Gorgias

How barbaric. She put ice in her whiskey. I tried a sip of it and tasted nothing. I dumped the cubes in his beer, which bugged him out, the whiskey hater, but I could consume the whiskey that way only. Someone shouted something through the bar. Nobody cared. I took my photo out of my wallet and drew a moustache on it, and handed it to him, because it made him cringe. She had left a while ago, now, leaving behind a cloud of fruity perfume and a warm chair. I tried on the chair and her voice, but it didn’t make him laugh either.

He played the piano like a reinvented noir character. Which is to say, terribly and in deep thought. He was a terrible person to be around, and this was one of many reasons. His lightly canted head looked solemn and he seemed to stare right through the black-and-white machina. That is not what caused it to make a sound; his left hand, idly punching the keys, was what caused a sound to emit from what I’ll call the hood of the piano. Sounds also found their way out of his mouth hole. The sounds were a lot like what we envision whales to sound like, i.e. moany and sad and preferably under water. The sound had little to do with song, which is an invention that ties sound and intention together to amuse people. The owner was not a person you could amuse with moans and piano dissonance, and so he kicked the guy out and took a swig of whisky from behind the bar, which had been waiting for him. The owner retreated to his behind-the-bar office, where he played the piano slowly and sang various moany sounds.