A Novella in installments, tracing the intermingling autobiographies of a boy and a violin, spanning over a century. To find any episode, look here.

(The protagonist posing with some old friends.)

(1) – Sears & Roebuck Co., Chicago, 1897

I remember the wooden walls with the storage hooks, hundreds of them in rows. In a dark room where a lady came once a day to check the temperature with some silvery mercury in a glass tube with numbers. That’s the first thing I can hazily recall. I think you cannot have a memory of anything before you are entirely constructed. A lot of us were there. All a little different, but mostly the same. I could tell we were the same species. We just hung there and waited. Almost every day, all day long. Silent with one hundred siblings.

But once I was carried out. A man came and said a name, like E-45 or something; I paid no attention. Then the mercury lady, younger, came and got me off my hook and handed me to him. It felt warmer when she touched me than when he did. I was carried past a long window. Of a kind of crafts room. Very kind but serious looking people were in there, using all sorts of tools making wooden things. Things like parts of me. Necks. Bodies with lovely f-holes like mine. Some had little fine carving tools and were shaping things out of mysterious black wood — black yet unpainted — from Africa. They were like my pegs, in what one man called my “pegbox”, but I call it my head. He brought me down a hallway into a small lighted room. There were very bright lights above. I was placed on a table. Then a different, smaller man, wearing a white garment and having a kind of magnifying glass hat on his head picked me up delicately, and with attentiveness. He plucked my strings; there were four of them. And I vibrated inside and felt a rush of goodness and joy. Each string sounded a little different and the sound they made endured. I could hear them ten seconds later. I wanted him to do it again. I thought it was something like when the mercury lady picked up a grey pussy cat one time and stroked its amazing fur, and I could tell this made the cat hypnotized, like in Heaven.

But the white man did not touch my strings again. Instead he did something very odd. First he pulled his glass hat down over his eyes, and his eyeballs became enormously large. Too big for his face. They looked bluish grey and quite analytical. Then he picked me up and turned me over. I thought he was going to look closely at my fine front with the f-holes with his gigantic analytic eyes. But no, he looked at my curvaceous back for some reason. And I had never seen my back at this point in my life — so I had no idea what he was seeing there. But he murmured to himself something about ‘nice inlay design’ and ‘mother of pearl’. He rubbed me, stroked me really, with a few smooth fingertips. Then he placed me down again and said “OK Good! She goes tomorrow!” Where I was to go I had not the faintest clue. In fact, I was completely astonished to learn that apparently I was female.

Little did I then know it, but I would never see my siblings again. Straightaway I was carried into a different very large and noisy room, and the person who carried me was humming and seemed happy. I saw many many other tables with other workers all wearing the same uniform. I was placed upon a new table next to some peculiar articles: A large flat piece of brown cardboard with creases in it, a very beautiful silk blanket exactly big enough for me. (It was a rich crimson color.) And a strange but fascinating thing shaped like an arrow but curved concavely, with hundreds of stretched horsehairs attached to both its top and its bottom. Finally a truly frightening item — something which appeared to be a burial coffin with red lining inside that exactly would fit my svelte body. The man placed the concave arrow thing inside the coffin — there was even a little hook place for it. Then he took me and placed me with great care inside the coffin, facing up. He even placed the silk blanket over me. I tried to scream that I was not dead but like all humans he seemed totally unaware that I could speak. Then he closed the coffin lid over me and sealed it with some clicking noises. It was dark. And I was deeply terrfied.

_______RS

NOTE: The next episode, if it exists yet, is right here. To find any episode, look here.

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