looking too closely | late 2018

VII

     EACH note echoed eerily throughout the empty room as his fingers brushed over the black and white keys with subtle pressure.

The piano listened to each touch, reaching back to him with hollow words and indescribable feelings.

He choked back tears as fresh memories of his own hazel eyes staring back at him with poison, hands wrapping around his throat.

      "You were a fucking mistake!" He had screamed, shaking Eli's body as the boy tried desperately to gasp for air "Your mother and I must've been fucking stupid to have you, you little prick! How fucking ungrateful can you get, you fucking twat!"

The words echoed in the room around him, telling him his father was right.

He remembered the eyes of his mother as she watched, weak, pale. She had no look of empathy. She didn't even care as she smoked her cigarette.

He felt dead in that moment. He had felt lifeless many times, but to feel dead was to realise that no one cared for him, even though his body wasn't even cold yet.

He had been dropped moments later, gasping as if he were reaching the surface of water for the first time since holding his breath.

In that moment he had thought of the time, long ago, when his mother had sat by him, pressing his fingers down with hers on ivory keys.

But even back then, his father never smiled, and his bruises never faded.

Now he bled into the floorboards of that house.

And his fingers ached with every touch of something he had once loved.