Hear ye, hear ye!

Now is the time for all good drabblers to come to the aid of their drabble community.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy drabbler.

I drabble, therefore I am.

(No, these bastardized cliches have nothing to do with the new topic. I'm apparently just over-caffeinated.)

Drabble #28 (fateful encounters) is now closed.

Drabble #29 was suggested by AmyLiz (whose tagline cracks me up). I'm making it deliberately broad as hell, just to see what happens.

Your drabble challenge topic, should you choose to accept it, is music. That's it. Go anywhere you want with it.

Aw, you guys. With the encouraging and stuff. (It will not be possible for me to do justice to every idea that the hamster in my brain dislodges in its trip through the wheel, but I hope the judges love it, too.) Although I gotta tell you, crafting something for cash feels like "Hey, baby, wanna date? I've got metaphors that can make you scream. Tropes so twisted they're kinky...you know you want it." I know it's better than my previous efforts, though.

Your drabble challenge topic, should you choose to accept it, is music.

(head explodes)

(computer explodes)

(fingers fall off)

(b.org bandwidth explodes)

Hey, now. I marked the post where you said song titles would make your head explode, in a *good* way.

That's just what I meant. I could write seven million drabbles on this one....

Good enough. I just wanted to make sure your assessment of head-explodey goodness hadn't changed.

I'm not sure where to go with that, don't have as many choices as Deb, but a fair amount.

Yay, Tep! Glad you liked the suggestion.

Challenge #29: Music

By day, the piano was silent. Beneath it, my brother and I imagined other worlds, caves, cottages, airplanes. We sat cross-legged, me with my books or my Barbies, Charlie with his pilled stuffed dog, sheltered by the gleaming bulk of cherry, its fat legs marking our territory.

But by evening, it sang. When my father came home, we lay underneath it as he played away each small frustration and worry, and I hummed along to songs I never heard anywhere else, my cheek against the floor as it throbbed with each note, inside the beating heart of my father’s music.

Sorry Amy, not to taint your memory, but the "fat piano leg" conjured up this:

Music

The image lingers from an old movie on tv, a dark-haired child lost in a world of unimaginable hurt and betrayal, with no one to appeal to, no knowledge that appeal was possible. Her short, brutal existence had taught her that life was just this.

The image is of a little girl's arms tied around the fat piano leg while her mother bangs at the keys and holds an implacable foot on the reverb pedal. "Hold your water, young lady! Hold on. You hold on to the very!last!note!" while a puddle seeps out from the edge of the child's skirt.

No problem, Bev! That book/movie freaked me out for years, and I clearly remember those scenes/that particular form of torture. Shudder. It's a wonder Sybil survived at all.