Despite my best efforts to avoid flash, Angela Goff’s excellent Visual Dare image has lured me in. Curses!
Rain pattered on glossy magnolia leaves, sliding down with an audible plop. Early summer heat was an omnipresent background actor in her life. It shimmered on asphalt and pasted the hem of her thin cotton dress to her legs. She’d grown up on this porch, sticking pennies between the boards in an orderly line, but now that she’d buried her mother it was just an assemblage of creaking windows and doors and damn it if her consolation pedicure wasn’t already chipped.
Humidity ravaged the tuning of the old piano, but her mother loved to sit on the porch and play ragtime. Husband left, mother gone, and all she had here was a broken-down house and a tuneless piano. And the heat.
She hitched her skirt and stepped on the bench, bare feet walking the keys. She danced, playing her own ragtime, and the music floated out through the summer rain.
