Shear.

There are no keys to play tonight, but the keys of memory. It could be the one's of the drift wood upright of my first piano teacher, sunlit in a kitchsy room of throw pillows and knick-nacks. It COULD be, the sleak shadow steinway murmuring in the din of the kind of upscale piano bar that I can't get into anymore. But instead, and of course, it's my Grandmother's piano, cherry wood with webbing and varnish.

I'd watch her play and the keys would pulse, wilting at her gentle touch. You could call it effortless. The summer I spent in her cottage in the meadow, I would listen to her play almost every day. That was the summer I invented time travel. My Grandmother didn't see a black man until she was 17, "except for in Shirley Temple movies". Her and her sister, Rollande, had clutched each other on the train, staring wide eyed at what was probably no more a sight than a regular man in suit and tie. "How foolish" she'd remark. Lacing recollection with recitation, alliteration, the whole evening being played away with a narrative of familiar rhythms. To this day, I have an appreciation for hearing a story more than once.

"They said there could be no joy after Auschwitz" she remarked, snipping at my hair with sheers in the guest bedroom, leaving one arm to rest on my small shoulder. The sight of withering ink on her paper skin, made me think that I wouldn't mind writing on my Grandmother's skin either, but I knew I'd never get away with it. You didn't do that to Grandmothers. But someone had to mine.

I sat in the chair and named the numbers with the soundless tracing of my lips. I was proud to know them, proud to be able to add them and happy for the distraction while my feet kicked lightly against the bureau and mirror I had been placed in front of.

I'm in the Starbucks in Union Square, one of them anyways, resting my face against the wall trying to get some semblance of sleep before I get thrown out or need to go shit somewhere or otherwise can't take being here any long. But also my fingers are tapping on the table, which does not wilt beneath my touch, but presses back against the rhythms of Clair de lune as I, and perhaps only I, remember it.

My hairs, girlishly long and baby blonde, are bullied in the air by the wheezing of my Grandmother's titanous metal fan. They catch the sun and explode to white in the reflection from which I view the choreography. My Grandmother catches my eye in the mirror and snip snip snips the scissors near my ear to the rhythm of Chim-Chim-Cher-ee from Mary Poppins and it makes me squeal with delight.

I wake up in the hospital, rust, no... blood, congealing on the gown I'm wrapped in... and the sheets... and the pillow. I hear someone coughing violently in the distance. I hear my heart pounding without rhythm in the beeps of a monitor. I close my eyes and I'm out again.
I have to shit so I pick up my bag, my other bag and unfold my hand cart on the way out the door. If I see a few cans along the way to the bathroom in the park I'll pick them up, but I won't stop for too long, my bowels are very much against me. Why should they be any different.

The orange clock thing has a half that counts up and a half that counts down, plastered on the side of a skyscraper. The meaning has been known and explained to me many times, but I don't retain it. Instead I substitute my own. I shuffle with clenched butt cheeks to the park, darting between chess players and hare krishnas and every face of every color baring down against a windy day, the crowd rippling like

wheat in the field just beyond my Grandmother's back yard, where I lay beneath a tree from which someone has hung colorful antique bottles from the branches with thick twine. The sun shines through them and casts wild colors on the trunk, on each other and on me. Colors collide at their landing point and become others. The wind shifts the bottles and they clink together and the scene they shin shifts with them in rhythm. I wish I was smart enough to know how to understand how color and sound and a boy and a tree can all be part of one object. I wish I could put that into words. I couldn't then either.

The scissors slip from my squirming and I'm awakened into the consciousness I now abide in with an explosion of pain. I don't hear my Grandmother's fretting, I don't feel her pressing a cloth to my head to staunch the blood and I only cry a little. I'm transfixed by the red coming from her ear and flowing down her wrist to join the withering black ink. If she were to live long enough, to live as long as 4 Grandma's, her skin might overtake the ink all together, forever.

"We have sick people in here" says the nurse "people who didn't do this to themselves. Maybe think about that before you want to go and be foolish."

I'm laying on the bench in the subway, trying to will myself to move, thoughts don't become actions like they used to. I want to die. I want to live. Why couldn't there be a third option?You always have a choice, but you don't always have options... someone told me that once.

"Sometimes people do bad things. They do bad things because their own soul is hurting and dark inside. Hitler was a man who lived in darkness" my Grandmother answered.

In the hospital I through up in my mouth and have to grab the side railing and pull with all my might to turn on my side, while the heart monitor wails and the spittle drains onto the bed like blood from an accident with scissors. You can travel through time, but you can't make two times one. My Grandmother isn't here for this, nor will she be at Starbucks. I mourn her, but she would mourn her dreams for me.

But if I could I would string together the moments and staunch the blood and vomit. I would subtract the numbers from my Grandmother's wrist and take her by the hand. I'd lead her to a wheat field where we'd sit at sunset hours and watch the colors come together and move together with their own sound. With nothing, but the wind to conduct them.