant, but in a not altogether entirely perfect fashion. It reminded me of of a crystal wine-glass that had been sanded around the edges: clear, but sharp.

The tune she sang to me was one I heard often. It’s quite a simple song, nothing particularly challenging in terms of range or register. Of course, when I was young, I had no idea the words she was singing could be translated to notes on a page of music. To me, at that moment, they were something magical and inscrutable.

Another one of my earliest memories is being curled up on the floor against my mother’s hooves and asking her to sing for me. She would smile, put out her cigarette, and sing as sweetly as she could manage. I didn’t know what the words meant, but I sung along, doing the best I could to follow the rise and fall of my mother’s voice. I’m not sure if I ever saw her smile more than she did that day.

Due in part to my mother’s refusal to translate her words, I didn’t know, when I was young, that there was any meaning in that song—in a roundabout way, I’m still not sure there is. Music is black dots and lines on a page. Ponies speak of the significance of music—the capacity for depth and emotion, the moving nature of a melody or composition—but in the end, it’s all just notes. Something to be remembered and recited, over and over and over. I wonder sometimes if that’s the only reason I still remember that moment with my mother, long before I was old enough even to recall one day or the next. It seemed important at the time; important enough that I some how knew I would learn to play it from memory one day.

Life, unfortunately, is not a series of notes we can read out. It’s much more complicated than that, which might be why I have such a difficult time remembering more of it . Maybe the pieces I can remember might mean something, if I put them together.

When I was still very young, probably just a toddler, I remember taking notice of the families around that were different than ours: all colours and smiles and things to be laughed at. On one of many trips across Ponyville, I remember looking at another group of ponies, one of them my age, and two older. That was the other difference: our two, versus their three or four.

For both our lives together, we lived in Ponyville. My mother never said whether this was out of choice or obligation, though it’s not difficult to guess. The way she spoke about things—music, culture, literature—gave the impression that she wished she had been lived under better circumstance. Maybe she had, at one time or another.

In any case, what I remember most of very young years are the streets of Ponyville. There was a great deal more mystery in the streets when I was young: dark and dingy alleys that I’m not sure ever really existed dark and dingy that my mother would drag me through, sometimes pausing in search for something that might have been discarded there. I remember a lot of hooves, mostly because I was at their eye level when my mother led me around.

When I noticed the family in front of us, my mother paused and looked back down at me. She would always smoke when we were out, and even though the cause for my sudden pause might have been a simple urgency like needing to use the washroom, she stopped and glared at me through her glasses. Her glasses looked like her: elegant, ornately framed, and with a grey finish all around the sides, the perfect match to her mane I always remember being a lighter shade of greys. And, just like her, they weren’t quite in the state they had been made. One of the sides extending around her ear was frequently subject to breaking—which, in times between repair, meant she was forced to hold them up with her hoof, like opera spectacles. I think sometimes she waited to have them fixed for that very reason.

“Yes, what is it?” Her voice was always urgent at that age. Over time I think it mellowed in a way, when we had a proper home instead of the bustle of the streets.

“Mommy,” I said. Over time that word would leave my vocabulary, but at that age, it was still allowed. “Who are those ponies?’

It’s remarkable that I was as articulate at that age as I was—most likely a byproduct of my mother’s mumbling into my ear beneath the crowd. Telling me things about them and putting the seed of vocabulary into my mind, to later sprout into proper words and perception.

My mother looked up at the family in question: a stallion, mare, and child that I can’t recall the colour of. As much as I might be able to recall this particular memory, it wasn’t anything about the group that stood out, other than that there were three of them.

“I’ve no idea. Is there something about them you’ve found necessary to hold us up for?”

I think it’s a wonder that my mother didn’t simplify her speech when talking to me—but that most likely plays into the way my vocabulary developed.

“Why’s there three of them?”

I can’t tell if my mother’s face soured then, or if it was simply as bitter as she always kept it. In my mind, I think the corner of her mouth turned more into a sneer than usual.

She stewed over the question for a while, which was an oddity. Usually any answer was on the tip of her tongue before I finished the question. The two of us stood for a while wherever it was we were, letting all the ponies around pass like a busy stream around two grey rocks.

“Well,” she said finally, “why shouldn’t there be?”

“But there’s only two of us,” I said. “They have one more. Who’s that?”

My mother looked up from me to the family again. I did the same, watching them. Again, while I can’t remember the colours, I have some of the particulars. The stallion had a mustache I remember, bushy, and a black hat with a buckle. The mother’s hair was up in a bun, maybe violet. And the child had a small stuffed animal with her, which she was moving through the air like it was flying. Her parents stood next to each other, just behind her, and smiled.

“That’s the girl’s father,” my mother said, as though the word might suddenly make sense. For everything she’d ingrained in me with her unfiltered vocabulary, that was a word I didn’t know.

“Father?” I asked, rolling the unfamiliar word around in my mouth, perplexed by it. Though young, I could intuit the meaning of the syllables—two ponies and someone my age, one a word I knew, the other this new word. I had a mother. This girl had someone else. A father.

“Why don’t we have a father?” I asked.

Then, for certain, my mother’s face turned like spoiled wine. She dropped her cigarette to the ground, I remember, and stamped on it with her hoof.

“There’s no need for questions like that,” she said. An oddly sparing chastisement in the face of her sudden unpleasant reaction.

“But why?” I asked.

“It’s simply unnecessary,” she said. “We’ve no need of a stallion. The two of us are simply enough. Understand?” She kneeled down low to me then, staring me straight in the eye, adding weight to her words with the force of her piercing blue, like sky-coloured tea-cups.

I wanted to ask more, but I think at that moment I knew better. So, I simply nodded, and she nodded back and stood. We walked forward with only a glance back from me at the family, still standing in perfect reflection, solid as we were in that river of ponies walking by, with nothing else in the world but their bodies and the look in their eyes as their daughter played and laughed like she hadn’t a care in the world.

That’s all I remember of that day.

While I can’t recall how we came into our first house, I remember the house quite distinctly. It was, in a way that many things were, so much like my mother, though I guess that this is simply a judgement passed in a reflection of a lifetime spent sharing it with her. Ponies often say that about me, or did, when they were the sort that knew her; ‘You’re so much like your mother,’ they would say, when I was growing up, meeting them on the way home from school or on days off. I would smile and nod and say thank you, and my mother, if she was present, would nod her head approvingly and go on about how of course, I was just like her at her age, destined for great things. She had been in the opera, of course, but gave it all up when she immigrated. She had been in a conservatory far off overseas. Where? Oh, heavens, no need for details. That was then, and this was now, she’d say.

But that’s jumping ahead. The house was the important thing. It wasn’t as much like my mother as other things; contrary to the fine china we somehow kept unused amongst the scavenged dishes taken out for everyday meals or the army of decorations that littered every shelf inside, the house itself was quite drab. From the outside, it was unremarkable—dilapidated, even. The finish was a too-thick layer of brown paint which only served to make the entire wood structure look like it was set to fall apart at any moment, as it probably was. Somehow, despite a lack of any awareness on my part of what it was my mother did at that age or how she managed to scrape together the bits to afford it, we were able to move into this house, complete with two stories, and a special room where I would spend most of my childhood—most likely more of it than in my bedroom. It was empty when we first moved in.

“This is a real solid structure.” I remember the pony we spoke to the day we moved in. He was a far-off sort, not in the way we were far-off, or mother was, but in a ‘too local to be local’ sort of way. He practically dripped grease when he spoke, and though I couldn’t place it then, I believe now he spoke with an Manehatten accent. Something from the downtrodden streets of ponies who could sell you the city bridge without batting an eyelash. He had a hat, slightly too small for his head, and he shared a smoke with mother after we were done with the tour, leaning against the wall of the peeling brown paint and talking about this that and the other thing. While he talked a lot when called upon, he seemed to know when it was best to listen.

As he commented on the building, myself and my mother inside the bottom floor of the house, he leaned sideways against one of the walls. I remember seeing his hoof shuffle quickly to cover a dent in the wall as he noticed it. I wanted to tug at my mother’s leg to point it out, but she moved away from me quickly as her eyes went over the rest of the house’s interior. She had only been inside for a moment before she walked into that room, like she was drawn to it. She put out her cigarette on her hoof, something I didn’t often see her do, and stood in the center of it. It was the one room with a glass door, I remember, while the rest were tarnished wood, or simply not there at all.

“Ah,” said the pony with the slick accent, “this is a nice little bonus as well. This room’d be perfect for all kinds a’ stuff. You could turn it into an office, a study, a guest bedroom—”

“A music room,” my mother interjected. She stepped closer to the far end of the room as she spoke and held her hoof up to it, running it over the marred splotches of white paint. Her voice sounded almost musical then, reaching a softer tenor than her pointed edge of articulation often neared.

“Well, for sure.” The realtor pony adjusted his hat and took a cigarette out of his coat. He put it to his lips but didn’t light it, perhaps assuming that he might do well to follow my mother’s lead. He stepped into the room behind her and watched her for a second as she appraised the room.

“You a musician?” he asked. My mother turned to him after a few seconds with a sort of haze still in her eyes, and me standing outside the room, watching both of them.

“Years ago I was in the opera. Nowhere near here, of course.” She walked around the room slowly, tracing her hoof along the wall. In her head, I imagine she was picturing the shelves of sheet-music that might go there, with room in the middle for the all-important centerpiece. She stopped suddenly and turned with a half-smile on her face. “My husband was a concert pianist. Very talented.”

“Issat so?” the realtor asked, rolling the cigarette in his mouth. “Anypony I woulda heard of?”

“I don’t believe so,” my mother said. “He passed some years ago, before he had a chance to become well-known over here.”

“My condolences.” Somehow, when he said it, the words sounded about as sincere as a street vendor’s hawking. But my mother seemed to appreciate it. She smiled but said nothing.

After a quick tour of the rest of the rooms, the paperwork was signed, and we had, for the first time, a house to call our own. There was scarce little furniture to go around—we hadn’t secured any bedding that I can recall, and so slept together on a pile of blankets in one of the empty bedrooms. But for most of that first day, as I ran about the house, laughing and playing games by myself, my mother stood in the music room, staring off into the distance, and humming occasionally to herself. That tune she always hummed. Smiling.

I never really knew what it was my mother did for finances. That’s an odd thing to say, looking back. Certainly, there was money around, in that we ate, though not entirely well. Meals most nights were some variety of flavorless mush, or vegetables that were always more brown than green, wilting before the steam hit them and tasting like day’s-old dirt in my mouth. Somehow, though, we always had enough to get by. I suppose owning the house rather than renting made a difference, though it also meant that the upkeep was ours alone to manage. All the holes in the walls, the plumbing that malfunctioned from time to time, spurting water out of a leaky drain, or more often than not simply refusing to let out a drop of hot water no matter how hard the handle was turned. When school started and I arrived at class with my thin brown coat and a lunchbox with a single, unsavory-looking apple, I felt odd, because the ponies there all seemed different. They were all shiny and new, while I, only in my first year, felt as old as the coat I was wearing.

Mother claimed from time to time that she had a great inheritance which she was given, and was simply metering it out so that I wouldn’t become spoiled and decadent. When I would ask her, before I learned better of it, to treat me to this or that, an ice cream or a toy I spotted on one our less-frequent excursions, she would cluck her tongue at me and narrow her eyes behind her glasses.

“There’s no need for things like that, Octavia,” she would say, pulling me promptly from the window of whatever treasure I had affixed myself upon. “Come now, we’re in a hurry.” And off we would go. I could never manage more of a protest than to ask, once.

Certainly my mother had some form of employment—she would meet ponies from time to time, mostly older, educated, prim-and-proper higher-class sorts whom she would say were business partners. In the depths of my reckoning, I can’t recall anything untoward in the exchanges I had with them: nothing that suggested anything more than was there. I would guess that my mother found some form of salary in private teaching, though she was careful never to let on to me who or what she might be teaching, if that was indeed what she was doing. The thing I remember particularly was that, no matter how it was the case, we managed to stay afloat somehow, and that though she may have worked in some way or another, she was always there when I left for school, and there still when I came home in the evening.

Chapter 2

“Isn’t it marvelous, Octavia?”

The reverence in my mother’s voice was the same form in sound that I’d seen in her smile the first day we moved. Only a few months after, before I was set to begin attending school that year, my mother spent the most money on something that I’d ever seen her—or, till this day, have still ever seen. After picking up some used mattresses and basic kitchen utensils, we went without any further additions to the house until that day.

I was woken up by my mother, which was an oddity. I understand it’s usually the convention of children to be bright-eyed and ready to go most of the time before their parents—but that day, my mother shook me awake like it was Hearth’s Warming morning and dragged me downstairs with a glimmer in her eyes on the way to the room that had been empty when I went to bed. I don’t know how I slept through the moving, unless the ponies in question happened to be very skilled and very quiet. Given what I appraised to be the cost of the thing they had moved, I suppose that’s not out of the question.

In the center of the room my mother had dubbed the ‘music room,’ where only blank space and far-eyed glances had been before, a huge piano greeted me that morning. Even in my complete ignorance, I could tell it was expensive. Unlike everything else in our house, which was drab and dingy and reeked perpetually of an unknown odor no matter how many times it was washed or cleaned, the piano shone. It glimmered, even with just a hint of light creeping in from outside, like it was a polished stone hewn into a single entity. Even though I didn’t know what it was, or what to make of it, I ‘oooh’d appropriately as my mother opened the door.

“It’s a hoof-crafted original from Prance,” my mother said, standing at the doorway as she held the door open and let me inside. I immediately began circling the thing, like it was even more of a strange, foreign object than it actually was. I was in awe of it, which I think my mother appreciated.

“The kind your father used to play,” she said, running her hoof along the finished body. That was, I think, the first time I heard her mention him. I was almost too occupied to take notice, but I wasn’t about to let the word I had wondered at for some time just slide by.

“Where is Father?” I asked. The word sounded more proper than my youthful intonation could make it. Unlike last time I’d broached the subject, my mother’s expression stayed sedate.

“He left before you were born,” she said, her hoof still on the piano.

“You told the house-selling pony that he passed.” I chewed the memory over for a few seconds before digging out the meaning I’d put together from the context. “Does that mean he died?”

My mother was silent for a few seconds before she turned to me. Her expression was still soft, like the smile on her face was frozen in a kind of consolatory haze.

“Oh, dear, that’s not something we discuss openly with just anypony. Passing is just a... simpler explanation.”

“So he’s not dead?” I stepped towards the piano, getting so close I could feel the glow of its shining surface in my eyes.

“Who knows? Some things, you’ll find, Octavia, are better left uncertain.”

I don’t think at the time I was content with my mother’s explanation, but I was understanding enough at that point to know that further questioning wasn’t likely to lead anywhere. So, with my line of inquiry stymied, I stopped looking at the piano, let my hoof rest on it the way my mother’s did, and looked at it.

Despite the fact that the giant instrument may as well have been an indecipherable machine, there was something that made my touch linger over it. Somehow, there was an energy about it—whether I could feel my mother’s breathless wonder permeating the wood, or if it was simply a foreboding awareness of what it might come to mean.

My mother smiled as she watched me run my hooves over the fine finish until I reached the cover at the front. My mother’s hoof met my own, and I looked up at her. Still smiling.

“Would you like to see?” she asked.

I nodded.

The way she lifted the cover off was almost worshipful—so slow, so carefully, until at last the cover was up, revealing a full span of white and black keys from one end to the other.

I remember letting out an ‘aaah,’ to my mother’s approval. The two of us stood in front of the piano for a while, neither of us speaking, barely breathing, white and black keys shining, inches away from our hooves—until finally, my mother spoke.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Her words came out in a single breath.

I nodded again.

“It’s alright,” she said. “You can touch it.”

I was apprehensive. Even being around something so new and pure seemed wrong.

“Go on,” she said. “That highest one there, the white one. Press down on it.”

While I was reticent to paw at something so beautiful with my clumsy, dirty hooves, I did as my mother requested. Softly, nervously, with no certainty, I put my hoof on the highest key and pushed it down.

A single, quiet note rang out. As it hung in the air, so softly, my mother closed her eyes and sighed. She waited until the last trace of the note had vanished before opening her eyes again.

“Your father could play so beautifully,” she said, running her hoof over the keys without depressing them. She stopped halfway and lifted her hoof.

“And someday, you will too.”

I nodded, silent, knowing still there was no sense in asking questions. Not knowing that, as the years went by, the piano I was so in awe of at that moment would become the thing I hated more than anything else in the world.

Initially, my mother intended to teach me herself. In the first few weeks, when the piano was still new, she would sit down with me in the newly christened ‘music room,’ plunk me down on the stool and tell me which keys I should press. Even with a complete ignorance of what I was doing, I knew the notes sounded pretty—but some were prettier than others, and I wasn’t sure what to do to make them all sound that way.

“This,” my mother said, pointing to the white key before the two black ones, “is a C. Press down on that one.”

I pressed. A middle C played.

“Good. Now, that one, down two—press that.”

I pressed. A lower note rang out. My mother smiled.

“That’s an A. Those two notes are very special. Play the first one again.”

I pressed. C.

“Now the other.”

A.

“Now keep playing them like that, back and forth.”

My timing must have been terrible, but I tried my best to do as directed, sticking my tongue out between my teeth and focusing as hard as I could on going back and forth between those notes. C. A. C. A.

After a minute or so, my mother began to sing.

It was the same tune she always sang—the one from when I was too young to know anything but her voice, that she hummed to me when she put me to sleep; that she’d hum when tidying the house, and later dusting the figures she collected on every available inch of shelving; or whistled, when making dinner. It’s a tune that, to this day, I cannot forget.

But, with the clumsy back and forth of my playing, it somehow sounded different. More, in a way.

My mother sang for a while as I played, until she stopped with a soft smile and held her hoof up to signal to me to do the same.

“Your father used to play that song for me,” she said.

That was the first time she taught me, but not the last. Subsequent sessions, however, were not as productive. For one thing, though I appreciated the beauty of the sounds I was making in an abstract sense, I didn’t find anything particularly engaging about the piano. I sat down at it once or twice of my own accord to plunk out a few notes, ignorant of theory and still wondering why certain notes sounded better than others. I remember making up a simple song or two, but didn’t have much more interest than that. After a few weeks, the shiny new piano was boring, and I went back to playing games with myself, and wondering aloud to my mother what our neighbours might be like, and if they would play with me if I said hello. My mother put up with half a month of my relative disinterest until she sat me down one morning and informed me she was going to teach me.

It was, in a word, miserable.

For one, despite the basic knowledge she had displayed, as well as her claim of a background in opera, my mother seemed to have no real understanding of theory. She would tell me certain places to press but seemed to be as unsure feeling her way along the keys as I was. She only knew a few songs that she could attempt to translate to the piano, and while she would put up with my amateurish attempts to play at her insistence for a while, she would quickly become frustrated, stressing me to ‘play better’. I had no idea what that meant—the only notes I knew were the ones she told me—and after my desperate attempts at embellishments, which sounded awful, she would scream at me, saying things like “Your father played much better!” Sometimes I would cry, but mostly just apologized.

Two months after we got our piano, my birthday came.

The day was, for all intents and purposes, unremarkable. I didn’t have the benefit of exposure to friends or other ponies to know what I was missing, other than what I had absorbed through convention and assimilation from text or observation. I wasn’t completely shut off from the world—my mother would let me out to fraternize with the ponies playing outside but was always lingering nearby to swoop in if somepony she deemed unsavoury caught my attention. More often than not she would prefer to have me practicing, even though I still had no understanding of exactly what it was I was practicing. We had a meal in the evening that was very much the same as every other meal we’d had that week.

“I’ve gotten you a gift,” she said. It was sudden, an interruption as I was midway through a mouthful of food. I remember being taken aback. While the day that far had been like any other, a gift meant acknowledgement. It meant my mother knew it was my birthday as much as I did, and all the hopes and dreams I had built up might at least be salvaged in something I could use to pretend that for at least one day a year, I was significant.

“Here,” she said, hoisting something over the table. She set it down and shoved it towards me. It was fully wrapped, and the flowery pattern of the paper made a shuffling sound as it moved across the table. I pushed my plate aside and took the box in my hooves. It was much smaller than I expected, but it was still a gift—and so, I opened it with fervor, tearing the wrapping paper off with no reverence for its intricate design.

The wrapper paper fell away to reveal a simple wooden box. I pushed it open and peered inside. A strange object greeted me, with a long arm and several notches along the front.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a metronome,” my mother said simply, as though I would know what the word meant.

“A what?” I picked the object up curiously, and with some apprehension. Even from just looking at it, the same way with our piano, I could tell it was expensive, fragile.

“A metronome,” my mother repeated. “It’s used to keep time when practicing music.”

She said it with a certain smugness. Maybe that much is misremembered in the haze of the emotion that overtook me at that point. Somehow, in all the weeks of forced failure at the piano, and of a whole birthday made to culminate in a gift I had no understanding or use for, my emotions came together. I remember the tears starting, for once without the crying that usually went with them. A hot stream trickling down my cheeks as I held in my hooves the gift that my mother had given me, and at that moment that I loathed as much as her.

“It uses quartz to keep accurate,” she explained, not noticing the clenching of my jaw or the pouring of tears from my eyes. “It’s very high quality.”

“Why did you get this for me?” She looked up at me then as if seeing me for the first time, and at that point must have noticed my crying. The soaking of my coat the way that it did when sorrow flowed over. The way my hooves shook as I held the metronome.

“Oh, come now, Octavia, show some tact. It was very expensive, and goodness knows you’ll be making use of it.”

“For what?” I practically shouted the question. I had enough sense to set the metronome back into its box, knowing full well that if I kept hold of it I was likely to hurl it into the wall.

“What do you mean ‘for what’?” she asked. “Why, for your piano, of course.”

“I hate the piano!” I stood up from the table then, barely high enough to see over it from my chair, which I quickly dismounted. I wanted to turn and run at that moment, but the air was too thick for me to cut myself free just yet. I could feel my mother’s contempt for my display of emotion twisting into her own bitterness, evident as it shone through in the down-curl of her mouth.

“There’s no need for that sort of sentiment, dear. You may say that now, but I can feel it in you; you’ve got an aptitude, the same as your father, and I’ll let myself go to the grave before I allow you to waste it.”

I didn’t speak then. As much as words might have bubbled behind my lips, wanting so badly to let me spit them at her like acid, I held my tongue. She waited a few seconds, then adjusted her plate as though it was entirely proper to return to her meal. That was enough to give me the strength to speak up, though my temper had begun to abate.

“I don’t want to play the piano,” I said. “I hate it.”

“There you go again. Really, don’t be foolish, Octavia. You were born to play the piano as sure as you were born at all.”

“But what if I want to play something else?” I tried to reason, looking around the room. Various statuettes and figurines had begun to coalesce in all rooms of the house by that point, though they were then a far-stretch from the colossal collection they would one day become. On the mantlepiece near the living room window, a miniature orchestra sat, frozen in the perpetual motion of their soundless performance.

“Like the violin?” I asked. “Or the cello?”

My mother cleared her throat quite distinctly, as though she’d practiced it in another life.

“Well, that would be simply a shame, because it’s the piano you’re going to play.”

I remember visibly shaking as I stared at my mother from the other side of the table, willing her to suddenly burst into flame—to wither into nothing for the stupid ‘high-quality’ quartz she had given me on the one day I was meant to feel special.

“I’ve signed you up for lessons as well. Not that I imagine you might be convinced of how generous a gift of that sort is... but you’ll thank me when all is said and done.”

That was the last I could take. I ran up to my room, plate of half-eaten food still on the table, metronome in its wooden box. My mother, chewing daintily, not batting an eyelash at her daughter as she ran away, crying.

Piano lessons started next week.

Despite the eloquent piano in the downstairs of our house, I went to the local music store for lessons—Hoof and Sound. The practice room in the back was a good deal more clinical than our house: the walls were padded with a green material I was told was soundproof, and the shelves were lined with textbooks, musical implements and instruments, folios and sheet music and carrying cases. There was a whole shelf of metronomes, which, when shown, prompted me to present my birthday gift and quietly say that I had brought my own. The pony who showed me around just chuckled at that.

He was the same pony who led me into the back room for lessons. While faces are something I find I have no gift for remembering, I do remember the way he looked. He was an older stallion with a great big bushy beard and mustache that circled the entire lower half of his face in pure white. His mane was the same colour, a brilliant contrast against his coat, which was a matte brown. A swirl of music notes circled on his flank, surely at least assurance for my mother that he was good at what he did. At least he had the benefit of direction in his cutie mark: my mother, for example, was possessed of an empty crystal wineglass on her side. While there are inferences to be drawn from such a mark, there’s likely a great deal more about it best left unsaid.

As he led me into the practice room, I remember feeling the worst I’d ever felt up till then. At least in the comfort of my home, no matter how awful my mother decided to be, or how miserable I was for disappointing her, at least then I was safe. Out in the wide world, away from my mother’s watching eye, I was setting hoof entirely into the unknown. The music instructor seemed nice, but that wasn’t enough to stay the rapid imaginings in my head of horrible scenarios and unspeakable horrors that might be waiting for me, hidden under his veneer of a smile. More than that, it wasn’t that I was afraid of being killed or kidnapped or tortured; I was afraid of being judged. My mother had given me a good preclusion for that.

“So,” he said as he sat down with me at the piano. His hooves came noticeably close to mine, and I shuffled sideways as imperceptibly as I could manage.. I could feel a sweat on my coat. “You want to learn the piano, eh?” He had a voice like a real old stallion, or like the imaginary, ideal version of one: loose dentures and cursing adolescent colts and fillies to get off his lawn, dagnabbit. Now I can recall it as being a delightfully pastoral sort of reassurance, but at the time, it was terrifying.

‘So you want to learn the piano,’ he’d asked. No. Of all the things in the world I did not want to do, this was at the top of the list.

“Yes,” I said, a squeak so quiet I could feel him lean towards me to hear better.

“Well,” he said, “you’ve chosen quite the instrument. There’s no instrument so rich in history or complexity as the piano. It’s capable of some of the world’s most moving music, and the choice of some of the most talented performers in Equestria, or even in the world.”

I didn’t say anything. I just shuffled further down the bench in an attempt to move further away from his low-hanging beard. I could feel the edge of the bench underneath my legs.

“Your mother tells me you already know how to play a little. Would you like to show me?”

No. Please, just let me go home, let me do anything but the piano, let me go home and kick the one downstairs until it’s in pieces on the floor and I never have to look at it again.

“I guess.”

He smiled at me like I was the cutest thing in the world, which I may have been to him. While he was smiling, I wanted to throw up.

But, he stood up from the bench and let me slide to the center, which I did with hesitance. I took up the keys with the same attitude, letting my hooves hover over them as though I might play them only by letting my body fall apart and collapse forward.

With my breath laboured and my heart beating louder in my chest than anything else I could hear, I played for him the simple song that I knew, and that I had always known, in some way or another. I made a great many mistakes, even noticeable in a way that I could tell. There was no end to the song, as my mother was usually the one to get me to stop, by humming out the last bar of the melody which I would attempt to follow with my right hoof, or by screaming at me when I got something particularly wrong.

My hooves shook as I settled them into my lap. I didn’t turn to look at him.

He made a sound that, in my terrified brain, didn’t register as a chuckle until I turned around and saw him smiling.

“That’s quite impressive for a filly your age. Do you know the name of that song you were playing?”

I shook my head.

“It’s a very famous song,” he said, standing to reach a hoof up to one of the many shelves of sheet music. He shuffled through the folders before pulling one out and opening it. He gestured for me to slide down the bench, which I did, giving him more than enough room to sit, whereupon he lifted the sheet he had selected to the holder and laid it out atop the keys.

I looked up at it as though it was a bomb waiting to go off. The notes on the page leered back at me, a slew of menacing curly-queues, dots and dashes and lines and symbols and notation written in a language I couldn’t interpret, even when it was using letters I recognized. Concerto. Allegrezza.

“It’s an old, old folk tune from overseas... nowhere in particular, and in fact the original composer isn’t even known. Over the years it’s been adapted to a variety of formats... operas, symphonies, concertos... that’s the one I’ve put up there. Have a look, would you?”

I peered at the sheet music again. Somehow, I was meant to believe that the incomprehensible mess of squiggles I was looking at was the same thing as the song I had just played.

“Do you know what any of that means?” The instructor leaned in close enough that I could feel the phantom tickle of his beard on my shoulder.

I shook my head.

“That one there,” he said, gesturing to the first in a cluster of black blobs, “is a note called C... along with some other notes above it that make it sound nicer.”

“I know C,” I said, letting the admission slip out before I could stop it.

The old pony raised an eyebrow at me.

“So you can read after all?”

I shook my head again.

The instructor cocked his head at me. He held a stare for a few seconds before shifting his hoof slightly to the right.

“Do you know what note that is?”

My tongue felt thick in my mouth, but something inside compelled me to answer.

“A,” I said.

“Yes, that is an A. You’re sure you don’t know how to read this?”

Again, head shake.

“What about this one?” he asked, moving his hoof over.

“C,” I said. “Then A again. F. G. C, G—”

He held up a hoof to stop my flood of notes. I would have kept going through the whole song otherwise, I’m sure.

I could feel myself breathing, staring intently at my hooves at rest in my lap.

“You’ve got quite an aptitude for music, miss... I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Octavia,” I blurted out, hooves still tucked between my legs.

“Grace Note,” he said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

I stared down and said nothing.

“Is this a song you’d like to learn to play, Octavia?”

My first instinct was to shake my head, to be rid of that song and the piano and to go home and never listen to another not of music for the rest of my life.

But a face jumped out at me behind my eyes. Her face, soft, smiling as she swayed and sang to me as I sat at the piano. The metronome I’d pulled from its wooden box ticking on top of our piano, instead of nestled safely in the bag I’d brought with me to my lesson. C. A. C. A.

“Yes,” I said.

Grace Note nodded with a wide grin on his face.

“Wonderful. This particular version is quite complex, but I’m sure I can find some simpler versions for you to start with.” He gathered the sheet music and stood up to put it back on the shelf.

“Tell me... are you doing any technique exercises?” he asked while straightening the music folders on their shelf.

I shook my head for a second before realizing he couldn’t see me.

“No.”

“I noticed your timing was a little off—nothing to be worried about, certainly not at your age! But, you would certainly benefit from some simple practice drills—tempo, note articulation, etcetera. You’ll want to get a decent metronome, though I’m sure I have one you can borrow if need be.”

“I have my own,” I said. Grace Note turned to me with a slanted grin.

“Ah, that’s right, you do! Forgive my memory, it’s not what it used to be. Did you bring it with you?”

Nod.

“May I see it?”

I dived into my bag like I wanted to burrow into it, scurrying through until I found the birthday gift I’d brought with me. I held it out to Grace Note. His eyes lit up when he saw it.

“My word! That’s quite the timekeeper you have. I can see you’re serious about this music business.”

I didn’t say anything—just jumped up onto the bench and sat with my metronome in my hooves.

“A good metronome is invaluable,” Grace Note said, taking a seat next to me. “Anyone can read music after enough practice, but timing is something very difficult to learn without proper assistance—like that metronome there. If you study, however, you can develop a sense of rhythm that will benefit you your whole life! Rhythm, believe it or not, is everywhere. In movement, in speech... and of course, in music.”

Quiet. Didn’t want to say anything.

Grace Note seemed to think that was funny. He laughed and patted me on the shoulder, which made me cringe slightly.

“Well, I can tell you’re tired of listening to an old stallion’s ramblings. Shall we get on with the lesson?”

I nodded.

Over the rest of the hour, Grace Note taught me more about music than anything I’d learned from my mother. I learned that the few letters I knew were just some of a slew of notes, including the ugly sounding black keys that were called sharps. I learned that a cluster of notes together was called a chord, though I was told I should work on my articulation before trying those. And, I was shown how to practice to the steady tick-tick of the metronome, keeping time as I ran through a simple, shortened scale, over and over again.

Before I knew it, the lesson was over.

“Well, that’s probably enough for today. How are you feeling? Does it seem like too much to take in all at once?”

I nodded, mostly because I was sure it was what he was expecting.

“Well, that’s understandable. Don't worry about getting it all at once. After all, you’re getting quite a head start. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you to practice.”

Yes. My whole life.

“Now, just get your metronome there, if you could. Your mother should be here to pick you up soon.”

I’d grabbed my bag, along with my metronome and new folders of exercises, and was just about to walk out of the practice room when I saw it. Leaning against the wall, a life-sized version of the one being played in stasis on our mantelpiece: a cello.

Grace Note must have caught me looking, because he slowed behind me as we approached the door. For the first time of my own volition that day, I spoke.

“Is that... a cello?”

“Ah, you’ve got a good eye, it certainly is. Crafted right here in Ponyville, I believe. This one’s used mostly by students, for practice, so it’s not in the best shape. Still has a good sound to it though.”

“Can I... can I see it?”

Grace Note’s eyes lit up. He laughed in that way I was beginning to notice he always laughed, and nodded his head after a minute.

“Of course you can, my dear.” He picked up the cello and held it towards me. “Go on.”

It felt different.

The wood wasn’t anything like the lacquered wood of our piano. It was worn—used—real. It felt a bit heavy as I held it, but it leaned on the ground easily, into a natural feeling fit against my body. I ran my hoof over the strings, touching an instrument’s strings for the first time, as the piano’s were always locked away it its giant, hollow body. I touched them lightly, barely strong enough to move them at all.

Grace Note cleared his throat. I looked up at him, and he held something out.

A bow. Just like the figure had.

“You’ll want this as well,” he said.

The bow felt unfamiliar, like a new limb meant to be added to my body. I turned it over a few times until I found the side I knew from the figure must go against the string. I could feel my hoof shaking as I set it against the cello.

“Go on,” Grace Note said. His voice sounded bright.

So I went. I held the bow against the string and pulled.

No piano could ever make a sound like that. A single, low, sorrowful note, held like a mourning wail, trembling at the edges as the bow moved across.

The room shook with it, or perhaps just my body, lingering in suspension until the final traces of the note ebbed. At some point, I opened my eyes and remembered to breathe.

Grace Note was there, smiling at me.

“It’s quite a remarkable sound, isn’t it?”

I don’t think I even managed to nod.

I felt something. I’m not sure what it was, or even looking back, how I might describe it. It was something like a bubble welling up inside me, but bursting, all with a pleasant warmness that seeped from my chest to every inch of my body. It broke, and flooded, and in that room the air might have shone.

Amongst all that, I felt a particular tingle on my side. It took me long enough to look towards it that I wasn’t the first to react.

“My word!” Grace Note practically shouted. It was that which turned my head, just in time to see the final sparkles of the thing that had appeared on my side. A symbol which I had no understanding of at the time, other than the very limited flirtation with it I’d had over the last hour under Grace Note’s instruction. A symbol that I know now is called a clef, emblazoned on my flank.

“In all my years of teaching, I’ve never had that happen before.” Grace Note was so taken he had to sit down on the piano bench again, leaving me there with the cello and bow in my hooves, eyes glazed over like I was on another planet. For the first time, the sound I had made wasn’t something I hated. It wasn’t something my mother had told me to play. And now a mark of it was left on my side.

“Remarkable, my dear girl, simply remarkable. Are you certain you shouldn’t be studying the cello instead?”

I think I set the cello down then and took another minute to examine my mark. I can’t decide if some cruel irony placed it there, or if the heavenly agent that bestows cutie marks simply didn’t know that a cello is usually played with a bass clef—at least in that way it was convenient to explain, which is exactly what I did when my mother showed up to retrieve me. With as limited elaboration as I could manage, I just told her I had gotten the mark during my music lesson. Me, still-not-old-enough-to-be-in-school Octavia, had gotten her cutie mark during a music lesson.

“Well, that’s it then, dear. You really are destined for the piano, you see?”

I never did tell her the rest of what had happened.

Chapter 3

After several months of piano lessons I was finally enrolled in school proper, complete with a body of musical knowledge more vast than was useful. There was a great deal to unlearn about my mother’s teachings first before I could begin to properly play the piano—though, Grace Note was right, I did seem to have an aptitude for it. It was no surprise, then, that the first day of school, one of the only occasions I had been without my mother aside from piano lessons, I spent the whole day occupying myself away from my anxiety by reciting piano exercises in my head. Moving my hooves underneath or on top of my desk in an attempt to whittle away the hours until I could go home. It wasn’t something I did for pleasure—it was just better than the alternative.

At one point on that first day, everyone around the class was forced to introduce themselves. One by one, each pony stood up and said something about themselves with varying degrees of nervousness: what their name was, how old they were, what they liked to do. Some kids were into collecting rocks, some into sports, most into just doing whatever. When I stood up, I collected a chorus of ‘oooh’s and ‘aaah’s for being the only pony in the room, aside from the teacher, with a cutie mark.

“My name is Octavia,” I said, quiet enough that I could see the teacher urging me with her eyes to speak up. “I like—I play the piano.” I stopped myself before the first sentence could get out. Thought finished, I sat back down and tried to pretend I was somewhere where neither music nor school existed.

Getting home that day (mother asserted that I was old enough to walk home from school by myself), I was gushed over. How was school? Did I make any friends? What did everypony think of my cutie mark?

I told her the day was fine, and then went to practice. This process repeated for some time.

The metronome I took with me to my first day of lessons became more of a companion than anything else in my youth. A diligent practice schedule and an overbearing mother left no time for socializing. On the off chance that I did manage to draw the attention of a neighbourhood pony or someone from school, my mother’s disdainful glare and mumbled bitterances were usually enough to scare the prospective friend away. So, I learned to take comfort in the things I had, which were very few. One of them included the metronome.

It took me some time to understand what about it might be so important. Couldn’t anypony keep time with a clock, or a watch? Couldn’t you just figure the tempo out by yourself? Who cared about tempo anyway? It was Grace Note that told me, in his very oldpony fashion, that timekeeping was a lost discipline of modern music, and that nowadays ponies just smashed their hooves wherever and hoped for the best. Yes yes, it was all well and good to play with passion, and emotion, but what about precision? Articulation? He stressed to me over and over that it was a rigid adherence to proper rhythm that would help me develop to the best of my abilities. And so the metronome went with me everywhere, even when I wasn’t practicing. I would set it to let it tick, dancing back and forth to a tempo until I was sure I could turn it off and keep time for an absence of its ticking.

The sound became almost second nature at a point. A sort of hypnotic, therapeutic back and forth that I would catch myself thinking about when it was gone. During recess at school, I’d pull the metronome of my bag, being very careful to be gentle with it, lest I break the quartz crystal inside, and set it to a slow, steady beat. I would close my eyes and envision a giant pendulum swaying, rocking from one side to the other, and sometimes me with it, until anything I had on my mind that day would disappear, replaced only by the ticking of the metronome.

I kept it on every time I practiced as well. Even for simple songs I could master after a short time, I would start with a slow tempo, then gradually build up until I reached the peak of reasonable articulation—then go back down until a cheerful scherzando piece was transformed into a dirge. My mother would occasionally hum along and nod her approval from the door. Thankfully, she never interrupted my practices. Even when practicing that song. Because, as I had told Grace Note that first day, there was one song I knew I should learn. The first time I tried to pick out strains of it, I could hear my mother’s sudden intake of breath from through the glass door. But even then, she didn’t barge in. She left me to hammer out the notes as I read them uncertainly from the page, the simple bass notes she had taught me becoming chords, the melody becoming harmonious, the feel and flow growing each night I practiced it. And I did practice it, at least once every night.

For every day that I can remember, I practiced that song. Time and time again, I would come back to it, telling myself I had learned everything about it, played it as best I could, there was nothing more to be done with it other than to play it so fast that it would lose all resemblance to its original composition. But still, I practiced it, because for some reason I knew I had to. I would play it even outside of practice time, sitting down at the piano when I had nothing else to do with myself and toying with the progression—improvising silly flourishes and fills over it for a moment before returning to my senses and playing it normally a few times, then stopping. More often than not, it would make my mother smile. I don’t think I ever smiled while playing it.

After a while at school, the inevitable happened. A pony approached me at recess, bringing a bright red ball along with him. His coat was a banana-yellow, and he had a spiky blue mane that looked to have been trimmed too short. As I saw him approach, I hurriedly put my metronome away and pretended very hard that I didn’t exist. To my disappointment, he saw right through my attempt.

“Hey,” he said.

I didn’t say anything back. Even when the teacher called on me, I was reticent to talk, and it was not a habit I was about to break for a colt whom I did not know.

“Hey,” he said again.

“Hello,” I said. Politeness took over more often than not. Be polite, be proper, my mother would always stress.. I remembered, most of the time. Be polite, be proper. Manners.

“What’s your name?” the pony asked. I suppose it was too much to expect him to remember me from my introduction, but it wasn’t as though I remembered him either.

“Octavia,” I said.

“Cool,” he said back. “My name’s Sweet Breeze.”

Gosh, someone really did dislike him. A boy saddled with such an awful name.

I didn’t say that to him, of course. I just nodded my head and wrapped my forelegs around my knees.

“Do you like to play ball?” he asked, putting his bright red ball on the ground and rolling it slightly towards me with his hoof on top.

I shook my head.

“No.”

“Do you like to play made-up?” he asked, referring to the make-believe games the other kids would imagine on the playground at breaks.

Again, I shook my head.

“No.”

“Well,” he asked, “what do you like to do?”

I opened my mouth with the words already in mind, and once more had to stop them before they came out as they first appeared.

“I play piano,” I said. That was true, at least.

He looked at me with a quizzical sort of grimace, as though I’d admitted to enjoying visits to the dentist.

“Do you wanna play?”

“No.” Pause. “No thank you, I mean.”

“What about after school? Do you wanna play then?”

“I have to practice piano after school.” That too was a default reaction. It was true, then, and always. It earned me another grimace, but Sweet Breeze hung on, perhaps because he was a masochist.

“Don’t you even play after school? Do you do anything for fun?” I could feel the disbelief and subtle contempt creeping into his voice.

“I always have to practice piano after school,” I said.

Silence hung in the air for a minute, save the constant background noise of playing children.

Sweet Breeze stood for another moment before picking up his ball and making a sour expression at me. He turned swiftly without waiting, but paused long enough to hurl two words over his shoulder.

“You’re weird.”

And that was the last time anypony tried to play with me in elementary school.

While my younger school years were mostly an indistinct blur, there are a few more moments from them that I remember. Chief among these are my birthdays, not all of which bear mentioning—save, perhaps, the one I remember from my first year at school.

I got home from school several weeks before the date I had long ago given up on as a disappointment to find my mother waiting for me at the kitchen table. She had a great big smile on her face, which in my experience was usually a cause for concern. I scanned around the room but didn’t manage to see her standard fare of a half-empty wineglass anywhere.

“Hello, Octavia dear. How was school today?”

“Fine, Mother.” I sloughed off my backpack and opened it up, pulling out my metronome and the sheet music folios for practice that day. Mother’s smile turned into a small frown as she watched me walk towards the music room.

“You really should be careful with your metronome, dear. It’s quite fragile, you know. If you dropped it at school there’s a very good chance it might break.”

“I know, Mother. I’m sure to be careful.” I set the metronome and music on the kitchen table as I went to grab a glass of water.

“Good, that’s good. I know you are. Good for you.”

The water at our house decided to be inappropriately hot as much as it decided to be inappropriately cold. That day, it was like drinking out of a lukewarm rain barrel. I finished half the glass and poured the rest out into the sink.

“You know, your birthday is coming up,” my mother said as I collected my sheet music and made for the music room. I left the door open as I set up my things, fully aware that she had followed me.

“I know, Mother,” I said. That was as much needed to be said, really. Birthdays were nothing special by that point. I looked up from the piano to find her leaning in the doorway.

I sighed. There was no point in doing anything until she said whatever it was she wanted to say, at which point I could get on with my exercises until the night came. I walked up to her, but said nothing, knowing full well that she must be concealing something she was waiting to let out.

I couldn’t see a wineglass when I came in, but as I stepped closer, I could certainly smell it on her breath. It was a familiar scent, like cigarette smoke. Sour grapes.

I know, even in whatever state she was in, she could see the irritation in my eyes. Seemingly enough to spur her on to get her announcement over with.

“Oh, fine. I was going to wait until a bit later into the week to tell you, but I’ll go ahead and spoil the surprise: I’ve been organizing a birthday party for you! I sent invitations to all your friends and classmates at school. Isn’t that exciting?”

“No,” I said simply. Somewhere, in an alternate dimension where reason and fairness are tangible concepts, my mother let the subject drop at ‘no.’ Sadly, this was not such a universe.

“Won’t it be wonderful? You can have cake to share with everyone, and some fun party games, and everypony will bring presents of course. Won’t it be lovely?”

“No,” I said again. I could feel the tears starting in my eyes then, pushing her and her talk of birthdays away with the only force I could muster. I don’t think she noticed then, whether it was the alcohol or simply willful ignorance on her part.

“It’ll be just grand. Your first birthday party!” She stepped from the doorway then, into the music room, and next to the piano, letting her hoof run over it in much the same way she had done the first day of its arrival.

“Oh, and of course, perhaps you could play something on your piano, to show to all your friends.”

That was where I knew she would go, and why the first ‘no’ had left my lips.

“I don’t want to play the piano for them,” I said. I made a point avoiding the word ‘friends,’ which I knew would be a lie.

“Nonsense, Octavia. You play brilliantly. I can hear you, you know. It would be a crime to keep your beautiful playing to yourself. You must play at your party.”

“I don’t want to have a party,” I said. The tears started to come down in earnest then, along with the shake in my voice that always accompanied them. And of course, my mother, in her infinite composure, turned to me and sneered at my contemptible display of emotion.

“Oh, really, Octavia. Don’t be such a brat. Can’t you at least pretend to be happy? You’re getting a birthday party, after all.”

“I don’t want a party,” I said again, sniffling as I tried to hold back the sobs. “And I don’t want to play piano. I just want to go to school and come home and have a normal day. That’s it.”

“You are such a little brat.” My mother walked closer to me then, sneering, practically spitting disdain from the curl of her lips. “I suppose this is all about you then, hmm? The thanks I get, for trying to organize a celebration.”

I didn’t say anything back, couldn’t. The crying was on in full force, me sucking in air through my tears, through my sobbing, as my mother berated me for my selfishness.

“Is it really so much to ask that you play something for my benefit, for the benefit of company, when I’ve already spent so much on you? On the piano, on lessons...” My mother held up a hoof despairingly, while still I cried, wishing I could let out the tears until they washed me away, and my mother too, neither of us to see each other again.

“Really, I can’t believe you. Nothing at all like your father. He always used to play for me.”

“That must be why he left!” I said, shouted, screamed. “He left because his piano playing was too good for you and he couldn’t stand to be around your horrible singing any more!”

The sound of my mother’s hooves on the carpet preceded the impact, and the sound. A loud smack. It took a moment for me to realize the sound had come from me, from her. Even longer to realize my head needed to be righted, and that the stinging sensation on the right side of my face was something tangible. I raised my hoof to it, and somehow didn’t flinch as I pressed down into the raw, bruised skin.

“Oh... my goodness, Octavia, I’m... I’m sorry...”

Oddly—and I remember thinking it then—I stopped crying. I just stood, frozen, hoof raised to my face where my mother had struck me. Tears drying. The loudest noise the house had heard aside from the piano. A crack that echoed louder than any crying I'd managed to fill it with before.

My mother grabbed me then, held me to her chest with her hooves around my back, pulling me forward and whispering into my ear.

“Oh, my baby, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry...”

I didn’t say anything. I let her rub my back, kissing the top of my head and mumbling ‘I’m sorry’s into my ear over and over again. The stinging on my cheek eventually settled, as did her mumbling. The subject of the conversation was dropped.

That night, she bought me a whole tub of ice cream to make up for it. I ate one bowl, then practiced for an hour and went to bed. The party was never discussed again. I can only assume the invitations were rescinded.

For my birthday, I had another bowl of ice cream. The expiration date on the lid only appeared obvious when I put the tub back, and I spent the rest of the night being sick into the toilet. My mother checked in on me occasionally, most of the time with a glass of water, which I thanked her for, graciously.

In a lesson, some time before the transition to high school, but not long before, it occurred to me that for all his instruction, I’d never seen Grace Note play.

“Mr—I mean, Grace Note,” I said, stopping myself from using his title, a habit I was only just beginning to get the hang of after repeated insistence from him that I just call him ‘Grace Note’, despite my mother’s instruction otherwise. “I just realized... I’ve never seen you play the piano before.”

“Haven’t you?” He sat back in his chair, long since migrated from his place on the bench beside me, now that the upper and lower registers of the piano were available for use. He stayed there for a moment with his eyes half-closed, then leaned forward suddenly and opened them wide.

“Well, I suppose that might be so. I often find it’s better to let students learn by instruction, rather than by example.”

“Do you think you could play something for me?” I asked. For some reason, my usual soft-spokenness disappeared during lessons. It was the only time of the week I managed to smile, though it was fleeting amidst interludes between practice. Sometimes Grace Note would make funny faces at me or play awful notes on the upper end of the keyboard while I was doing scales in an attempt to make me laugh, which he often succeeded at.

My request seemed to take him off-guard. He stroked his beard a few times, playing it on his face like an absurd single-stringed harp. He stood up and considered the piano, which I was still seated at.

“Well, I suppose I could. Do you have anything in particular you’d like to hear?”

I slid off the bench to make room for him. He took the seat like the instrument was unfamiliar. Even the way his hooves touched it seemed strange, though he took no issue tapping out notes or corrections for me during my playing.

“Can you play something you like?”

He sized up the question for a bit. I could almost hear the chewing of the thought as he mulled it over.

“Well,” he said again, “I was known in my day for a particularly stirring rendition of The Geldingberg Variations,” he said, letting his right hoof languish on the top of the keyboard. “Particularly number twenty-five. Played almost like a nocturne,” he said.

“‘The Geldingberg Variations’?” I asked, leaning backwards and forwards on all fours as I watched him at the bench. “What are those?”

Somehow, when I was around him, in that soundproof room, it’s like all the material in the walls might have sucked away my fear of being judged. Like, for one day a week, I could be a real little girl.

“Very well-known classical folio,” he said. “Quite complicated in its own right as well. Composed of a series of variations on an initial aria... there are thirty in total, I believe, and a final piece, which is of course a reprise of the aria.”

“Would you play it for me?”

He turned to me and looked me up and down, as if trying to suss out some ulterior motive in my request. I can only guess he found none, because he turned back to the piano after a moment.

“Alright then. Apologies if I’m a bit rusty.”

I’ve not heard a version of the aria like that since then. It being my first time hearing it, there was a great deal to be surprised by. I’d only heard my own playing up until that point, unless you counted the disjointed hammering on the keys in my mother’s desperate attempts to teach me as ‘playing’. Watching someone experienced at the keys left me awestruck. I sat in complete silence as Grace Note played, a soft, dulcet melody, a relaxed tempo with bass notes that led me along through every measure until the finish. Contrary to his preface, he seemed to play every note perfectly; if he got any wrong, I certainly didn’t notice them.

When he was done, after what seemed like an eternity, but what must only have been minutes, he raised his hooves from the piano keys. Even though I’d never heard the song before, I could tell it was over. I took a few seconds to recover, then clapped my hooves together as fiercely as I could.

Grace Note looked back at me. I think, for an instant, I caught a hint of blush under his beard.

“Maybe I’ve still got it after all,” he said. He plunked down on one of the lower notes, the same key he’d finished in, and the sharp bass rang throughout the practice room. I giggled, which wasn’t something I did often.

“The aria is, of course, perhaps the simplest part of the folio. Variation number five was always particularly challenging, if I recall...”

Without even raising his hooves in preparation, Grace Note turned back to the piano and began to play again. That is to say, he played, and it was at that moment that my jaw most assuredly hit the floor.

Where the aria had been relaxed, contemplative, and soulful, the piece Grace Note played without so much as a warning was nothing short of astounding. His hooves moved faster than I knew any hooves were capable of moving, dancing over the keys, blending melodies together perfectly on each side, plucking out notes and bounding over each other in sections that I couldn’t even begin to understand for their technique, let alone the melody itself. As stricken as I was by the performance, there was almost no time to enjoy it—just as soon as he’d started playing, Grace Note stopped. It couldn’t have been for more than a minute. When he lifted his hooves, the piano sang, like it was letting out the traces of the fury he’d just graced it with.

He turned to me with a smile on his face.

“Haha. That one’s a bit of a show-off piece. Do you think I pulled it off well enough?”

I took a few moments to collect my words from my throat.

“Wow,” was all I could manage.

Grace Note’s grin was the widest I’d ever seen it.

“That was amazing,” I said after a few more seconds. “How did you... how does anypony play like that? It was incredible!”

“Oh, hush. Don’t flatter an old stallion,” he said. He shifted a bit on the bench and stretched his forehooves behind his head. “All things come with time, my dear. I’ve just been around long enough that they’ve had no choice but to give up and go willingly in my direction.”

“Can you play some more?” I sat on the floor of the practice room, my eyes no doubt beaming from the astonishment I couldn’t keep from my face. I wanted to see everything now, this whole world of music I had no idea existed. When all I had played were simple melodies at that point, working my way up to real songs, this was a true master at work—though, I imagine he might prickle to hear me say so.

“Would you like me to run through the whole set?” he asked, with a bit of a chuckle at the end of his question.

But I nodded, and the idea became real.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose just this once.”

The rest of the practice I did that day was at home. But I couldn’t help thinking, as I plunked out strains of Clopein’s Nocturnes, how far I had to go before I was capable of playing anything like that; even with an hour a day’s practice, Variation Five and Twenty-five seemed a long way away.

Chapter 4

When I graduated to high school, I took to leaving my metronome at home. There wasn’t enough time to spend with it during the few breaks between classes, and at that point most of my time was occupied with studying on theory, or for the subjects that seemed only to make themselves an obligation in the front of more practice, which is what I knew my mother wanted. When I did manage to find time to relax, in a sudden abatement of internal obligation or anxiousness, my mind went back to the same song it always did. I would mime the hoof movements on tables, or in an open textbook if I hit a passage that utterly failed to engage my interest. Not that the song was more interesting—by that point, it was simply rote memorization. I’d played my mother’s song so often I could do it in my sleep, which I think sometimes I did, waking up with my hooves raised above me in a mimicry of the chords I was so used to.

I was at lunch one day, pressing on invisible piano keys as I followed that familiar melody, when a scenario from my past saw fit to revisit itself. My lunch was gone from the table, with the leftovers nestled safely in my lunchbox which itself was tucked in my bag. Unlike the other ponies, whose parents could afford to buy them hot lunches, consisting of pizza and pasta and fancy desserts and other fabulous things I had never had, whatever money my mother was making seemed to go either to my music lessons, or to the unappealing sandwiches she insisted on packing for me every day, no matter how many times I told her I could make my own lunch. I think it might have been her way to try showing that she cared.

As I sat at my table in the corner by myself, as I often did, a familiar sense of dread washed over me with the approach of an unfamiliar pony. Just like the one in elementary school, her hair was some shade of blue—but so was the rest of her, with white highlights in her mane, and a cutie mark on her side in the shape of an hourglass. She gave me a huge smile as she walked closer, staring right at me. Her teeth glimmered underneath the cafeteria lighting.

“Hi-ya,” she said. She stopped a foot away, on my side of the table, still smiling. The ponies in the background eating their lunch and doing whatever else it was ponies do at that age, likely gossipping and discussing the finer points of the opposite sex.

“Hello,” I said. While growing up had pushed me face-first into a world where complete silence was simply not kosher, it didn’t make me any more comfortable about speaking to complete strangers, which, for all intents and purposes, everypony in my school was to me. I don’t even think the teachers remembered my name.

“Whatcha’ doin’ over here all by yourself? You look kinda bummed out.” Her voice had more enthusiasm than I think I’d ever be capable of exuding. I could feel the glimmer on her teeth as she spoke, and more than a bit of me wanted to jump up and run away just to escape her sudden onset cheerfulness.

“Just... eating lunch.”

“Well, it looks like you finished. Would you like some company?”

She sat down at the table without waiting for me to answer—not even the opposite end. She smiled at me from further down the bench on the side I was. I looked at her for a few seconds, then turned my eyes back to the table.

A few awful, awkward seconds went by.

“So,” she said. “You over here by yourself most of the time?”

Where did she get off asking those kind of questions in the first place? It was one thing, when youthful innocence meant somepony’s attempt to be friendly was simply them playing nicely with others. The de facto rule of high school, insofar as I could interpret it, was to be content to let other ponies wallow in their own lives. Even the few around the school who gave me odd looks and laughs when I walked by, always with my music books in hoof, didn’t ever approach me directly. There were horror stories about bullying... but that was all for other ponies. This was me. My world. My table, by myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t really feel like talking at the moment.

“Sorry,” I added again after a few seconds.

That didn’t seem to shake her at all. Her smile didn’t even waver.

“It’s okay,” she said. “My name’s Minuette. What’s yours?”

It was just like that day in elementary school. Being a teenager, the look I gave her was more ire than anxiousness, though that was mostly just to hide what I was really feeling at the time.

“Octavia,” I said. I let it hang in the air like a dead weight, hoping that if I gave in to her badgering she might relent and leave me to be contemplative and miserable in peace.

“Octavia, huh? Guess we both got stuck with the music names. That’s a treble clef cutie mark you have, right?”

I looked down to my side just as she did. I’ve always thought there was something untoward about openly staring at other pony’s cutie marks, so close to areas that should be devoid of attention. But, as I’d already noticed hers when she walked in, I suppose I wasn’t one to talk.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Cool. So that means you play an instrument, right?”

Like a rehearsal.

“I play the piano,” I said.

“Awesome! I’ve taken a few lessons too. Of course, when I got my cutie mark, my parents weren’t sure if I’d picked the right hobby or not—now even I’m not sure!”

Why was she talking to me? I’d said as plainly as I could that I didn’t feel like talking to her. Maybe subtlety wasn’t her strong suit.

“Please,” I said, adding the first weight of emotion to my voice. “I'm really not interested in conversation. I appreciate the thought if you’re trying to... do something nice by coming over here and talking to me, but really, I’d like it if you just left me alone.”

Minuette jumped up from the bench in an instant, her huge smile never leaving her face.

“No problem! You just looked like you could use someone to talk to.” She stepped away from the lunch table. “Lemme know if you change your mind, okay?”

And with that, she trotted away, sporting that stupid grin on her face, far more cheerful than she had any right to be.

I almost got up and asked for her to come back, but thought better of it in the end.

My birthday that year was another occasion for remembrance. Instead of fading away in the night, as all the ones I could most bear did, my mother took it upon herself to get me a present that year. It was waiting for me on the kitchen table when I got home, the living room table having long since been taken over by the various ornaments my mother had adorned the place in.

I looked around for her before opening the present, but oddly enough found myself alone in the house. It was such an unusual occurrence; I felt almost anxious as I tore the flowery wrapping paper off.

It was a songbook. A collection of famous operas and their accompanying refrains. Some of the titles I knew. Most I didn’t.

The front door opened behind me as I was leafing through the book, mumbling the notes under my breath, piecing out what some of the arias and other songs might sound like.

“Oh, you’re home early,” my mother said. She had a bag of something under her foreleg, groceries, and took a moment at the door to set it down and remove her coat. Her fine, fur-lined coat that she wore even when the weather must surely turn it into a sauna.

“I’m home at the same time I am every day, Mother.” It’s hard to put much feeling into a word like ‘Mother,’ which means that as a result, I didn’t often manage to do so.

“I see you opened your present without waiting for me,” she said, a familiar drip of ichor in her voice. I breathed out softly in response, too quiet to be a real sigh.

“I’m sorry, Mother.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine. I just would have enjoyed seeing your reaction myself. But, since you went ahead and got right into it, tell me what you think.”

“It’s a very nice songbook,” I said. I’m not sure if by that point in my life I had trained all the emotion out of my voice, or if it simply left because I was a teenager, and therefore possessed of the nature of all teenagers to be disdainful for life in general.

“Isn’t it though? I found it when I was thrift-shopping last week. I used to perform some of those, you know, back in my day.”

I didn’t say anything. Just nodded and went to help her with the groceries.

I was surprised to find pasta, sauce, and a bottle of wine amongst the other usuals.

“Mother, why did you buy—”

“Surprised? I thought we could have a special dinner, it being your birthday. A real artisan, foreign cuisine. And then perhaps you could play me a piece from your new book.”

I nodded. Pasta and piano. I suppose it was as much as I could have hoped for.

“Let me just have a glass of wine or two and I’ll get to making dinner,” my mother said, uncorking the bottle with a practiced expertise. Even though it was common knowledge than any store in town that sold alcohol would surely sell wine in a less expensive, less cumbersome boxed form, my mother always bought bottles. The wine cabinet was well-stocked, in that there was always one bottle, but never more. She would always drink it within days, then immediately go out to fetch a replacement.

“Bring me my cigarettes, would you dear?” she asked as she poured the bubbly red liquid into one of her tarnished wine glasses. I did as directed, tossing the packet of her smokes over. They landed on the table with a soft noise, and she smiled at me.

“I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”

I nodded and went into my bedroom to look over my birthday gift. I was in no hurry to practice its contents.

Eventually, my mother called me down for dinner by belting my name up the stairs. When I was very young, she would yell it sometimes in moments of jest like it was a flourish in an operetta, embellishing it between notes and registers. It made me laugh, but she stopped doing it long before I reached high school. Now it was simply a shout: “Octavia!” Downstairs I went.

The table was set haphazardly. As she sometimes did when she felt the occasion called for it, my mother had taken out the ‘good’ table cloth, which meant too that the ‘fine china’ was out, only sporting nicks on every other dish, sparsely pockmarked amongst the white-blue swans and flowers painted over it. In the center of the table, a long magenta candle stood burning, flickering as its wick dwindled and it dropped great gobs of wax onto the china plate my mother had set it on.

“Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

“Thank you.” I took my seat and eyed the meal my mother had prepared. It looked more edible than usual. I picked up the glass of wine next to my plate and took a drink. Manners, after all. Polite, proper. One does not refuse a drink. Swish in your mouth before swallowing.

“This really is lovely, isn’t it?” she asked, picking up a tiny noodle from her plate. She was always quicker to describe things in such vibrant terms. For me, it was certainly nicer than normal. But, alongside the questionably imported wine and mediocre pasta dish in front of me, I could hear the slur emerging in my mother’s voice. I wished I could see the bottle, but it was invisible, wherever it was, in the dim candlelight.

The meal passed in relative silence aside my mother’s occasional sigh.

“So,” she finally said, tucking her napkin under her plate and pushing it forward. “How are things? In general I mean. Or in school.” Ssschool. I could smell grapes over the table.

“Fine,” I said.

“Are you doing well in... in your studies?”

“Yes.”

“Have you made any friends?”

“No,” I said and then added, “not yet.”

My mother leaned back in her chair and lit a cigarette.

“Ah, well. That will come with time. I never had any trouble making friends, of course. Things were different, then, but still. I was the mare-to-be at my school. Girls fighting each other to be my friends, stallions throttling each other just to ask for one date.”

“Mhm.” I sawed at one of the remaining noodles on my plate, breaking it into pieces as my mother went on.

“You’ll get there eventually, Octavia, dear. Everypony comes into their own eventually.”

“Thank you, Mother.”

The two of us sat there for a while, my mother’s head encircled by the wreath of smoke spreading from the end of her cigarette. Eventually, I pushed my chair back, though I didn’t stand.

“May I be excused?”

My mother took a final puff of her cigarette and put it out on the tablecloth, completely irreverent of the gilded edges already marred by several of her burns. Perhaps, in her inebriated haze, she thought the table was bare.

“Of course, of course. Does that mean you’ll play a song or two for me, from your new book?”

The night must come then. Practice, sight-reading.

“Yes.”

“Well, lovely then.” My mother stood from her seat and grabbed her glass from the table. She pulled the wine bottle, or perhaps a second one, from a spot I hadn’t noticed behind her chair, and poured herself a fresh glass, spilling a little over the edges in the process before setting the bottle back down.

I picked up the songbook and made my way to the music room. Mother followed on uneven footing.

“To the conservatory!” she said in a half-empty sort of way, and laughed to herself, coughing at the end.

I took up my seat at the bench and placed the book on top of the piano.

“Is there any one in particular you’d like me to play?” I asked, knowing that I may as well make the selection as painless as possible.

“There isss, actually,” my mother said, leaning over as she spoke and sloshing a bit of wine onto the carpet. She pawed at the book, flipping through the pages until she seemed to find the one she was looking for.

“Ah, this one. I performed when I wass young, you know. Lovely piece. Can you play that one?”

I looked over the sheet music. Relatively simple.

“Yes.”

My mother nodded. And so I began to play.

The piece opened with a somewhat uninteresting melody, single bass notes meant to lead in the main singer. As the proper vocalization approached, my right hoof moved upwards—and, at the same time, my mother opened her mouth and began to sing.

The words may have been right, according to what I could read on the page, though they were in a foreign language I didn’t recognize. What was nowhere near correct, however, was her delivery; while my hoof plucked out the notes at a relatively steady tempo, sure and secure in their tuning, my mother’s voice warbled in every direction, sloshing back and forth like the wine in her glass as her body moved. I tried to push her out of my mind, simply following along with what was on the page, knowing there was no reason in saying anything about her singing, nor would there ever be.

But it was her who stopped me. She held a hoof up to the book in front of the sheet I was reading, at which point I held my hooves still.

“No no no,” she burbled, tipping forward noticeably, her glass now almost completely empty. “You’re not playing that right. It doesn’t go like that in this part. It’s, it’s ma il mio...”

“I’m playing it as it’s written on the page, Mother.” Normally I would have found it easier simply to let her go on, but there would be no end to the torture if I let her find something to belittle me over. Lucklessly, wine is the sole champion over reason, and her hoof pressing on the page became more insistent, tapping at it over and over to seal her point.

“No,” she said again. “I knowthissong very well, young lady, and you were not playing that right. It’s... ma il mio, mist—”

I snapped the book away from her and held it towards her, pointing the notes right under her nose.

“Here,” I said. “Read that. Does that look like what you’re singing?”

Her eyes scanned the page for a few seconds. Even beneath the sheen of alcohol, I could see the sudden panic of ignorance in her face. After half a minute, her expression dulled again, and she pushed the book away.

“Looks fine to me,” she said, her ‘s’s blurring into incomprehensible garble. “Now, play it again, and play it right this time.”

I sighed and set the book on the piano again. Once more, I began the aria. Once more, as the vocal melody came in, my mother began to sing. This time her expression soured even earlier. Instead of tapping the book, she shoved me.

“Damn it,” she said, cursing in a voice that only brewed up when pickled in sour grapes. “Can’t jus’ play one thing for me? You’d thinkall those lessons I paid for would mean you can read a song book at leas’...”

I stood up and walked past her in the span of a few seconds. I knew she was in no state to follow me, which led me to my room and a forceful slam of the door.

I didn’t hear any sound from downstairs for a while, though burying my face in my pillow may have had something to do with that. After perhaps ten minutes, a knock came at the door.

“Octavia?” My mother’s voice outside my bedroom. Thank Celestia for the lock.

“Go away.” If I’d kept silent, it would have been a coin toss between victory and a four hours screaming defeat, and I was hoping to come out better in the middle ground.

“Octavia,” she said again. “I’m sorry. Won’t you come back downstairsss and... you don’t have to play anything. I just want to talk to you.”

“Go away.” I said the words and turned back to my pillow, muffling my urge to scream.

“Please,” she said. “I’m sorry. Come out and let’s enjoy the rest of your birthday.”

It was then that I held my tongue. After a few minutes, I heard the hoofsteps on the upstairs hallway, then the stairs as my mother left. A few minutes after that, faintly, I could hear the meandering touch of drunken hooves on keys, pressing the ones she’d taught me, warbling out a verse of the song she always sang. I shut my eyes and tried to think the song away.

It stopped after a few minutes. After a few more, I got up from my bed and opened my door. I walked down the stairs making as little noise as possible and found her there, passed out on the floor, a glass of wine spilled on the carpet. A cigarette smoldering on her other side.

Quietly, I picked up the cigarette and put it out, then went back upstairs to my room.

Chapter 5

“Hi-ya!”

Minuette’s presence at lunch had become a daily ritual. After my first refusal of her attempt at friendliness, she had returned seemingly unrebuked and greeted me with the same cheerful enthusiasm every lunch. After the third or fourth day, I stopped bothering to shoo her away. She bounced on the bench as she sat down next to me.

“Hello,” I said.

“How’s ol’ ‘Tavi doin’ today?” she asked, teeth bright.

“Fine,” I said. I took the day’s sandwich out of my lunchbox and looked at it as though it might turn into something more appetizing if I stared hard enough.

“So what’s new? Anything exciting going on? Learn any cool new songs?”

“Not really.” I took a bite of my sandwich and chewed, clenching my teeth as I attempted to stomach the disgusting combination of bland taste and slimy texture.

For some reason, the words struck me then, and the only way to get them out seemed to be to speak them.

“It was my birthday yesterday,” I said. I don’t know why I said it.

Minuette’s face lit up like I’d just surprised her with a winning lottery ticket. For the first time, her smile lapsed in favour of astonishment.

“Wow, really? That’s awesome! Did you get anything cool?”

I thought back to the song book, now stained with wine and crumpled in the middle.

“No,” I said, taking another bite of my sandwich.

“Aw, that’s a bummer.” She sat for a moment, until her face shifted abruptly, like a light-bulb had gone off. “Hey, wait a minute. Hold on, okay? Just stay right here.”

And with no further warning, she ran out of the room, leaving me at the table by myself, with my sandwich.

I had a feeling she’d come back, though.

After a few minutes, I was proven right. She came bounding back over to my table, beaming as wide as she ever had, holding something in her mouth. Something silver, which she dropped on the table as she returned.

“Here,” she said, grinning. “Happy birthday!”

I took a closer look at the thing she had dropped.

It was a piece of jewellery. A necklace, with some kind of pendant hanging on the end. A symbol. A—

“I made it for metal-working class. I dunno why I thought a treble clef would be fun. I guess you kinda inspired me!”

I picked up the necklace and held it in my hooves under the fluorescent overhead lighting.

Minuette smiled at me.

“I... I can’t take this,” I said, shoving the necklace back to her. Let alone the fact that I’d never received a birthday gift from anyone other than my mother, this was something she’d clearly put a lot of work into. I already felt bad enough for forcing her to talk to me in the first place.

“Go on,” she said, shoving my hooves back. “I insist! It’s not exactly a ‘cool thing’, but now at least you can say you got something kinda neat for your birthday.”

The necklace felt heavy in my hooves as I pulled it closer.

The clasp on the back came undone without much effort. Slowly, as though someone other than me was moving my hooves, I raised the clasp behind my head and snapped it into place. I let go of the necklace and it fell across my neck, a mark to match the one on my side, but this time in silver.

“It looks really good on you! Ooh, hold on...” Minuette rifled in her bag and pulled out a mirror.

Looking into it, I’m not sure I recognized the pony on the other side. Was that really what I looked like? My face was so sullen, and my eyes were dark. The only thing that looked alive about me was the silver symbol around my neck.

It took me a few seconds to realize I was crying. Minuette seemed to notice around the same time, at which point she pulled the mirror away and shed her smile for concern.

“Ohmigosh, are you okay? I’m sorry! If you don’t like it I can take it back.”

“No, no no no... It’s... it’s fine, really.” I waved my hoof in the air at her, my best attempt to convince her I was okay. She kept her lips pursed as I wiped the tears off my cheek, sniffling as I pulled my hoof away. “It’s actually... it’s beautiful, I think. Thank you, so much.”

“Don’t mention it.” She put her hoof on my shoulder and rubbed it in a reassuring kind of way.

The rest of the day, I think I might have gotten away with a smile or two.

I was almost skipping when I came home that day. Silly that something so simple could make me feel so different—but somehow, it did. I walked in the front door smiling, which my mother most certainly took note of.

“Hello dear. How was school—my goodness! That’s quite the ornament you have there,” she said, pointing to my necklace. I held it up with a hoof and smiled at her.

“Thanks,” I said. “A friend made it for me. For my birthday.”

“A friend? My goodness dear, I’m so glad to hear that! And here I was thinking you were going to get out of school without making any really great connections.”

I set my books and backpack down in the kitchen and went over the sink to get a glass of water. I think I was humming as I did it.

“So what’s this friend’s name, hmm? What are they like? Do they have any hobbies or interests?”

“Her name’s Minuette,” I said, taking a long drink of water and finishing it with an ‘ah.’ “And she says she made this in metal work, so I guess that’s something she’s good at. She says she used to play the piano too.”

“Used to?” My mother stood up from her chair at that point, following me with her eyes as I walked to the other side of the room. “With a name like that, you’d certainly assume she’s set on a path to the conservatory. And what was this you said... metalworking? Is she from a family of labourers?”

I rolled my eyes and pulled my practice books out of my bag.

“I don’t know, Mother. She’s just a friend. I don’t know her life’s story.” I zipped up my backpack and headed to the music room, folio in hoof as I went towards the piano.

Mother leaned on the door as I took up my seat at the bench. It was a position I remembered.

“One should always take care to know something about one’s friends. If nothing else, to make sure you’re associating with the right type of pony. Are you sure she’s not headed for a career in the arts? You can never be too careful around other musicians at this age. All those scholarships up for grabs, she may well try to sabotage you.”

The tone that had warranted an eyeroll was quickly precipitating into something more sinister. I stood up from the piano and made to usher my mother out of the room.

“I don’t believe she’s doing any such thing, Mother. She’s lovely and cheerful, and she seems to actually want to talk to me.”

“Well that’s how they start,” my mother said, forcing her hoof out and keeping herself in the doorway. “They butter you up, pretend that everything is nice and cordial, and then stab you in the back when you least expect it.”

“Mother, you’re being paranoid. Minuette is a fine pony. I have no doubt her intentions are earnest.”

“You say that now,” Mother said. “But what happens when you’re all set for college and she’s there to badmouth you to the board of directors? When she’s pulling you out of the house at all hours to prevent you from practicing? Dear, I don’t like this affair one bit. I think you should cut off ties with this... Minuette.”

I think my mouth literally fell open in shock at that point. There was no way, after an entire life of almost monastic solitude, that Mother could find anything reasonable to say against me having a friend. Which meant she wasn’t being reasonable. Which meant she was being crazy. Which likely meant that, for the first time in my life, I had found another pony who she was sure would steal me away from her, and from my music, her music, and everything she wanted me to be.

“That’s insane, Mother,” I said, not as firmly as I wanted. “I’m not going to cut off ties with Minuette. We’ve only known each other for a few weeks, and already you want me to stop speaking to her?”

“Aha!” My mother held up a hoof in example. “That’s exactly it, you see. You’ve known her for less than a month; how do you have any idea what her intentions might be? Now honestly, Octavia, you know I’m only looking out for you, and I really think it would be in your best interest to just tell her politely to—”

“When have you ever had what’s in my best interest in mind?” The sentence flew out of my mouth like a dagger, and I could see my mother’s eyes widen as it impacted. I went on before she had a chance to collect her riposte. “All my life, I’ve been doing things because you wanted me to. School, music; the whole reason I’m playing this Goddess-forsaken instrument every day is to make you happy.”

My mother shook her head, disbelief resonating from her.

“That’s nonsense, Octavia,” she said. “You love playing the piano.”

“No! I don’t! I hate it!” Something twanged inside me, loud and hollow sounding, and I went back to the piano, brandishing a hoof at it with a fire in my eyes. “This whole stupid instrument—I hate it more than anything! I hate you for making me play it every day! When all the other children had friends, and families, and interests and social lives and lives period, Mother, I was stuck inside playing this awful, miserable thing. All for you.”

As much as I wanted that to be it, for the fervor of my sudden confession to finally knock an ounce of sense into my mother, I think she was too gone for that. The look in her eyes was more pity than contempt.

“Dear, this ‘Minuette’ has obviously been telling you awful things, convincing you of such horrible lies. Imagine, you not enjoying playing the piano! I’m making a decision for your own good then. There will be no more seeing her, end of story.”

The words left me at that point. I screamed, louder than I’ve ever screamed, because there was nothing else I could do to let out the feeling inside me that wanted to explode. I threw my hoof out, and I know it struck the piano because all the strings rang out at once, followed by a dissonant look on my mother’s face to match.

“No! You cannot! I refuse to stop being her friend!”

“Well, I’m afraid you don’t have a choice in the matter, dear. Either you cut this venomous viper of a false friend out of your life and save yourself from her ruining your lifelong ambition, or I’ll do the sensible thing and withdraw you from school. I’m sure you’ll see which is the more reasonable choice.”

Never, in all my years with her—in all the miserable birthdays, in all the nights I came home to her drunk, passed out, covered in cigarette smoke, cooking a meal that was more rubbish than nutrition, loathing every second of her for making me sit down at that piano and play—did I hate my mother more than in that instant. I hated her because I realized, at that moment, that she had every card. There was no life for me to live but the one she wanted me to. A hundred possibilities spun through my head—of running away, dropping out of school, living on the street, begging Minuette to take me in, going on a search for my father, or someone to give me a home and let me return to school, wherever they might be; even hurting her, maybe not enough to kill her, but so that I could live out the rest of my life without her there.

But the thoughts died as quickly as they came. There was no point to the imagining. In my head, I was certain that there was no point.

I started crying. My mouth felt dry. My mother stepped towards me and wrapped a hoof around my back, and I was too dead inside to stop her.

“There there,” she said, rubbing her hoof gently along my neck and back. “I know it seems unfair now... but trust me. Once you’re back to your senses, everything will be right as rain, and you can focus on your scholarships and how happy you’ll be performing with a symphony orchestra when you graduate.”

I leaned my face into my mother’s shoulder and sobbed. And all the while she held me. There there. There there.

I gave Minuette her necklace back the next day. I knew that if I spoke to her for more than a minute, it would be too hard, so I simply held it to her in my hooves and said, “I’m sorry. We can’t be friends. Please don’t talk to me anymore.”

And that was that. I walked away from her in the hall, heading to the bathroom to find a stall to wring out my tears. And she never spoke to me again, though I still caught her glancing over to me when we passed in the halls.

It stopped hurting after a few months, which was near to graduation anyway.

As the end of high school grew closer, my lessons became less frequent, from once a week to once a month, and then less than that. It’s possible that Mother was running out of money, wherever it came from, or that she earnestly believed there was no point in squandering any amount of finance on weekly lessons when I could learn so much by myself now. In some of the last sessions I had, Grace Note remarked repeatedly how impressed he was with my ability, and how surely I must be one of the most talented students he’d ever taught. It made me smile sometimes, but only because it was coming from him.

I was practicing one night, the song I made my rounds through every day. The metronome clicking steadily as I rounded the notes so familiar they could have been burned into my skin. C, A. C, A. F, G, C, G—

A knock at the door drew my attention from my practice. Visitors were so seldom they may as well have been ghosts, which meant someone knocking at the door was either lost, or there for something fairly important. My mother answered the knock as I stood up from the piano. I watched through the glass door as she greeted the pony there. She nodded a few times, took a letter from him and shook his hoof before sending him on his way. After waiting a minute or two, I opened the door and stepped into the living room.

“Who was that?”

My mother looked up from her book as though she’d only just remembered I lived in the house.

“Hmm? Oh, it was a courier, dear. Just somepony delivering a letter.”

“Instead of with the normal post? Was it for one of us?”

“Yes, dear, don’t worry.” My mother set down her book and lifted her wineglass, taking a large drink and draining it half to empty. “It was just from the local music establishment.”

“You mean Hoof and Sound?” My mother nodded. “What did it say?”

“It’s just to inform us that your lessons have been cancelled, that’s all.”

I felt something stick in my chest. Though I’d long since given up raising my voice against my mother, I couldn’t help at least a mild desperation from creeping in.

“Why? Did you stop paying for them?”

My mother turned to me like I’d cursed at her. She set her wine-glass down and scoffed at me in an exaggerated sort of way.

“Heaven’s sake, dear, of course not. It’s just your teacher... Mr. Note, something? He’s passed away.”

In the background, in the silence, the metronome ticked. A steady tempo. Tick tick. Tick tick.

My mother lowered her glass and picked up her book again, wetting her hoof before turning the page.

“It’s just as well, in any case. You were getting too good for your lessons anyway. Much more sensible to have you continue to study on your own.”

Tick tick. Tick tick.

I left the metronome on as I went upstairs to my room. When I got there I looked under my bed, as low to the ground as it was, and after a quick search, found the copy of The Geldingberg Variations Grace Note had given me a few months earlier.

I think you’re ready, he’d said.

I stared at it for a minutes, then put it back without opening it, and went to bed early.

As the end of high school approached, so too did the ‘prom.’ In my mind, an excuse for horny teenage colts and fillies to do what it is horny teenage colts and fillies do best, which is make regrettable decisions with each other in a haze of alcohol and desperation for accomplishment in their last year of public education. Not something I had an interest in, in any case.

Nevertheless, somehow some colt at school got it in his head to ask me to go with him. His name was Charlie Coal, and he was an earth pony with an unassuming sort of disposition. He seemed nice enough when he asked—stammering, assuring me he was earnestly interested in me, and didn’t I love music? And oh wouldn’t it be wonderful if I’d play him something sometime, but no really, would I mind, being his date?

I feigned that I was flattered and rejected him promptly. But, as my own tongue seemed eager to betray me at every opportunity, I happened to let slip the fact that I had been asked out when I got home that day. Which meant my mother heard it.

“Well why didn’t you say yes? You only get one prom, dear.”

“But Mother,” I said. “I don’t know this colt from John Stallion. He’s never even spoken to me before. Why would he want to take me out?”

“Well, back in my day there was quite a convention for secret admirers. Maybe he’s been lusting after you from afar, stealing up all his courage to finally ask you out.”

My face soured at the word ‘lusting.’

“Well, if that’s the case, I’m not sure I want to go out with someone so wishy-washy in any case. Besides, that’s a whole night of preparing for finals I’ll miss.”

My mother stood in front of me as I went to walk to my room. She blocked the stairs, standing with both her forehooves outstretched.

“Octavia,” she said, her voice grave. “Come now. Surely you can’t mean to miss out on your final year’s dance? You’ll be so busy with perfomance once you graduate, you might not get the chance to meet another stallion for years! And what if this one turns out to be the one? This... Charlie Colt?”

“Coal,” I corrected her.

“Yes. Dear, I really think you should go. You’ll be missing out, otherwise.”

I spoke to Charlie the next day and told him I’d changed my mind, and could he pick me up at seven?

The dance was unremarkable. I don’t recall much about it other than it being utterly boring, along with a selection of terrible music. I was in no mood to dance. Charlie was nice and somewhat accommodating, though I could tell my attitude put him off. All in all, the whole thing seemed like a waste of time; me, standing still at the side of the room, him paying me the minimum of interest while he went around and talked to his friends, and to a girl or two. I didn’t mind. It’s not as though I expected my mother to be right about that.

She did surprise me in one regard though; when I told her I’d confirmed the date, she rummaged through her closet and unearthed a dress she’d said she’d worn in her youth. And now, of course, she wanted me to wear it. It was in remarkably good condition, unlike everything else we owned: a shimmering purple gown that, much to my chagrin, I had to admit didn’t look terrible on me. Charlie certainly complemented it enough.

By the time the dance was over, I was more than ready to go home and dream away the rest of the night, counting steady the days until graduation. Charlie, of course, had other plans.

“There’s a party that everypony’s going to now that the dance is over. It’s on the south end. Cosmic’s parents are out of town and he said everypony can come by. Did you wanna come with me?”

The ‘no’ was on my lips before my mother’s voice droned into my head. You’ll only have this chance once. What was wrong with him? You’re not going to be young forever.

I sighed.

“Sure. I’ll go with you.”

If he was despondent till then, my agreement lit him up with joy. The two of us departed a good deal behind the rest of the crowd, most of whom were travelling in groups anyway.

The way to the party took us right through the middle of town, which I at least recognized enough to know the general direction of. The buildings started to get more familiar as we passed the majority of the commercial district. But, as we neared what I imagine must have been the three-quarters mark, something caught my ear, loud enough to make me stop. Charlie stopped too, after a minute of realizing I wasn’t walking with him.

“Hey, Octavia? The party’s this way, come on.”

“Shhh. Listen. Do you hear that?”

As directed, he held silent for a moment, and the two of us craned our necks, picking out the song caught in the evening breeze.

“It’s The Geldingberg Variations... number twenty-five.” I looked around, trying to find the source of the sound. It seemed too crisp to be live. After a few seconds of scanning, I found it.

“Hoof and Sound,” I read aloud from the sign on the front. “The music store...”

“Yeah, so?” Charlie seemed more impatient than he had when first asking me to go with him. He moved his hoof to pull me along, but I stepped forward, out of his reach.

“It’s coming from the loudspeakers. They must be playing it because...”

I only got a few more seconds of listening before I felt Charlie’s hoof on my shoulder.

“Alright, we listened for a bit. Can we go now? I don’t wanna get there after all the booze is gone.”

I pulled away from him again and turned in his direction.

“Doesn’t it sound beautiful to you?”

“It’s just a song. I can listen to a song any time. Right now, it’s prom, and you said you were gonna come to this party with me.” Charlie made another grab for me with his hoof, which I dodged.

“It’s not just any song. This is the variation that... listen, I don’t care. Go to the party without me. I want to stay and listen for a while.”

“I can’t believe this.” Charlier shook his head, wandering in a semicircle around to my left side. “I spent all this money on a suit, bought you that dumb corsage, and you’re not even gonna come to the after-party with me? I bet you weren’t even gonna put out, were you?”

“Is that the only reason you asked me out? Because you thought you were going to get laid?”

“Why else would I ask you out?” Charlie stepped closer to me. I moved to back away, but found myself up against the door of the music store, which rattled behind me as I rested my weight on it. “I mean, come on: a weirdo like you? You’re lucky anyone asked you out in the first place. The least you could do is gimme a hoofie.”

“Get away from me.” I made to shove him out of the way, but he grabbed my hoof between his forelegs and pressed himself closer. I tried to pull my hoof away, but he had a good deal more leverage. Within seconds, he’d dragged my hoof down, between his legs, where I could feel something very distinctly underneath his suit.

“Let go of me or I’ll scream,” I said, still struggling to pull my hoof away. I pushed on his shoulder with my free foreleg, but found no give as he rubbed my other hoof all over what I knew was his hard-on.

“Scream to who? The guy playing the piano over those speakers? Ain’t gonna do you much good. Look, just gimme some sugar and I’ll leave you alone—”

“No—”

I moved to pull away from him again, suddenly, but he caught me and slammed me against the door. The change of his hooves meant mine was free, but it also meant he was on top of me, both of us on our hindlegs, and his foreleg pressed into my throat. I could feel him rubbing up against me, now on my stomach through my dress, instead of my hoof.

“Come on—”

I twisted, trying to move to my left. His foreleg pressed down, hard, which made me suddenly realize it was quite difficult to breathe. I tried to struggle in the other direction, but he held me down firmer. I could feel my eyes flutter at the lack of oxygen.

He started rubbing himself on me again. Rubbing against my dress. Holding me in place. Every time I tried to move, he’d move with me, locking me against the wall.

But I had my hoof free, and enough oxygen to move it. The second I hit him in the head, he let go of my throat, which meant breathing again, which meant I could move to the side. Before he had a chance to collect himself, I reared up on my forelegs and kicked as hard as I could manage. I don’t think that was very hard, because I certainly didn’t hear a crack, but I did feel contact with something, followed by the ‘oof’ of him falling to the ground, stumbling on the street.

I turned around to him, breathing heavily. My dress, I could tell, was torn. He looked up at me from the ground. I could see him hanging out of his suit, and a bit of blood coming from his lip.

He didn’t say anything else. He just got up and walked away.

Variation twenty-six had started playing. I stayed and listened until the reprieve. When I got home, my mother was asleep. I put her bottle of wine away, tucked the dress back into her closet, and went to sleep.

Chapter 6

“I’ve been accepted as a pianist in the Canterlot Symphony Orchestra.”

Two weeks after graduation and I’d already gotten a letter. No shortage of scholarships either, though the screening board stressed they would have been happy to accept me on the strength of my performance alone. I hadn’t even needed to apply for the position—a scout present at my scholarship application had been delighted at my display. Signed me up on the spot. Me, who’d never played a concert in my life. Now a scholarship and a position with the symphony. It was almost too good to be true.

My mother beamed, as much as she ever could, when I told her the news.

“That’s wonderful, dear,” she said, in that way she so often said it. “I knew you could do it. I’m so proud of you.”

“Thank you.” Dinner was the same as always. More sludge. For years, every day. Tick tick.

“Do you know what you’re doing for housing? Canterlot can be quite expensive. Good deal of nobility in the city, of course. I’m sure you’ll fit right in though.”

I took a drink of my water and let it settle before speaking.

“The orchestra supplies accommodations for all its performers. I’ll have a small apartment to myself, in addition to a salary.”

“That’s lovely, dear. My goodness, you really have grown up, haven’t you? Moving off to Canterlot, joining the symphony, getting a place of your own... promise you won’t forget about your mother when you’re off in Canterlot, being famous.”

Forget?

“I won’t. I promise.”

Another drink of water.

“And do be sure to send tickets if they give you any to spare. I’d simply die if I didn’t see you in concert. At your first one, at least.”

“Of course, Mother. I’m not sure yet, but I’ll see how things go.”

“Wonderful, wonderful.”

The first day in Canterlot was everything and nothing like what I’d expected.

For one, while my mother had stressed to me over and over that proper manners must be abided by, nopony else in the city seemed quite as adherent to that principle as I was. They were friendly enough, certainly, but seemed mostly just to chuckle when I curtsied and spoke in fancy diction, and called everyone ‘sir’ or ‘madame.’ I was sensible enough to give it up after the third stop in a row with strange looks. It’s not as though I’m not capable of speaking normally—it’s just that, from everything my mother had told me, Canterlot ponies were a different breed, with different expectations. I learned that wasn’t true after only a day, which left that much more to wonder about thereafter.

Being used to a two story house, the apartment the Orchestra supplied was small in comparison—though, in further comparison, when the only rooms I ever occupied where my bedroom and the music room, it was a bit jarring to have an entire living space to myself. Furnished as well, with couches, tables, chairs, appliances, a nice view out from the deck... oh, and of course, a separate room for the piano. Soundproof, I was assured. Anyone with noise complaints should direct them to The Canterlot Symphony Orchestra. I told them I’d keep that in mind.

The first thing I unpacked, I set on top of the piano, and thereafter into motion. Tick tick. Tick tick.

An hour of practice, every day. For once, she wasn’t there to hear it. But the notes came the same anyway, as they always did.

The symphony hall was unlike anything I’d ever seen. As opposed to the ponies I was introduced to, who I could tell had performed and toured since their youth, the only recitals I had ever given were for Grace Note and my mother, and the latter with usually disastrous results. Seeing an entire venue sprawled out with seats, ready to be packed to the brim with throngs of ponies waiting to judge my every motion, criticize my every error... well, that was something.

“You’ll do fine,” the director assured me. “Everyone is a little nervous their first time, but you’re here because you’re good at what you do. Plus, we have a whole month of recitals before your first show. You’ll be ready in no time, I bet.”

The whole orchestra seemed to eye me as I walked by. It wasn’t hard looking like I fit in—leaving my mane long, styling it just so. I could even adopt that snooty look mother always wore, if need be. But I didn’t feel like I fit in. And more to that, I don’t think it was fitting in that they were worried about. They were already judging me—me, the concert pianist, scooped up from a small town nearby to play in one of the most prestigious orchestras in Equestria. And going to school at the same time? What kind of flub was the orchestra director, appointing me as the pianist? Surely I must have bribed him, slept with him, coerced him in some way to letting me get the position.

On the first day, a sheet of music was laid out in front of me.

“Hoofward Grieg,” the director said, leaving me the sheets. “Piano Concerto in A Minor. You’re familiar with it?”

I nodded. “Not particularly, though I’ve played it a few times.”

“That’s fine. Better than nothing at least, you’ve got a head start on a few of the gang. Study tonight and we’ll do our first practice tomorrow. If that’s not too swift a turnaround for you?”

I thought about what was waiting for me back at the apartment. Furniture. A view out the deck. A piano.

“No, that will be fine.”

“Good. We’ll see you then.”

I had just finished my first practice when the message came. Backstage with the director and some of the other performers, including the reserve pianist.

“Now, Concerto, you have to give the girl a bit of a chance to adjust. This is her first time working in this sort of setting, you understand.”

“Then why is she being chosen in the first place? I’ve played in concert halls my whole life, and some hillbilly from backwater Ponyville is chosen to fill the most important spot in the orchestra? And not even that, but to do it so poorly?”

“I’m sorry.” I let my head sink, though not so low that I’d appear to be sulking. I hoped.

“You should be. That was the most emotionless performance of that piece I’ve ever heard. Why don’t we just hire a set of birds to peck the keys on time? As long as they hit all the right notes, yes?”

The director stood up at that point and went off with the backup pianist, Concerto. A brown coat and mane to match. No horn or wings. And of course, he deserved the position much more than I did.

“Sorry,” I said again. The rest of the orchestra was listening, surely, though none of them said what was on their minds quite as viciously as Concerto did. I had to admit at that point that my acceptance might have indeed been a mistake. While the context of playing with other musicians didn’t throw me off, Concerto was right; the notes were just notes. I played them exactly as they were written. The screening committed hadn’t had any problems with my audition or performance. Maybe I’d played differently there.

“Sorry,” I said for a third time, quietly, mostly to myself.

It was then that the pony with the envelope came. He spoke to someone at the door who nodded him past, pointing to me. I stood up from the piano to greet him, with a vague remembrance of the last time I’d received a letter coming to the front of my mind.

“Miss Octavia?” He asked my name despite the fact that he’d been very pointedly aimed in my direction. Nevertheless, I nodded.

“Letter for you,” he said. “Urgent.”

“What is it?” I said. If it was something so important, surely there was a chance he knew the contents without me having to open them.

“It’s your mother, miss. She’s, uh... in the hospital.”

I’d never been to a hospital before. For all the mystery illnesses I might have contracted in my youth, maybe my mother’s horribly prepared vegetables warded them off, because I’d never had to fight anything more than a few days’ stomach cold. With that in mind, hospitals weren’t something I was entirely familiar with.

The doctors were very nice when leading me to my mother’s room. All warm smiles and sympathy. One of them met me at her door, a yellow-coated unicorn with a brown mane. He smiled at me. I smiled back. Polite, proper. Manners always.

“Miss Octavia?” He extended his hoof, which I shook. “I’m Doctor Stable. I”d like to go over your mother’s chart, if you have a moment?”

I nodded. I wasn’t about to barge in to see her, in any case.

“Your mother has... well, it’s almost certainly verifiable that she has some form of cancer. We haven’t gotten full oncology reports back at this time, but we’re most likely looking at lung, liver, or both.”

I know I heard those words, and I knew what they meant. Cancer. Liver, lungs. Obvious, from the years of cigarettes and wine. But that was something that happened to other ponies, wasn’t it? Surely, the things I’d just heard couldn’t apply to my mother.

“Cancer,” I said. The doctor nodded.

“It seems to be at quite a severe stage already. It’s very likely it was simply undiagnosed for some time and has only now just reached what we might call a ‘critical point’.”

“I see.”

The doctor’s smile had vanished. I think he expected me to say more than that, because it took him a few seconds to pick up.

“There are a few things we can do at this point. Traditional radiation is right out, unfortunately, and operating at this point would be pointless, as we’re not even sure there are any tumors causing the symptoms.”

I nodded. Still more words he was saying, that I knew, but didn’t know here, now.

“There’s an experimental treatment being deployed in some hospitals right now,” he went on, “involving unicorn magic. There aren’t any proven side-effects. Conversely, the success rate isn’t as high as we’d like it... if anything, it might just waylay the time until her... passing.”

“Her death, you mean.”

The doctor raised his eyebrows at my use of such blunt terminology, but cleared his throat and recovered admirably.

“Er... yes. Her death.”

“So she is dying,” I said. I wanted it to sound sad, miserable, listless. I know for certain that I didn’t cry. I hope I didn't smile.

“Well... yes. With cancer in this stage, any remission would be a miracle... after which we’d theoretically proceed with further treatment and heavy monitoring thereafter.”

“I see.”

Another pause that went on for too long. He seemed to be expecting me to say something else.

“I’ll uh... would you like me to leave you for a bit? I know news like this can be quite upsetting—”

“No, it’s fine.” I turned around from the short distance we had walked, back to the door I had met him in front of. “This is her room, yes?”

“Uh, yes, it is. She was still awake, last I checked, though I’m not sure you’ll—”

“Thank you.” I pushed open the door without waiting for him to finish. I’m not sure if that qualified under ‘poor manners’, but I imagine giving the circumstance he could forgive a sudden absence of formality.

Seeing her there was... odd. My mother, whom I’d stumbled upon countless times, passed out on the floor, on the couch, on the living room table, amidst her towers of figurines, often flickering between lucidity and unconscious drunkenness—never in all that time had she looked as helpless as she did now.

She was lying on what I imagine is the prototypical hospital bed—white sheets, bars at the sides, tilted up towards the top, that sort of thing—and there was a machine hooked up to her. One or several, in any case, most of them beeping, one holding sacks filled with fluid, the other making horrible gasping noises like a frog breathing its last breath as it expired. And her, laying there, eyes half-open, the last curl of polish taken from her mane, the last stare of dignity robbed from her eyes. On that bed, the mother who had hummed me a tune I would carry with me through every instant of my life looked more helpless than an abandoned child.

She tried to sit up as I walked closer but gave up halfway through and collapsed back onto the bed.

“Dear,” she said. Her voice sounded raspy, thin, like the crystal in her glass had finally crumbled after too much misuse. “I'm so glad... you could make it. The doctors at this place are... louts. Don’t know... the first thing... about medicine.”

I didn’t say anything. I just stood there, at her bedside, watching her breathe. Watching the rise and fall of her chest, and the struggling of her hooves at her sides to hold her upright, failing every few seconds and giving up, letting her slump back down into her hospital mattress.

“Octavia, dear. Are you... alright?”

And she was asking me.

“I’m fine, Mother,” I said. I walked closer to her, holding out my hoof. After a few false starts, she managed to raise hers as well and met mine. I could feel a shake in her foreleg as we touched, before the effort became too much and she let her hoof fall back to the bed.

“How is... your position with... the symphony going?” The pauses were where she sucked in air, rattling it in her lungs, quivering like the last drop of liquid squeezed from a half-filled sack. Like wet burlap shuffling over shifting bricks.

“It’s... well. It’s going well.”

She smiled, which, in her state, full of plugs and tubes, made her look like a corpse being pulled by puppet strings.

The mare in front of me was my mother, who a week ago had seemed as healthy as she had ever been. Which, is to say, not that much. And now, suddenly, lying here like this.

“I hope I’ll... get to see you... play soon.”

I reached out my hoof again. She tried to lift hers, but I pressed down, holding her foreleg to the bed, gently. Running my hoof over her coat.

The words wouldn’t come.

“It’s... sweet of you... to come back so suddenly... but don’t worry. I’ll be... fine in no time. Bunch of... unicorns, you know... with their magic, and such. Doctor said... it should fix me... right up.”

I pressed down on her hoof harder. The machines beeped in the background. The breathing, sucking sound. Tubes.

“Dear... do say something...”

My eyes snapped open, like the start when waking.

“I’m sorry, Mother. Yes, I spoke to the doctor as well. He said that it’s an experimental—”

“That’s what... they always say... when it’s too good for... the public. But ponies like... you and I... get special treatment.” The last word came with a cough, which sent my mother into a hacking fit. I tensed for a moment as the machines beeped louder, but the fit stopped as quickly as it had started. Her hoof had shaken against mine when she moved.

“Don’t stay too long... on my account,” she said, rolling her eyes in an effusive sort of fashion, like cored apples rolling around in a skull. “I’m sure you’ve got... lots of practice... to do.”

“I do,” I said.

“You should... convince them to... do a performance of... that song you love. The one I taught you. It’s such a... wonderful one.”

I nodded.

“It is.”

And then there was silence, but for the breathing, the hissing, the beeping of the things in the background. The steady rhythm of the in and out. Tick tick. Tick tick. Over and over.

Her eyes closed then. I held her hoof tighter and looked up to one of the many machines outputting a string of incomprehensible information.

It kept beeping. No team of doctors rushed into the room. The line in the center bounced upward in a rhythm. Steady rhythm. Beep. Beep. Tick. Tick.

Rhythm is everywhere, they say. Very important.

I pulled the blankets up over her before I left. The next train wasn’t until the following afternoon.

Another rehearsal ended in the same stead. Concerto kept quiet this time, but I could hear what he was thinking. What everypony was thinking. Let her go to school and leave symphony work for the professionals. What is she trying at, playing in the big leagues. Such a shame about her mother though. Haven’t heard back from the doctor yet.

After the second night’s rehearsal, the rest of the orchestra was quick to take off. I stayed for a while, letting the other performers leave, lock up their things, dim the lights. Of course their pianist had a key to the symphony hall, not that I needed it. The place locks itself up. But I waited until it was just me, sitting on stage, alone at the piano.

I put the piece of paper I’d brought with me up on the piano. Not a piece of sheet music. A letter. One I’d received that morning. Addressed from the hospital.

I didn’t open it.

The lights were gone. It was almost impossible to see the keys in front of my face, but I didn’t need them. I had the tick in my head. My hooves knew where to go, the same way they always knew. The same notes I could play as easy as breathing. One, and then the other. C. A. C. A.

For the first time, on that piano I didn’t know, they sounded real. The concerto was already forgotten. Nothing ever before like that C. That A. Moving in the same direction I always had. The minor refrain before ascending, up, ever up, and before the chorus. Pause.

My hooves felt heavy. If they were wet, I’m not sure. There was no sheet music to dampen. Just the envelope.

The symphony hall was empty. Down. The chorus.

I sang it. I’d never sung it before. That was always for her. No matter how she was, there was always a way to hear it. She could pick out the notes from a mile away. I could hear her every night, even if she didn’t sing. Always going along. The same sound. Then, the first thing, and now here. For a whole empty audience. No light, and no need for it. The refrain she wouldn’t let me play too loud, because I knew it would make her cry. Crying. And still singing, the way she would, no matter what was wrong.

I know she sang it in those sheets. Among the keeping time of those steady beeps. Beep. Beep. Rhythm. Hers and mine. The words I didn’t know the meaning of for so long.

They don’t have to mean anything. They just are. Just notes that we repeat, over and over again.

Tick. Tick.

C. A. C. A.

And soft, soft silence in the darkness.

“I want to give up the piano position.”

The director raised an eyebrow at me over his paper, tempered only by the fact that I think he might have thought I was joking. It was enough to make him lower his paper, which he did, and to put out his cigarette also, which he did further.

“That’d be quite a statement, coming from the youngest applicant ever to be given that position—let alone with no performance experience, based solely on the expertise of her audition.”

“I know.” In a contrast to my tone, I kept my head high. Chin raised. Nose pointed straight ahead. “I just don’t think I’m cut out for it.”

“Listen.” The director sat up properly and pushed his chair back a little bit as he adjusted—and then, finally seeming unhappy with his position, stood up, and put one hoof on my shoulder. I looked down at it, then back up at him.

“I know you’re having a hard time,” he said. “And take it from me, I know, Concerto’s an asshole—I’ve worked with the guy before. Don’t let him giving you a hard time scare you away. This is a big opportunity!”

With my left hoof, I touched his and slowly lifted it off my shoulder.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

He sighed.

“You do realize this is going to be quite complicated? Even if we sub Concerto in, he still has to practice—trust me, I’ve seen his Grieg, and it is not up to snuff. You know this means losing your apartment as well, yes?”

“I know. Although...”

“Yes?”

I stepped back from the director, standing off to the side of the stage where the rest of the performers were getting their instruments ready. A host of strings, woodwinds and even some brass, and the percussion section, who sat in an array of confusing looking arrangements of things to beat in perfect tempo.

Somewhere in there.

“I’d like to request a transfer, actually.”

“To a different instrument?” The director scratched his head with a perturbed look on his face. “You know you auditioned for the piano position, right? Even if we had a chair open, which I’m not saying we do, you’d need to apply again, and get approved a second time.”

“I know.”

The silence hung between us for a few seconds before he sighed.

“Alright,” he said. “What instrument did you want to audition for? I’m not making any promises, mind, though you might convince me to cut you some slack on account of...” He left his sentence unfinished. Tick tick.

“I want to play the cello,” I said. The first time I’d ever said it. The words sounded right in my mouth.

“The cello?” The director looked downstage to the rest of the orchestra setting up, in particular at the string section, where two cellists were preparing their bows.

“Do you know how to play the cello?”

I looked down the stage then. At the bass bodies leaned against them in the pit—the strings that crooned like phantoms when depressed, the bows, like swords, cutting a swath of melancholy through the air, haunting, but still beautiful.

I held my hoof out for a moment, and felt something in the air that might not be there now, but would be there, soon.

“I’m led to believe I may have a certain aptitude for it,” I said.

“Well, let’s see what you’ve got then.”

The lights were bright. I remember that distinctly, how bright they were, shining from overhead like someone had let the sun inside. The music on the stand in front of me was so light I was surprised it didn’t catch flame, though it wouldn’t have mattered if it had. There was enough memory in my hooves to move without it. Something like what I’d practiced. Practice and you can learn anything that way. Over and over again. As long as you have the rhythm for it.

The lights dimmed. All at once, the sound in the background, like ponies bustling at lunch, on the playground, in the market or at a dance, suddenly hushed. The quiet, only of shuffling papers. One clearing throat. The sudden precipitation of hooves tensed to create sound.

And then sound. Sound, rolling, rumbling, into the flourish of a piano. Not mine.

Then me. That note. The same as every note. C. A. The rhythm. Tick tick. Tick tick. All the same. Over and over, all the same.

The lights were very bright. I remember that distinctly.

And the notes were the same, though in different order. Every time, they’re always just notes.

So why, for the first time playing them, did I feel happy?