Noah Balulis

The Little Black Notebook

The soothing sounds of my mother playing the piano. Her hands moving on the black and white keyboard as fluently as water. Her head tilting from left to right along with her body as she swayed with her arms, which to me, looked almost like waves. My father didn’t play the saxophone but I often dreamt of him with one in his tiresome, scratched up arms. When he came back from work they reminded me of the really wrecked parts of walls from our local abandoned building in which homeless folks drank and slept, and had sex. They were nothing like my mothers hands. When he gave me a pat on my back I could almost feel the scratchiness of them through my clothes. In my dreams they were soft, big but gentle. Oh how wonderful they would sound as I slept. Her sonatas so beautifully played and him, holding his instrument in his arms, graceful, not full of dust and paint on his clothes.