Piano Lessons

By Vickie Wippel

               Fingers tickle keys. Fingers tickle me. A piano teacher, bearded and blood shot. A piano bench, a shopworn family heirloom. Hardly big enough for two. Every Good Boy Does Fine. Every good girl stays quiet. Fingers move their way up scrawny legs, playing scales to an inner thigh. Mother, thumbing through Newsweek, hums along to stilted music coming from down the hall. 

                He doles out a stick of Doublemint gum like a communion wafer at the end of 45 minutes—sins are forgiven and sheet music pulled to prepare for the following week. 

Oh, when the saints go marchin' in,


Oh, when the saints go marchin' in!


Mother taps her toes.

The End.