You are the admiral of the tower, the commander of the 43-ton battalion of heavy metal. Fifty-four bells of the memorial carillon at your amateur disposal to either pleasure or ruin the eardrums of anyone within a half-mile radius. You float a hundred feet in the air, in the bridge, the war room, the nerve center of the singing beast. Outside, ethereal music flows. Inside, you wade through a dangerous jungle of ink and notes.
With less than a split second before the next note should follow, you reach a fork in the road; maybe it’s only up to subconscious muscle memory, but your fist trembles as you must try to guess the correct wooden handle to continue the melody. There may be no such thing as a “correct” piece of music, but there is definitely an incorrect way to read one, and you’re at risk. Step on a landmine, explode. Play a wrong note, die in humiliation. And there is most certainly no D-sharp in Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Your feet become a swan’s webbed palm as you crush the accidental neighbors of the note you meant to hit. Ding, dong, ding, dong, a chromatic, a scale, one note missed, another one follows, and then, absolute silence.
The piece hasn’t ended. You just lost where you were in the music. What note comes next? It’s the front line of a catastrophe—nowhere to run, no trenches to hide in, swallow your embarrassment, forget your pride—come up with the next note, goddammit! You scan the music for some landmark, some way back into the melody before it dissolves completely. A next note. Uh, you play whatever’s under your fist. Wrong. And somewhere down there, a pedestrian winces.
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Prompt from Daily Themes Week 8: Character
Voice; Write a scene using an “inappropriate” voice. For example, narrate a three-alarm fire in a slow pace and flowery language, use brisk, economical tone to describe a passionate love affair.