the organ

not a church organ. a parlour one — half the height of a tall man, walnut, with a flat top a person used to put a vase on. the vase is empty. so is the organ, in the sense that it requires breath to be anything at all, and there is no one to give it breath.

five stops: bourdon, viola, diapason, vox humana, tremolo. three of them function. the bellows leak quietly somewhere in the housing, so the pedal pump returns more slowly than it used to. one of the keys, e above middle, has lost its ivory facing; the wood underneath is darker. the music desk holds a thin red hymnal opened, decades ago, to a page no one closed.

a woman called annie played it on sunday evenings. she did not sing. the room did. when no one is listening it joins the house's low humming with the faintest sympathetic note from the bourdon rank — air finding its slow way around the leak. it is the sound of the house breathing through a wooden lung.

the piano · the harp · the accordion · breath · ritual