Sin City

The pianos sat situated like streetlights, one on every block or so, stretching down the road downtown between buses and bicycles. They stood like sentries of art, hand-painted portraits with lids nailed shut. Kids and bums would sit and strum the worn-away keys like they remembered something they knew, tapping carefully and courageously as if there were someone to impress. They asked no permission. Neither did the pianos.

Nothing quite reminds a teenage girl of her age and gender like a city can. It was just me, my sister, and her friend; 15, 17, 19; cargo cut-offs and pull over, sleeveless romper and flats, heels and shoulder-sloping short black dress. We walked like soldiers pretending there was no battle, dodging whistles of grenades and chatter of machine gun shouts, watching everyone and making no eye contact.

It is a singular and unquestioned law of the universe that my sister does not pay for food. I, when with her, often forget this law, and try to pay the hot dog man, who smiles and waves his hand kindly, "Don't worry about it," they all say, and blush. My sister consumes very little of the free food society gifts her with, and I use her like a coupon the universe has granted us: pretty girls eat free.

Pianos light the soul of a musician like a lamp does to a moth. The empty seat drew my sister in, and her shaking hands moved over the keys like something which belonged. Plastic nails plastered over bloody bitten fingertips clicked against splintered wood, tapping out a morse-code beat beneath the tune.

I leaned against the wooden frame and ate the unpaid-for hot dog hurriedly and hungrily, my well-known position in the world being one to watch, lean against pianos, and protect those playing at them. The song floated out into the bustling city, over bells and horns and radios, but to my sister, she was alone.

She sang. Chords shook and bounced unsteadily, but her voice made up for it, thick and strong like muscle and sinew, not like bleached hair and tanned skin. She sang like someone whose ancestors hurt. She sang like a pretty girl in the middle of a city. And oh, the people listened.

A small crowd moved in and around as she and her friend sang songs my sister wrote, shamelessly and whole-heartedly. The people took their phones out. A scavenger hunt party asked her for a serenade, to which she happily obliged, belting half of a Taylor Swift song beside a to-be bride before they marked it off their list and flitted away like butterflies.

The sun was setting in the reflections of buildings, darkened windows lit on fire, clouds air-brushed in silver linings like a God in a world which has forgotten him. The fireworks were getting ready for nightfall, and the people were filing into the park as I sat on the bench beside my sister.

The next song she chose was nostalgic. It carried the air of the childhood we shared, a sort of sorrow that cannot be spoken, stretching around the earth and back again and curling around the sleeping forms in cribs. We knew sorrow when we were born, these songs were our lullabies.

So I sat and I sang. I knew the song. She pounded the soul of that piano and shook the concrete, lifted the steam from the streets. It was mournful and candid and true. The people came, the people left, eyes of bicycles lingered and fell away, crosswalks brought crowds and dispersed them until the only one left listening was a homeless man sitting against a concrete block with his eyes closed.

He breathed the song. Whispered it, murmured it, wrestled it within his chest. He was a strange sort of handsome, with clear blue eyes and a youngish beard, not quite done living yet. It was the kind of handsome one would fail to notice if they were not looking for it, if he did not look them in the eyes.

It was a blues country piano concerto and we sung the sun down and the fireworks popped and fluttered to the skies at the end of the last chorus, when she held each line out just as it sounds when you know the curtains will soon close,

On the thirty-first floor
Your gold-plated door
Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain

There were tears in the man's eyes. He looked like he wanted to shake our hands, but we could not look him in the eyes, and we could not spare more than a thank you, for the sun was going down and the fireworks were going up and the town popped and fizzled like a champagne bottle as we walked back to the car, heads down and shoulders tensed, reminded of age and gender by the strange men who shouted and whistled but did not offer any food.

The city is a strange place, and the rules it runs by are not always written. People lose. People win. People run out of coupons and some never had any in the first place because though all men may be created equal, this world doesn't treat them that way, we deal our own cards and the decks aren't dealt fair.

But the music always plays, and the people always listen.

And you know what's rad?

FREE HOT DOGS.