Waiting for a Guardian Angel.
By Eamon Murphy.
“The Steinway is where she has always been since the first day I brought her home—in the days before everything. Waiting under ceilinged spotlights in the corner of the azure-carpeted dining room.”
Piano player by Siguni – Aga Ciszewska.
After three years of separation, we finally stopped throwing hand grenades at each other.
The shrapnel was followed by a registered legal letter instructing that all property and chattels be cashed in and sold. Split equally in an end-of-marriage bounty.
The Steinway is where she has always been since the first day I brought her home—in the days before everything. Waiting under ceilinged spotlights in the corner of the azure-carpeted dining room. Shining black and polished. Waiting again to exhale syncopated backbeat mellowness.
Play something she commands.
Something worthy of this occasion. A reconciliation of the past to the present. How we got from there to here. Something fusional. I am sensing an old work of ours called Dusk Light. It is a fluid E flat major. Slow and melodic. Adagio cantabile dolce.
Shall we then? Once more — for old time’s sake.
Before the gold rush begins.
No. This is not why we are here.
Listen.
Listen instead to discord.
There is no sound on earth like a Steinway grand piano being ripped apart with an axe and sledgehammer.
The notes go first which is like her voice collapsing. First hoarse then nothing.
Next her heart of carefully-crafted timbers —which previously had circulated new-born melodies around her body and out into the world —is smashed to pieces under sledgehammer blows. The strings snap, release and unwind.
It is the sound of music dying.
A mercy-killing.
I stand breathless in the new silence. Shoulders aching and study my cracked, red-polished nails and the crooked patterns made by the broken skin and blood on the backs of my manicured hands.
Later I haul her remains outside into the frosted winter garden, surrounded on all sides by limp-hanging silver birch and elder. We used to have all-night parties here. Filled with excess, laughter and bad dancing.
The grenades came later.
There will be no encore. No soulful sonata to infiltrate the dusk light silence.
I anoint her with kerosene and stand back to watch the funeral pyre.
The sweet-smelling smoke lingers around the garden. The last guest to leave.
Waiting for a guardian angel to escort her away to wherever grand pianos go when they die.
The Blood Pudding – August 17, 2026
Eamon Murphy is from Wexford Ireland. His short stories have been short listed for the Fish Publishing Short Story Prize, Colm Tobin Short Story Award, the Cambridge Short Story Prize and broadcast on Irish radio. His story A Drihid Lullaby was featured in The New Guard. He has recently completed his first novel Every Living Thing.
Artwork: Born in Warsaw, Poland, Siguni (Aga Ciszewska) received her MA from the University of Warmia and Mazury, Faculty of Art in 2002. She tries to explore new ways of working in contemporary drawing. Recently she works mostly digitally and draws everything by hand. Siguni currently lives and works in Olsztyn, Poland. You can find her work here.