The horizon looked like a piano to him as he stared out the window. Large black tree trunks placed evenly on the ridge, separating the white snow into keys. It was noon and overcast, a day where you wouldn't feel comfortable without a warm fuzzy barrier between your body and the cold, even from inside a house. This was especially true for Kes as he sat in the living room, his fireplace a dark, black recess full of cold ashes and burnt memories. Transformed into a new state of being, his father's will was scattered in there, gone. Long gone, it seemed. Last night he had watched it burn, watched the pages smoke and curl and blacken until they just fell apart, disintegrating into black and white clouds that fluttered up the chimney. His eyes had finally rested when it was done, speeding him through time until he woke to stare out the window, catching a glance at the old grandfather clock that still kept ticking after all these years.
It had gotten a piece of machinery in it to wind it automatically, a cord snaking out the back unobtrusively to power it from the wall socket. Standing next to the window like a metronome for the hillside, it swung back and forth to set the rhythm of a silent song hidden away from him. Hidden from his fingers that once played song after song in this room on the old piano that was long gone now. The will had said it all. Not a cent had been left, not for him, not for his mother, and not even enough to pay for the burial, if they had needed to have one. The one grace that had come on them from his father's boating voyages. The boat had gone down too though, without insurance. The old man's wooden coffin carried him down deeper than any hole he would have gotten on land. It wasn't worth the piano that the old man had sold to help fund it, but it had stayed afloat a few years, enough for the debts to pile up.
A shiver brought Kes back to reality, back to the almost empty room. Just the clock and the fireplace and the beat up recliner that he sat in. This place had at least been his. He had bought it off the old man before that final voyage, made sure that the memories he had here wouldn't get sold away for laughable delusions of grandeur. Just the house though, he hadn't been fast enough to realize and save the piano. It was empty and quite. Last night had at least been filled with the crackle of the fireplace, a flashing heat that devoured the papers left to him. He wouldn't have even gotten the boat, if it had survived. It would have gone to some society that drank at a bar down by the pier, telling tall tales that had no possible anchor in reality. The will was just a formality and a few quaint words to show how far he and his father had drifted apart since those days he had sat in his lap at the piano, hitting keys as his father played out song after song into the night. Kes had burned all that up though, thrown it into the fire last night. He had bought the memories back, and now he had burned them all away again, leaving the charred remnants to sit there in the house.
A slight shift in the weather brought snow to blur his view, gradually picking up until the window only showed a blank white window to nowhere, blending in with the white walls. Recliner creaking as he rose, Kes set himself to starting up the fireplace once again, breaking him away from his thoughts for a few short moments.
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