Pigeons clucked like hens vying for the rooster’s attention. Bits of bread flew out of a snow white hand. A gold watch wrapped itself loosely around the tiny wrist, as if in danger of falling off. Delicate fingers reached in and out of a bag of Wonder Bread. In and out, in and out.
Holly clicked her teeth together. A cold gust of wind rattled through dying trees. The pigeons left her then, swirling up into a foggy expanse of sky like some great black, winged monster. Holly shivered and drew her bird-bone arms closer around herself. Shadows passed across her face: deep, indigo sadness and rough greens. She couldn’t understand how she’d gotten here, how she’d ended up feeding bread to pigeons in Central Park instead of playing music in Carnegie Hall.
Holly reached her fingers in front of her eyes, stretching them towards the rock face 50 yards away. They were much longer than they should have been on body such as Holly’s, but they were thin and as white as the rest of her. She scuffed her toes against the grassy earth and swallowed, her dry throat opening and closing uselessly.
Debussy floated through her head. Her fingers wriggled and writhed helplessly; reaching for chocolate-chip ice cream keys that were much too far away. Holly closed her eyes and remembered her parent’s house. Her parent’s house and her piano. Her piano and her library of music. Her library of music and her manuscripts of scribbled notes. They were gone now. She’d sold it all to a music store when her parents died.
They had been there at her graduation from Julliard, two years ago. She remembered them sitting starry eyed in the front row as her name was called. She was alive then. There had been red in her cheeks and meat on her bones and her fingers had been alive and young rather than the gnarled twigs she held in front of her now.
She let her arms wrap around herself once more, ineffectively blocking her from the wind. The last of the leaves shuddered in the branches above her head. A couple kissed on the bench closest to her. She looked away. Couples made her sad.
She glanced besides her, suddenly remembering her hot chocolate. Shriveled remains of mini marshmallows dangled in the now freezing brown. She picked up the mug (painted white with pictures of Mickey and Minnie) and stood, her boots crunching in the frosty snow. She passed the couple on the next bench over, passed her favorite rock, passed the lump of grass that reminded her of her dead grandfather, passed the girl playing with a bright red shovel in the toothpaste-white snow.
She remembered being a child and being worried when she had a mouthful of toothpaste and it made her teeth look yellower than they normally looked. Was the toothpaste some kind of X-ray? Was it meant to tell you: “This is how ugly your teeth really are, they’re worse than you thought aren’t they, you stink.”
She remembered running out of the bathroom into the hallway one summer evening in her Winnie the Pooh nightgown and whining at her father to tell her why her teeth looked so yellow. She wanted him to tell her that “No, honey, toothpaste never knows what it’s talking about. Toothpaste is just jealous that you have teeth and it only gets to clean teeth. Never listen to toothpaste.”
She remembered her father telling her that he was busy and tired and had had a very hard day and please do not worry about it your teeth are fine you’ve never had a cavity, have you?
And she remembered it was true, she’d never had a cavity and even today, at 25 had never had a cavity and didn’t plan on it. Holly didn’t eat much of anything, least of all candy. She’d never been big on the stuff but lost all interest in it when she’d started playing the piano and at that point had lost interest in everything else, too.
In the beginning, her parents were happy. Holly had always been pretty lazy. She did fairly well in everything that she did, but that was only because she had a natural aptitude for sort of everything. Holly was never really great at anything until the piano came along.
In the beginning, they loved when she sat down to practice. They adored the passion she was displaying and the way all she talked about was key signatures and the circle of fifths and E flat melodic minor and Moonlight Sonata and Clair De Lune.
Holly shook her head. She kept wanting to tell herself that eventually her parents lost interest in her piano. That they became annoyed with the fact that she never did anything else and never even thought of applying to any colleges besides big-name music conservatories.
It was easier to remember them that way. Not in a bad light, but in kind of a yellow light: We’re not going to force you to stop, but we’d kind of like you to and you should at least slow down a little.
Holly’s boots treaded heavily through the snow. Tendrils of grass poked through the crystals, bright and new as a newborn baby, with an expectant set of parents terrified of some rare disease that’d require loads of insurance costs and even bigger loads of strange looks.
An apple core lay on the sidewalk as Holly’s boots marched onto solid, murky pavement. Pigeons flocked around a streetlamp, where on old lady, homeless and in piles of fabric fed them pieces of bread from a brand new bag of Wonder Bread.
