Liron's Melody Read Free Page B

continued in her mind, echoing as if through a long tunnel. If she didn’t
know better, she would have thought it wasn’t in her mind at all, but close by,
and real.
    Dampness touched her bare arms, and she swore she could smell
the ocean, which made absolutely no sense considering she lived in Colorado,
and nowhere near the sea. She looked toward her front door, wondering if she’d
left it open and some kind of strange storm had rolled in.
    She gasped and jumped so hard she almost fell straight off
her piano bench. She squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed them with the heels of
her palms. When she opened them again, everything was as it should have been,
and the temperature in the room went back to normal. She stared at her empty living
room, trying to figure out what she had seen. For a second, the half of the
room she wasn’t in had looked like some kind of stone structure, like a room in
a castle. It had felt cold and foggy, dimly lit with flickering candles, and in
the corner where the door should have been sat the man her imagination had
conjured while playing the music. Only, she’d stopped playing, and he had
continued.
    “What in the world?” she whispered. Her heart pounded and her
mouth felt dry. She glanced at the score of music and eyeballed it. She had
never been an exceptionally creative person…not visually anyway, in the way of
dreaming up strange visions. Even if she had daydreamed now and again, they had
never been so vivid that they had taken up residence in the room she was in.
    Maybe she’d finally lost her mind. Or maybe she was so
exhausted from Rob’s hike of death that her brain was playing tricks on her.
That had to be it.
    But even as she convinced herself that was the only logical
explanation, her heart still ached at the sorrow she had felt while gazing upon
that man. She glanced at the keys, part of her longing to play again, to see if
she could glimpse him a second time. Part of her was afraid to. What if she
really was losing her mind? Had grief and isolation finally caused her to
crack? If so, it probably wasn’t healthy to continue entertaining the fantasy.
    But….
    The desire to play again was overwhelming, no matter how
irrational it was; no matter if he was a complete hallucination of her deluded
mind. She just wanted to see him again. She wanted to see him because, in their
shared sorrow, for one brief moment, she had not felt completely alone.
    Exhaling slowly, she placed her shaking fingers back over the
keys.
    The shrill shriek of the teakettle made her nearly jump out
of her skin, and she swore. She got off of the bench, shaking her head and
muttering to herself. It was probably a good thing the teakettle had whistled.
She was literally one note away from the loony bin.
    She went into the kitchen and turned the stove off, trying to
put her mind to work on normal tasks. Hot water in the mug, tea bag in the hot
water. She should probably eat something…she hadn’t had dinner yet.
    Play. Play.
    Her subconscious was insistent tonight, probably because it
wanted her to go crazy. She started to clean her kitchen counter while she
waited for the tea to steep. Scrub the counter, scrub the counter, she
chanted to herself. Wipe it down, that’s it. Nice and normal. Everyday
tasks. Maybe I should clean the toilet next. I haven’t cleaned the bathroom in
over a week. It probably needs it.
    Play….
    She left the sponge on the counter and turned to the fridge.
She opened it up and perused the contents. It was pretty sad in there. She
needed to go to the grocery store. Maybe she would do that next, after she had
her tea.
    Tea. She turned back to her teacup and bobbed the bag in it a
few times. As she did, the image of that man flashed in her mind again. With
the vision came the sorrow. His sorrow. His pain. It swamped her like a tidal
wave until her chest ached.
    She turned and leaned back against her counter. Was it
possible for a figment of a person’s imagination to be lonely? She