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None of us had ever heard fiddling like this. Not even old Peter, who lives under a whorehouse. People are still talking about when Annie showed up, when she came for a session and knocked us all off our stools. She came out of the mist, that one. Of course, doesn't everyone? Who even knows what goes on outside MacCall's these days?
Anyway, when Annie got here, the old sessioners, Dave and Amy and all them, didn't pay her any notice. They never did, not till the music started. The rest of the bar did. Who wouldn't, with curves like that? So when she sat down, she already had quite an audience.
And Annie started to tune. She played the seacoast, she played a thousand Scandinavians landing on the shores and burning the villages. Flat, very flat. Pegs turned. She played the sunrise over America's Rockies, that sparkling light bending over the snowcaps and across the face of a girl lost in conversation, who doesn't know how beautiful she is, and will never know. Pegs kept turning, and the sun set, with more stars than anyone's ever seen, more stars than there ever have been, reflected in the eyes of a man who's just learned his father's past.
Annie played Jeff's daughter's birth, played Morris's first kiss, awkward and hesitating behind the gym. She played Kate's longing for James, kept hidden all this time under a platonic veil.
Still she tuned, not satisfied.
She played the bubbles in the stout, that head that lasts forever. The pine in the bar, the oak in the floor. The stale smoke left the cracks in the table and told stories of all the words those tired lungs had ever said.
Annie played on. No one remembers if she was touching the pegs anymore. Hell, no one even remembers the bow.
She played the Plague, she played the Famine. A hundred thousand looking for work in a new land. She played the ironworkers, she played the subway builders. A thousand ceilidh, a million should-have-been-shared thoughts hidden under cowardice.
And Annie played on.
The glaciers of Greenland crashing to the sea. She played each iceberg of the Atlantic, each frozen island waiting to tear hull rivet from rivet. A key change to the Belfast worker pounding those rivets, then going home to pound on his kids. She played his confession, his mea-mea-mea-culpa and his panicked heart one night as his continued pounding had finally sent one of his darlings to Potter's Field.
Still she played. The sun rose and set through the grime of the windows, years passed, decades floated through our ears. And yet the old clock in the square clicked forward but slowly, second by second.
She played the criminals, transported to the Antipodes and she played the Catalpa. She played Riker's Island, and she played new evidence introduced ten years too late. She played Dostoevsky.
Annie's fingers spelled out the hiss-boom-crack of every Trafalgar gun, of each Antietam musket. They picked out the product of the ball and shell, each hero of their son placed in the ground, his valor growing in tale even as his flesh turned to dust.
Her bow hewed Adam from clay and Eve from rib, just as it was hewing the coal from its face and the plank from its tree, breeding ten thousand songs of despair.
A string broke with the twang of "Dear John". The sound changed, as it had to, and frustration crossed Annie's face. Now she played sons who had never known their fathers, daughters who were sold to a man who would make sure they never had a childhood, only the spinsnipsnip of the mill. Relationships that didn't end, only faded to a dull nothing, the waiting-wondering of a phone that never rang and a letter that never came.
Finally Annie found chords that worked without a string, and light came back to the world, the stale air gone from the room. She played brilliant conversation, revelation on Pascal, the flash of discovery.
Her remaining strings played the Hero's Journey and the Homeric Hymn, just as our feet tapping along sounded out the Outlaw Saga.
Annie lifted her bow from string, looking at the other sessioners expectantly. She was done tuning.
They never got to play together. She never even got to fix the broken string. The coroner ruled it a stroke, but then again she might not have known any more songs to play.
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