A girl sits at a piano bench with her back hunched, her arms bent at a ninety degree angle against her body, fingers stretched around her skinny thighs, her feet tilted awkwardly outward. “Sit properly please,” says her mother politely from the kitchen where she watches from behind. The girl straightens her back and her feet, adjusting her posture without moving her hands, her fingers almost methodically immobile. “Thank you,” her mother says. The girl stares blankly at the pages before her, at the half notes and the crescendos and the flats. She swallows, the only movement in her body. “Begin please,” says her mother softly. Only the ticking of the clock above her on the mantelpiece breaks the deafening silence. The girl clenches her jaw at the sound of her mother’s soft, kind words of instruction, struggling back a morning’s worth of tears, as if with those very words, her love of music, of playing music, diminished like the notes on the page of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23. “Begin please,” her mother beckons, more firmly the second time. The girl blinks and her eyes slowly water. She lifts her right hand for the first time since sitting down and sets the timer on two hours. She then lifts her left hand, turns the tempo to adagio, and, without moving her head, brings her two hands to the center of the scale and brushes her fingertips against the cool, smooth surface of the ivory keyboard. She stretches her delicate fingers into their shadows, pressing on them with just enough pressure to feel them move but not make a sound, and squeezes the black keys, lifting them up with her knuckles. “Maureen,” her mother says, tapping on the doorframe that leads to the living room where she monitors her daughter, “please begin. You’ve missed five minutes already.” The girl lifts her fingers from the keys and they fall. “Reset the timer please.”

“Yes, Mother.”