prompt: season, title: the piano fighter in misc. flash fiction

My father played the piano like it was his actual voice, not the crude low grumble erupting from his throat, constantly code-switching and dumbing down his impressively self-taught vocabulary so the rednecks at the gun factory wouldn’t look at him askance. He could do a New York Times Sunday Crossword in a twenty-minutes toilet trip, but he knew what needed hiding for surviving.

His true voice bellowed out though the wooden echoes of that little upright box in the corner of my parents’ living room. When he was much younger, through fuzzy amplifiers off the electric keyboard in some bar or another. His sadness, his anger and brilliance, it all poured through his hands in a way his mouth could never grant the nuance of his joy and pain. He played keyboard and sang all over this Northeast, until the day half of his friends and musical collaborators died all at once. A gig he did not go on, as I needed taking care of, their van crashed into by a Table Talk pie truck and many of his closest friends were immolated on the spot. I do not know why I remember the brand of food that killed them, I was a baby, of course, but dad always focused on that specific detail out when he told me the story. I think it underlined, for him, the absurd tragic randomness of death. Not even Hostess or Freihofer’s, a second-ran bakery like Table Talk pies.

If he ever played in public again, I don’t remember at all. But I saw him play all the time in my living room, slow smoky blues and bar-rock bangers, I think it was when he was his truest self, even if it frustrated me that my friends were so impressed by it, when I didn’t inherit his music and ended up just a public yeller and a modestly talented scrivener. Live music impresses kids. Sure as hell impressed me. Over the years, though, the decades of brutal physical labor and the constant toxic chemical exposure at the factory slowly ruined his hands and he could play less and less. When all those chemicals finally gave him his fatal heart attack in his early ‘60s, now that I think about it, I can’t remember how long it’d been since I’d heard him play. Five years? One season? A decade? This too short life turns time into utterly incomprehensible nonsense.

I bitch and whine about my dreams, hopes, youthful aspirations, all dashed by a lay-off in the middle of a writer’s strike and a medical courier job where I found out that the radio code for semen-analysis samples is “wigglers”. But it pales compared to what broke my father’s heart, what slowly shrunk away until those chemicals finally killed him. Childhood dreams and teen heroes failing you, that’s something, yes. My dad though was the last of his kind. A true piano fighter whose world burned away all at once. Wasn’t even Entenmann’s. Goddamn Table Talk.