The Place It All Rises To

This is a piece of short fiction I wrote which was published in December 2009, in an anthology entitled "More Than a Book".

The Place It All Rises To

Manuel gazes up at the heavy, ornate wooden doors and smiles.  Taking a breath and crossing his arms over his chest, he leans forward, propelling himself through the doors:  Out of the heat, away from the world.  Once inside, the doors swing closed behind him, and he finds himself standing in a silent, crushed-velvet, golden room.

He has never been inside this building, and yet he is home.  He steps out of what remains of the shoes he has been given - this is, after all, holy ground - and steps forward onto the red carpet that stretches all the way down the wooden floor to the encrusted platform ahead.

Manuel makes his way past the empty pews, past the stained-glass eyes that weep and roll heavenward  and, mercifully, do not judge or regard him.  There is no judgment here today, just a peaceful quiet and the competing smells of vanilla candles and lemon Pledge.

Well, no, not only those.  There is something else here; Manuel has heard about it and it is what has drawn him from his cardboard shelter, three buses away.  Now there it is, directly ahead.  A shock of pleasure courses through him and he jumps a little, almost squeaking aloud.  Not in church,  he hears his mother's voice saying, so Manuel shushes himself, but allows a grin to overtake his face.

Skirting the altar, Manuel stops for a moment and buckles his tired, aging knees to genuflect.  Groaning up to his height again, he makes his way across the chancel - knowing he is not meant to be there - and stands before the Grand Object, shiny and black like patent leather.  Sucking in a deep breath, he sits on the stool, which welcomes his weight with an audible koosh.

It all feel automatic, not as though more than fifteen years have passed since he last played a piano.  His dirty toes find the cold, smooth pedals and his fingers immediately play the warm-up phrase from Rachmaninoff his mother taught him to always begin with:  C, D, A, C, G.

Manuel plays and plays, fingers dancing with the ivory keys.  Melodies arise from his memory, and he begins to laugh.  He decides in that moment that he will play this piano until someone comes along and stops him, until the lights dim and the cloud of joy he is sitting in blows away.

At around one-thirty p.m., he will be found, half on and half off the piano bench, having completed his own welcome march into heaven.  Father Purlton will discover Manuel's body, a small brown blight on the shining altar floor, head tilted and unnaturally gray eyes a color in concert with the peeling, chipped pillars which Manuel's eyes seem to follow as they stretch up, all the way to the glimmering apse above his still form to the place it all rises to:  Music, incense and tear-stained prayers, both the spoken kind and the silent.

The Place It All Rises To by Mark A. Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 

copyright 2009 by Mark A. Brown