The Tuner

a piece of "Piano Man" fiction for Vince Wetzel

photo by Cherry Laithang

The Piano Man Chronicles is a collaborative storytelling experiment at the Salted Wetzel with a Side of Mustard, where every tale is connected only by a novel that doesn’t exist outside the characters who encounter it. Vince Wetzel is driving the narrative with three-part short stories. Guest authors also join the world, adding their own echoes to this fictional book’s quiet ripple. Step inside and see how one story sparks many.

Fucking Greg.

How many times does she have to tell him to hide the bong? Anyone can see it from the hallway.

Sam kicks the door shut behind her, lets her purse slide down her arm and thud onto the carpet.

No clickety-click of his thumbs on the damn controller. No rotten microwave-popcorn butter smell. Silence.

She drops the keys on the counter. A clink, then a falling ting… tong, the late landing note, Gymnopédie No. 1. Maybe she’ll play that tonight.

She takes a step into the living room. Stale skunk from cold bong smoke.

Did he do it on purpose?

She can see him blowing an enormous lungful. Marking his territory?

He’s not like that, Sam, and you know it.

Room needs air. The windowpane sticks, gives with a dry thup, pulls free, street noise rushing up at her. Rain hisses on tires, pitch-shifting in wheel wells.

She sits at the piano and opens the fallboard.

If Greg were here, looking at the cloudy half-moons of her palm prints, hearing the glissando she just sprayed across the keys, he wouldn’t notice the street rain under car wheels sounding like the string ostinato in Bittersweet Symphony; he’d only give her that dumb love look and wipe the moons away with his T-shirt, as if the more it shone, the louder its siren call became.

Imagine the pride reflected back in its lacquered beetle surface as he polishes it, the glow he must see in his own eyes. He never says outright that he’s the one paying for it, but Sam can see that yellow light every time he catches her playing.

If he were here and she had her made-for-piano hands on the keys, he’d be watching, eyebrows knitting with that aww expression, like a lovesick giant stuffed dog.

Imagine he’s still here, hiding in the disemboweled upholstery of the couch cushion, peering through a bong-burned eyehole, glowing with benevolence at the sight of her already at the piano, hands suspended above the keys, tingling as they do when she waits for the swoop in her, when the right beat comes and they drop.

Her hands look so white against the black, hovering, two small owls poised in air, twitching, ready to dive with the scree—eeee—hh—of bus brakes releasing, wrists dipping, as if she were the one playing the night sound through the open window.

What will her hands want to play tonight?

Her fingers drop to the keys. Two bars of All by Myself. She brings both hands down in a flat smash chord and laughs. Anything but that. Now she’s in danger of having that damn song stuck in her head all weekend, which is not the vibe.

The three glorious, long-awaited days of Greg’s fishing trip.

She plays and sings under her breath, free like a bee, do what I want any old time. That’s closer. Sounds like a plan.

The song shifts under her hands and becomes: there’s no one laughing at your back now, no one standing at your door—

Remember them perched on stools with paper plates between them, Greg spooning rice onto her plate?

“You should play piano next weekend,” he said. “Read the book too, Piano Man. Might give you some ideas about, you know, what else you can do with your…”

One more fucking mention of that book and I’m going to scream, she thought, biting down hard on the edible fork.

“Or go out,” he went on, “have a wild night with your friends. Do something fun.”

Sam plays. Is that what you thought love was for?

Did she grumble, smack her hands on the table, and make the dishes shake? Maybe it was: I can plan my own damn weekend, Greg. She slams the fallboard down with the flat of her palms, leaving two unmistakable handprints.

There. Proof I did my homework while you were gone.

She stands listening, the refrigerator’s low droning dissonance, everything in its right place.

A sharp cymbal clash of dishes erupts from next door, a family’s ordinary percussion. What would she give the girls at work come Monday?

They loved boyfriend-bashing, so why not give it to them, do everything she doesn’t when Greg is around, make it a rebelliously boyfriend-free weekend, order food he won’t touch, spicy Thai, yes, that, and put on something he hates, reality TV, burn through a whole season of Talented Love, the one with the bitchy ballerinas he can’t stand.

She orders Som Tam Thai Isaan and slips into her ratty red pajamas and fuzzy robe.

By the time the Netflix ta-dum sounds, she is curled around the takeout container, mouth deliciously burning, watching diva Sloane rip Noah’s life apart while he gets eaten alive in the life-switch, apologizing his way through every scene.

Achingly sincere Noah, with his beautiful face and Ken-doll hair, moves her to actual tears when he leans into the camera, “Sometimes I forget everything else. I close my eyes and it’s just the dance…”

And Sloane, incandescent onstage, glittering, little lights blinking all over her.

Just the confidence of her.

Other women know how to do it better.

She grabs a bottle of wine and drinks straight from it. It’s the kind of thing Sloane would do, although it’d be champagne.

If I had glamour, that it-girl thing, they would have seen past the slip at the audition; maybe if I glowed.

How do you get glow?

Settling back on the couch, Sam’s eyelids grow heavy. I’m a dull pearl, gotta get me in the rock tumbler.

---

Low backstage lights on the lavender sequins of her gown, a faint underwater twinkling. Greg beside her, with Noah’s blond, side-parted hair. One hand at the small of her back, the other against her belly.

“You can do this.”

Red curtains lift. Stage lights rise. Lifts her chest for a breath, hand moving to smooth her gown. Palm meets bare skin. She’s naked.

Panic, turning to Greg, who is now Noah. He presses her forward, smiling.

The lights hit her full-on. Hot, blinding. The heat is a surface she steps into, like water, wrapping around her, clothing her.

She feels the audience out there in the darkness, hears the stir of them.

But at the piano bench, there is no piano.

She turns toward the wings. Greg/Noah mouthing “play.”

She stretches out her fingers; they hover over air, beginning to tingle. She closes her eyes and plays.

Sound comes. Beethoven, Sonata No. 8, Pathétique.

Then not only the piano but the entire orchestra rises. Her hands in the air, she stands, fingers moving, shoulders, every movement making sound.

The lights burn the side of her face.

She wakes, blinded by sunlight, the living room flooded with light, the sonata still ringing in her ears.

Half asleep, she wonders what playing light would sound like. She walks to the piano, wipes the prints with the edge of her robe, and lifts the lid. Light would sound like Sonata No. 8, the first movement. She tries to play it.

She can hear the notes distinctly in her mind, but her hands can’t find them until… there it is, her hands remember.

She looks up at the birds as they circle the roofs, the phrases rising and falling with their movement, playing it to them.

Wondering why everyone called the 8th Pathétique, to her it sounds more like hope, the minor chords climbing, to make you want it, make you really feel it.

That’s what Noah said dance is for: to make people feel. He sounded like Greg the night they watched the LA fires on the news.

Greg said it really makes you think about what matters, and asked if she wanted to quit her jobs, play piano, said he could cover the bills, and when she snapped, saying, stop breathing down my neck, I’m doing fine, he’d gone on gently, there would be other auditions. Missing the Broadway pit wasn’t the end of the world; she didn’t have to give up. There were other ways to be a musician, bringing up that damn Piano Man book again, saying it might give her some ideas.

Strange how she holds every note of Pathétique but can’t remember what she said back—probably barked at him.

Why did she always have to be such a Sloane-y bitch all the time?

Is Greg right? Find another way? Read that book; it’d make him so damn happy. Might give her a few new ideas.

But where the hell is it? She checks purses, under the bed, behind the books, under the couch.

He’s going to kill me. Order another one.

She adds the sheet music to her Amazon basket, Sonata No. 8. Maybe it’d come in the same package so Greg would never notice. Then again, Greg isn’t the most observant boyfriend in the world.

Probably because of those eight a.m. bong sessions playing his cowboy video game, drinking beer to quiet his cough, and if she said anything he’d say my eight a.m. is your six p.m. with third shift and you know how stressful my job is, I have to decompress, as if he had a monopoly on stress, as if her jobs weren’t slow bleeds of forced smiles and tiny wrong notes drilling into her skull, and maybe she could be more like Noah, or Greg. What would it feel like to stop bracing against other people?

But how is she supposed to decompress with him smoking up the room, spraying gunshot splatter across the TV? She ordered him headphones. They weren’t a gift.

Can still hear it, even now, Pathétique echoing in her ears, blending with the frenetic clickety-clack of the controller, the wet glorp of the bong clearing, the metallic crack of a can opening. She has to get all the sounds out of her head to really play. Get his presence out, like a séance in reverse, chasing spirits away with sage or whatever.

She lies flat on the carpet, the playlist cued, letting the music take up all the space. Through the open window she sees birds cutting across the sky in loose, shifting patterns seeming to move with her phrasing. She follows them with her fingers, little arcs in the air like on the keys, watching the clouds shift, and closes her eyes to feel it the way Noah said. Beethoven’s 7th—murmurations of birds, waves on a coast, fish darting in the sea.

The knock clunks in her chest, the offbeat.

She startles and pauses the music, the room rushing back all at once. Nobody ever knocked on their door.

Bracing herself for something awkward or threatening. She opens the door a crack and faces a chin so dominated by a large and centrally placed mole her eyes keep orbiting it; she forces herself to meet his eyes.

“Package for you,” he says, holding it out, his voice neutral, bored. “Your mailbox is, like, completely full.”

“Oh—” she says, already taking it, the door closing before she remembers to say thank you.

The box is book-light. She carries it to the counter, slits the tape, and pulls out the book. How did it get here this fast? Has even an hour passed?

The cover is the same: the cartoon guy in the leather jacket at the electric piano, red plastic cups teetering on the keys.

She gets herself settled in the reading chair by the window. Where was she? Kyle, or whoever, was on his way to a party.

She skims, not finding a familiar scene.

…the garden exhaled heat, roses sagging under their own perfume…

What the fuck is this?

She turns it over; the cartoon piano man grins out at her. She flips to the back. Same blurb. She turns to the cover page.

The Piano Tuner, written in ornate lettering.

“Oh,” she says out loud. So this is just a misprint. The speediest misprint in history. How many times is she going to buy this damn book?

Still, a switcheroo story is fun, isn’t it? And besides, the writing went for it. No shame, no restraint. Got to respect it. What better cover story? She could read it openly and still look like she’s reading Piano Man. A fizzy sense of permission.

She opens a random page:

—Véronique stiffened, her spine drawing itself tall as a candlewick—

—Nicola glowered at her from beneath his bright, uncompromising brow—

Oh, this is classic. Haughty Véronique and her oh-no-I-won’t obvious lust for the hot, cruel baron. Sam skims.

—dipping her pinky in Nicola’s chocolate mousse, the bitterness blooming like a reprimand on her lips, leaving him open-mouthed—

Sam laughs. She could already hear herself spoofing it for the girls at the call center, licking her pinky, mock-defiant, playing Véronique’s disdain.

Oh, they were going to do it.

She could get into it. A delicious hate-read. She pages forward.

—in the piano room, the keys were uncooperative beneath her fingers—

—Was Grégoire still punishing her with his wounded silence?—

Oh, weird, another Greg. Can’t get away from good old Greg.

She looks up and sees the clouds sliding in fast, flattening the light. A motorcycle rev dopplers into the ooo from Gimme Shelter. It’s like when her student hits a heavy note, not wrong, just leaden enough to feel in her teeth. Grég-oire.

It’s a fun cosmic mix-up; don’t let it ruin your day, Sam.

She keeps reading.

—smelling of horse and open fields—

—eyes too blue to be merely blue—

She looks up again. That could be Greg. Blue eyes.

Why is this freaking me out?

—thick brow casting shadows—

—fullness of his lips—

—if she were forced to choose, it would be Nicola—

—and yet, as Grégoire knelt beside the piano—

—Play something, his voice as thick as gravel stones—

—Beethoven’s Pathétique answered her at once, grave and unrelenting—

The dry flap–smack of paper slapping paper as she slams the book closed. Of all things. Of all possible music. That sonata. Véronique did not just sit down and play Sonata No. 8.

No way this is a coincidence. Of all possible music.

What the royal fuckity fuck?

She throws the book across the room. It hits the carpet with a whump.

She feels the pressure shift in her ears, a thin, high whine, wavering like a singing saw. She closes her eyes, rolls her shoulders once, and takes a breath.

Don’t lose it, Sam. It’s a coincidence. A switcheroo.

She opens her eyes.

Okay. Enough.

Don’t stand here spiraling over a misprint. She’s going to get the sheet music from the mailbox, do like Detective Danvers and see where it leads. A prank? A setup? Had Greg somehow engineered the whole thing, knowing she’d order the book?

As she slips her shoes on without socks, she sings believe in things that you don’t understand under her breath… devil’s on his way, and the whole thing seems suddenly funny.

But when the door clicks shut behind her, the hallway seems to stretch out of scale, the floor too long, weirdly narrow. Did she stand up too fast, or is this what happens when you spend too long alone inside your own head?

Great, she thinks. Twelve hours alone and I’ve got isolation psychosis.

She listens for the low buzz of people downstairs, wondering if whispers could travel up this far.

Sam, there’s no surprise party.

In the stairwell, the building plays at her, the ik—reee of a chair scraping somewhere above her, sliding from B4 to D5. Her shoes answer with their own tud–thwap on the smooth concrete, the dull echo lagging a half-beat behind, and she notices herself off-stepping so it doesn’t turn into boom duh boom pah (the night we met I knew I…).

She turns the corner into the empty lobby. No party. She stops in front of the dented mailboxes, and sure enough, like the mole guy said, hers is packed tight, the last envelope jammed so hard it sticks out like a pale paper tongue. She opens it with a protesting er—kee—kah, metal on metal, and the letters spill, flap–fanning across the floor.

Behind her, the front door opens. A dog pants, huff huff, the sound slipping immediately into the bass-line of Ænema in her head, its grinding push. She almost laughs. The building is a soundtrack. Jesus, she thinks, I should get an electric piano like Kyle and play along down here, busk in the vestibule. That’s the point, right, Greg? New ideas.

She crouches and starts gathering the mail and sees it’s not hers. Apartment 301. All of it is addressed to Mr. Nicholas Fuller.

Another Fuller in the building? How’d she never noticed before? Samantha Fuller. Nicholas Fuller. Stacked right on top of each other, floor by floor. Long-lost brother? Secret sibling? Could be a clue. But no, this city is crawling with Fullers. Coincidence.

Nicholas Fuller has an awful lot of mail. And no score. Damn it.

Any other day she would have left the mail, but today, switcheroo day, she’s got to follow the clues. Time to go see Mr. Nicholas Fuller.

Nicola. Nicholas! There it is again. It’s everyone-has-a-double day.

She tucks the mail under her arm and heads back toward the stairs, wondering if this could be an elaborate treasure hunt.

She climbs past her floor and knocks on 301.

An underwater, bass-heavy music comes through the door. She knocks again, choosing the upbeat, waits, knocks harder this time with both hands, drumming out the jaunty part of Pathétique, just in case.

The smell hits her, unmistakable. Weed. Thick enough she can almost see it.

She Shazams the song, Number Nine by Playboi Carti.

Number 9.

No one answers.

Is this a dead end, Danvers? Looks like we’ll stay an only child another day.

Back at her own apartment, she sits at the piano bench and opens her phone, searching for The Piano Tuner. A novel by Violet McCluskey comes up: a great, white-pillared mansion in flames, smoke swallowing the sky, a blurred woman in a white gown running across the grounds.

Across the street, birds line the telephone wires, spaced notes on a staff, like that cheesy inspirational meme, and she counts them without meaning to. One, two, three… nine.

Nine.

Her hands go to the keys, and she plays Deux Arabesques. It goes with birds. That’s why Hitchcock used it, the only piece of music in The Birds, everything else those creepy machine-made bird sounds, not a theremin but something like it, and she thinks of one night when she got stoned and played a theremin, her own hands floating, shaping noise out of nothing.

She’s always saying she doesn’t like weed because it turns the world into a Hitchcock movie. Everything having meaning, everything lining up.

That’s what this situation needs. She pulls out a notebook and starts writing because that’s what detectives do. Make a murder board.

Beethoven, Sonata No. 8

Gregory / Grégoire

Nicholas Fuller / Nicola

Dream: Greg / Noah

The Piano Man / The Piano Tuner

The mole

Apartment 201 / Apartment 301

Number Nine, Playboi Carti

9 birds

She stares at the list.

Jesus, what if this book came fucking alive?

Should she get high and get detective on it; a bong hit for seeing patterns?

She grabs the bong from where she’d hidden it behind the TV and finds it already packed and ready to go. It is supposed to be a small hit, but muscle memory clears the bong too hard.

The smoke hits wrong, and she coughs, a sharp little gag she doesn’t expect, bent over the sink, spitting, coughing, almost throwing up. She realizes with irritation that she is going to get really high. Welcome to tonight’s showing of Hitchcock’s: Samantha at the Keys.

She wipes her mouth on her sleeve and carries the book and the notebook to the piano bench. Everything’ll be okay.

Keys under her fingers seem far away, even receding, is it from a passing cloud throwing slanted light, landing only on her fingers, because their whiteness had to be lit to look this much in focus, until Sam realizes how closely she is holding her hands to her face.

It’s because of the dream, being able to play air, and now her hands want to play everything, even her face. What if she had keys instead of a nose, could play her eyelids? Would each eye be the major and minor of the same note? Close your eyes, Sam, put the damn fingers down on the keys, stop monkey-clawing in air, see what your hands will play.

But her eyes are open, transfixed by her fingers. Is she already that high? These hands, everyone always told her what beautiful hands she had, ivory, statue hands, her fingers so slender, long, made to play piano, they said. And what a thing to tell a child. I mean, seriously, look at these weird things, these bones poking, spoking out of wrist stumps, unlike anything else besides toes, which were worse. But look, like claws, the lizard skin of falcon ankles. What a thing to tell a little girl, that her alien-enough appendages had a purpose apart from her, in inevitable service to some outside-of-her mission. Made for piano.

And what chopped-liver-self had to be dragged along behind them, serving them, like fucking Grégoire, a peasant to the high nobility of porcelain fingers. How dare they say such a thing to a little girl? She didn’t want to be stuffed into fluffy, puffy-sleeved, weird-smelling miniature adult gowns and shiny shoes she could see her underwear reflected in.

Don’t you think Sam wants to go out and play? Don’t you think she’d rather scrape her knees to red, meaty pulp on her bike, 2 blocks up, 2 blocks down, instead of playing 4-octave scales? Jump 7 times on diving boards instead of playing dominant 7ths through all 12 keys? 5 girls telling secrets at slumber parties rather than reciting the circle of 5th? Don’t you think she’d rather have a single Saturday with nothing at all to do, stain her knees green with grass, a little color breaking up the black and white of piano keys?

Maybe it’d been a fucking relief, Greg, to live in a house with no perfect white teeth grinning at her, the big black lips pulling back with that constant, unrelenting play me, play me chant.

Her hands drop to the keys, and they choose to play, I used to float, now I just fall down.

But no, we are not gonna get the teeth-tear-wet today, Sam. Change the radio station. We’re not pity-partying. Opposite of tears—today is dry, smoke-dry. It’s the heat of the dream spotlights, the fire in The Piano Tuner, her hands are the blurred gown of the running woman. Today, flag flapping free. Today, fire.

I’ve got a bad desire.

Her fingers catch the opening chug, a tight-picked figure, train on the tracks, hey little girl, your daddy home? Did he go and leave you all alone? Her hands are moving across the teeth. Her voice is rising with it. She sings she looks like a girl, but she’s just a flame. Her hands chase to catch up with her.

There’s a fire on a mountain.

Run, boy, run.

I went down, down, down.

Fire, meet gasoline. Watch me burn.

Her hands change songs. Think I forgot how to be happy. Something I’m not.

Oh God, not again. She stands up, but her hands keep playing. Something I wait for. Something I’m made for.

She takes a step back, and the sound cuts out, but her fingers are still miming the keys.

She looks down at them and cracks up, her laugh high-pitched, alien, smearing through the room like feedback.

Is it still ringing, or is it in my head?

Pull it together, Sam. Don’t get caught in a weed time loop.

She laughs again, a silent laugh that doesn’t get vocal-cord engagement, a staccato series of exhales—at least they don’t echo.

Her phone lights up from the piano, alert from Uber Eats, and she swipes it away, the cover of The Piano Tuner appearing.

The blurred white dress of the running woman could be the blur of ivory hands on a piano. But the piano would be the fire. Imagine playing fire, the theremin of fire. If only they had a fireplace, can’t have a fire on the second floor of a ten-story apartment, what about lighting candles… composing, transposing flame into sound?

Is The Piano Tuner telling her to make fire medleys?

She should do that. Get famous on TikTok. She could do days of the week. Weather reports. Numbers. A mash-up countdown: 5 Years, 4ever, 3 Little Birds, 2 of Us, and 1 (life, you got to do what you should).

Her breathing is shallow and quick, a dog pant, and her fingers curl in the air as if they’re playing the Ænema bass-line. Her eyes land on the notebook again. The list.

Focus, Sam. The murder board.

She scans her notes. No. 8—sonata. Apartment 201, 301. 9 from Nicholas Fuller’s Spotify grab. 9 birds; she looks out; no birds on the wire now. Like a bird on the wire. Like a drunk in a midnight choir.

The clues are numerological.

What am 1? = me alone.

2. 2-0-1. My apartment.

3. 3-0-1. Nicholas Fuller’s apartment.

4. 3+1 = 4.

She stops there, pen hovering.

Who lives in 401? Should she listen? Knock, even? The building’s stacked with numbers, floors rising above her, the whole thing a column she could climb.

She’s got the puzzle. Now gotta solve it.

What’s 10?

10 floors in this building. 10 fingers.

She looks down at her hands.

10 = my hands.

My hands are the answer.

1+0 = 1. Me.

Just me.

And Véronique. Don’t forget the book.

It all begins with The Piano Man, player turned Tuner. She picks up the book. The answer has to be in there.

But her eyes keep darting, jumping ahead. She can’t hold a sentence. She catches pieces instead. Tendrils of flames dancing against the starlight. She blinks, looks again. Flames beating at the stone walls. Her eyes jump. Pillars burned to black bone, silhouettes flickering through smoke.

God, this book is actually really good.

Who will Véronique choose? Greg or Nicola? Is it the answer to the whole riddle? But she knows she’s too high to read; the words slip-sliding all over the place. She’ll come back to it later, read it cover to cover.

What if I read it as an oracle? Ask the book questions directly?

She closes her eyes and asks aloud: Was the switcheroo intentional?

Opening a random page, her eyes skim until she lands on: Absolutely.

Okay.

She closes her eyes again.

Is it from someone I know? Opens the book. Indeed.

Who is it from? She scans faster now. Véronique.

Is Véronique me? Yes.

What does Véronique need? She flips near the end this time: flames.

She closes the book and sets it aside.

It’s hot in here all of a sudden. She goes to the window and throws it open. Yes, that’s very Véronique of me, flinging windows wide, letting the outside in all at once.

The twi-lit street is busy now, in-between hour. The sky is deepening into pink, darkening fast, headlights smearing across wet pavement.

An ashtray is on the landing; the wet black smudge where ash had been, now blown away. Another clue?

The numbers try to come back. 401. The fire escape. She looks up at the zigzagging metal outside the window and imagines herself halfway up it, crouched, hood pulled low, peering in. What would Danvers do? What would Sloane do? Wait until it’s dark, go slinking around, seeing what could be seen.

She grabs Greg’s hoodie from the chair.

She steps out onto the fire escape, craning her neck toward 401. Nothing to see from here. Wait till night.

Back against the cold brick, legs stretched out, the slatted metal biting through her jeans in cold lines. She shoves her hands into the hoodie pockets and finds a lighter.

She flicks it. Phut. Again. Sctich-chk… fss. Small flame wobbles, holds. She cups it, watches it, lets it die.

She listens.

A bin scraping, all attack, no decay. A woman’s laugh, an ascending vocal run. Sam closes her eyes and the sounds slip their sources. Human voices wash into the hum of engines. The electric drone of streetlights harmonizes with the groan-clack of a car door slam. The city becomes a single instrument.

Her legs go numb. The cold keeps working its way in. She flicks the lighter again.

She opens her eyes and looks up. It’s night now.

At first, it’s only a suggestion, a flicker caught in the window across the street. She shifts her weight, leans forward. Is it a reflection from 401’s window?

Heart rat-a-tats.

She climbs a dozen steps, the metal slick under her shoes. The reflection is brighter now, looking almost like flames. She goes higher, keeping low.

She passes 301’s window. Inside, LED lights trace a hard right angle where wall meets ceiling, shifting colors. Someone’s back to the window, a silhouette in front of a TV.

She keeps going.

Across the street, the reflection shows flames now. Oranges, yellows, snapping, sinewy. It is a fire. All of it led to this moment. To save apartment 401! She climbs faster, less crouched, now Samantha Fuller, fire-hero.

She climbs one more step, hand slipping on the wet metal, chest going ba-dum ba-dum.

Now she can see inside the apartment—it doesn’t add up.

The firelight isn’t spilling but stays contained, held inside a perfect rectangle. A huge TV filling the room, a fire looping on the screen. No movement except the image itself. Somewhere, a fork clinks.

She exhales, long and shaky. Oh, fuck, and now I am dangling out here like a crazy person. She slinks back down, careful to stay low in front of 301. Another cold trail.

She climbs back down, slower now, and steps inside, the apartment closing around her. The heater kicks on with a soft, sudden whof.

She drops onto the couch, hands sinking into the hoodie pockets, fingers closing around the lighter. The outside noise is still ringing in her ears.

Am I sober enough to read now?

I wish this book had a 401st page. There must be clues in The Piano Tuner, otherwise what is all of this for?

The lighter goes fss.

Her eyes are steady now. They can follow the words. She reads aloud. It’s like watching a movie. She can see blackened men with white eyes flashing through smoke. Ash like slow snowfall. Heat making mirage-like wavers.

The fire has freed Véronique from the damp dungeon walls that held her, burned away into freedom. Fire, Véronique says, is both purification and destruction. She sees phoenix feathers in the licks of flames against the manor’s pillars, sees them as devouring snakes, cleaning away the dark, brutal history of this once terrible place. Terrible and beautiful, she says. She is free.

Grégoire and Nicola appear now, no longer peasant and lord. Everyone is equal in fire, Véronique says. Wood splinters. Iron screams as it gives. Grégoire and Nicola free the galloping horses from the burning stable.

Véronique climbs the burning stairway to the piano room, lacquer blistering, keys yellowing, then cracking. The sound breaks loose. Wood pops. Strings snap. Each fracture screams, a music rising into the roar. The last song the piano makes as it burns. And through the smoke, Véronique goes to the piano and raises her hands as if to play.

Sam looks up from the page. The edges of the room seem to dim. Her ears pop, and she can hear the slow doom doom of her own heart.

The lighter flares in her hand.

She stands.

She knows what the answer is now.

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I was invited to participate in the Piano Man project which is a two-year anthology project by Vince Wetzel who is publishing many stories surrounding the fictional novel PIANO MAN. You can read about PIANO MAN here. Some stories are small three-part serials. Others will be from guest authors (like me!)

The Piano Man Chronicles is a collaborative storytelling experiment built around a novel that exists only inside the lives of the characters who encounter it. That fictional book — The Piano Man by Thomas Eberle — drifts through each story like a quiet current, sparking reflection, disruption, or unexpected connection. Some characters read it. Some reject it. Some only know it because someone they love won’t stop talking about it. But for all of them, the book becomes a catalyst.
At Salted Wetzel with a Side of Mustard, Vince Wetzel is expanding his narrative into a shared universe shaped by guest writers like me, each bringing our own voice, perspective, and emotional texture. The project isn’t about following one plot; it’s about wandering through a constellation of lives in motion, watching how a single story echoes differently for everyone it touches. Together, these pieces form a living tapestry of art, consequence, and quiet magic.

Playlist link for only the good songs referenced in the story: