The Piano of Rehgale

If you’ve ever traveled to the ignorance-soaked town of Rehgale, and met its gray-eyed people drowning in an acute isolation, you’ve probably heard of me. I bet you wandered the streets, stumbled over unknown and uneven terrain. The bar was probably your first stop, but I bet you found no comfort there. You received enough hungry stares to make your blood cold.

You felt the mist clog your throat, too, and tasted the sick pinkish brown liquid that came from the tap. I bet people had to tell you it was water. Maybe you didn’t believe them.

You may have hungered for a bit of bread, or something in a wrapper, but only found a butcher hacking away at some unrecognizable animal. You would’ve felt his heavy gaze on yours, seen the grotesque smile of a man drunk with madness, and caked in blood. I bet he offered you meat in a tone flaking with peels of laughter, but you were critical and waved him off. He probably slapped his hand on his knee when you came back, beckoned by your stomach. It was then you thought curious of his round belly, and singled it out as the only one in town.

You hated the place. Oh you hated it! But I can say you lingered long enough to talk to the folks who made you feel uneasy, and made your skin crawl and churn with a malignant liveliness.

Your ears hummed with tales of uncanny coincidence, myths of conspiracy featured around slapdash rumors, and of outsiders with strange knowledge of a world advancing beyond their own. The grey-eyed strangers of Rehgale seemingly exchanged harsh and untidy looks, before retelling their last tale. Perhaps you listened close? Perhaps you kept your distance.


Although, most leaving Rehgale can usually repeat the tale of the outsider, and if not they always seem to remember my Piano.


Being people of little luxury, they probably described my family’s entrance with great zest. Perhaps they told of how we stormed into Rehgale wielding the reins of a large vehicle with a heroic quality, or of how my father did not return their cold stares from within the truck, but drove straight to a house they had watched cautiously being constructed brick by brick for two years. They had not predicted how grand it would be, fully trimmed with rosebushes and lined with hues of gold and black.

If you had been there on that day, you would’ve seen my father circling the mansion with unkempt eyes, as my mother, a slender women of an unstable nature, stumbled across the blurring fabrics that danced on the carpets.

You would’ve seen me. You would see my eyes twinkling with excitement and a mad sense of bewilderment, an obvious side effect of my youth, for I was but nine. You would see me walk clumsily after my dizzy mother, and trip on the carpet. No one would help me up, but that would be fine. Nine years was enough to get used to it.

Then you would’ve gasped when you saw the Piano. Many did. Gasped and pointed to the two uniformed men lumbering into the building with it. You would’ve seen one of them use their extra hand to help me up, and, if you were looking close enough, you would’ve seen my small eyes trail to the Piano. At that moment, if you were there, you would’ve observed the wondrous hypnotism of polished black.


The people of Rehgale slept in vain astonishment that night, but if you had stayed up when the dark of the sky was absolute, you would’ve heard my Piano. You would hear the keys yawn in discontent as feeble notes were played crudely upon the instrument. And then- then you’d hear it sing through the movements of my hands.

Fourteen notes.


If you were wiser, more knowledgeable than those grey-eyed people of Rehgale, you might have recognized the first few notes, and the words attached to them:

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star-”



If you were a resident of Rehgale during the time of my tale, you would have been constant audience to my persistent practice. Quick, classical tunes would be the genre humming through the fog. If you were a member of my family during those hours of music you would see the blue in my eyes wash unsteadily and splash against the rims of my irises. You’d see my fingers slip and glide across the pearl-white keys and occasionally rise for black ones. My Piano would yawn and stretch its strings before playing, it seemed, an action you wouldn’t notice unless you were me. Though I was very youthful then.

If you were me, you’d have been so happy.



Were you one of those curious onlookers of Rehgale my eyes fell upon during those years through a pane of glass, you may have seen a curious woman, another outsider not important enough to make it into your tales, lingering in and out of the mansion. You may have heard the upbeat songs I played for her, particularly (assuming you were smarter than those folk) a complicated rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle-”, in which I would play for her ears only, though that wouldn’t stop the listening ears of those curious Rehgale people.

My Piano was good in keeping the tune soft and quiet, though.



You may have recognized this outsider at the wedding even. Though if you were one of the grey-eyed, you wouldn’t have attended. But you would hear the Piano singing. Not my own playing, even those folk would know that. It was amateur, too absolute, as if the keys were pushed all the way down on each hit. I bet they told you how it made them curious.

If you attended, you would have seen the rare smile my father gave me, and the rare one I gave him in return. You would’ve found my mother at the Piano; playing something she’d taken scarce time to learn, though you could catch a creeping smile. She never was much good at it though, at least, not like me.

So if you could pick apart the sounds of songbirds and gusty winds from that day, you would’ve heard my Piano groan with upset notes, though it would put up with other people’s handling of it long enough for me to choke out my two words into the foul air that the grey-eyed people of Rehgale had taken in for generations.



Then the fateful day came when the air was shrill with silence. If you were one of the many winged creatures that lurked in the sick green trees of Rehgale, you would not dare test fate and kill the silence that buzzed seamlessly through the web of fog. There came the uneasy feeling that talk should terminate in death. If you took residence in Rehgale you would truly feel the power of the Piano.

Silence was never so alive. No music was heard that day. But it didn’t matter. If you were my Piano, you’d want a rest.

For on that fateful day my parents dropped dead, one after the other, in that terrible picturesque house.


If you were me, turning up earth for my parent’s graves, you wouldn’t speak in the silence, either. But if you were the child that stumbled over the carpet of his new home, the child who never got much from his parents besides that fateful Piano, you might, at least, defy the law of silence that cast its spell upon Rehgale to say Goodbye.

So I did.

And things got worse.



If you were the doctor who told me of my wife’s illness, you would have told it straight, wouldn’t you? If you were him you wouldn’t have sprinkled your diagnosis with hopes and fantasies. If you were me you would’ve thought of something to tell her as she choked upon no known actuality in the cold room where my Piano waited as if humming one of my melodies. But I had no words to describe my sorrow; can you blame me for that? My voice had always come from my Piano.

If you had been in the dusty air of that mansion brought up in the name of a dying family, you would have seen a man sick with desperation kiss his wife and turn to his Piano.


Would you find it curious that I closed my eyes?


If you had been peering over my shoulder, as my wife had done so many times when we were fitful with youth, you might have caught a glistening reflection in the trickle of blue and white from my graying eyes. If you were listening well you could catch little notes went astray in the sticky fit of tears. Though I don’t think anyone was listening.


I wiped my warm tears on cold skin, and glanced behind me to see the girl I’d loved and wanted to love for an infinity of time looking over my shoulder smiling as she had when we were but reckless teenagers in the strange world of Rehgale.

If you had been there, you would have seen, albeit for a moment, a boy with slicked back hair, smiling an unkempt grin at a girl soon to be forgotten by all of Rehgale. Perhaps, if you were not caught up in the moment as I had been, you would have seen a man grinning madly at an unfocused spot in the distance, as his wife slumped over, dead, on a couch.


My senses returned to me all too quickly, and reality knocked me numb. She had died before the first note.
If you had been there, in that maddening town of Rehgale, you would’ve heard me, in a rage driven by sorrow and grief and guilt and anger and whatever else seeped into my fragile thoughts, dedicate a whole night of music to her. The grey-eyed dreary townsmen of Rehgale stayed up all night, none daring to again test fate by interrupting my artistry with their dreams.


If you had been that hunk of strings and polished black that had comforted me for a life, you would have felt the terrible ‘ping’ and dull pain following the lifeless sound produced by a broken C-cord. You perhaps would view my attempt to play with the broken sound, and fail. You’d feel the all too familiar tears upon the keys, and would watch me collapse lifeless upon you.

If you were a citizen of Rehgale at the fateful hour of my silence, that last random cord of notes that my body had unmistakably struck would reverberate between your thoughts, as it did for all residents, for the remainder of the silent dawn.


Curiosity would convince with its usual gnaw, and you would be one of those grey-eyed that beat upon the locks to my family’s house, beat upon the tomb of my wife and I. The doors, though decorative, were poor in terms of structural integrity. The hunger and desperation of a hundred men flooded into the yawning corridors of the tomb, snatching up paintings and jewelry and money wherever it appeared. Your eager mob would rush up flights of steps, ignoring screaming faces as they raged and sprinted across their own… those unlucky enough to drown in the flood of torn leather boots. All the while the Piano of Rehgale waited patiently, as it felt the beautiful house it had lived in being torn apart around it by those who had admired and told about it for years.

So, assuming you were one of those desperate grey-eyed folk of Rehgale, when you and your kind came upon my old Piano that had sung through the movements of my hands, your emotions probably twisted. This instrument had brought joy, bewilderment, sorrow, and horror, and in its wake the desperate eyes and trembling lips of those one hundred faint souls were still. My stiff body still lay upon the white keys I’d played to death in my grief, though my hands no longer lived with music. Just my head, still pushing down the fatal cord: the final notes to terminate my musical genius.

Then, with no fuse to prepare them, except perhaps the stiff lumbering of my body to the floor, when no force seemed to have acted upon it, the onlookers became special audience to my Piano’s last sound, though, from what it played, I knew it was for me in particular.


If you were there, a member of those who would make a desperate flight from the house and into the muddied and decayed streets belonging to the seemingly sane people of Rehgale, you would probably run, too. For those whose limbs were plastic with fear, saw the keys go up and down pushed by no visible force or matter. The cords jumped alive with the small notes, not bothering to stop on the broken key as I had. The keys moved so slowly and hauntingly that the polished black on my Piano’s surface now seemed like a portal to space and time, though the song it played was meant to be slow by its own default. The mob fleeing from the dreadful thing playing itself heard near screams from those inside, who would later explain their fits of horror with exaggeration, saying that the thing opened doors on which the other sides screamed other-worldly demonic piping. But you know the rumors better than I, for if you did go to Rehgale and heard their tales of the evil and unknown, they would surely censor no detail.

In truth the playing was quite simple. Over the sounds of those crazy Rehgale folk you could make out fourteen distinct notes. One… after the other. My Piano was not an original composer, it seemed.

If you had been more knowledgeable of my story, my Piano’s story, than you might indeed have recognized the tune. If you had indeed been there with the horrible men of Rehgale, you might have taken the time to listen to the beautiful music my Piano created. If you had been there, you might have started to sing:


“Twinkle twinkle-”