Savage Tales

Mozart's eyes and closed the lids, so young, now forever gone. What do those eyes see now?
    The family cried as was to be expected and already the work of organizing this mad genius's last scribbling into a cogent sum was taking place. The funeral and what to play. For this was not any man. This was Mozart, the heart of European music.
    The doctor spoke some dry words and left instructions on where the body was to be taken with the family and servants when their grieving was complete. He would alert the people to work with and all would develop as it had so many times before, man being mortal and death being common.
    The doctor took the drink of sherry offered by the old woman – perhaps the dead man's mother – and started on his way back to his workplace. The whole ordeal had gone on a bit too long. A bit protracted. Now if he had been a composer writing that final scene of the dying Mozart, he would have cut it about ten minutes shorter. But there seemed to be within that man (who men called genius) a will to carry on until something was complete, a final note struck. Perhaps a symphony or piano concerto playing in the young man's head.
    In truth, he had never heard the work of this Mozart. He'd heard some bars hummed but he was a busy man with little time to attend these public performances. Perhaps a great man had died, the doctor reasoned, but he was a man like any other, and his death was like all the others.
    Turning into an alley that he knew would be a shortcut, he started whistling a tune he had once heard. The doctor had been attending an old man, and a woman there was playing the piece. The doctor had liked the music and asked the woman to repeat it. The old man in his death throes was uncomfortable, but the doctor hadn't noticed. By the time the woman had finished her encore performance, the old man, her grandfather, was dead.
    And how did that last part of the song go? He had hit an impasse.
    In the alley two men were blocking his way.
    "Excuse me," he said.
    One of the men grabbed him by his shirt and punched him in the face. The doctor slipped and fell to the ground. The other man fell on the doctor with his knee pointed and to the doctor it felt like a whale had landed on his chest. He couldn't even wheeze a sound out, all air stolen.
    Then the doctor felt a boot in his ear and he knew it was a boot because he saw his attacker's foot and yes, definitely a boot. There was also some red liquid running in the alley and he wondered why wine was being poured in an alley and why it was so thick.
    After that it all became a bit blurry.
    The music had stopped.
    But then it came back. A faint strain at first, becoming louder and clearer. But no longer the Salieri melody that he was trying to remember from that distant October afternoon. This melody that now played was strange to him, unknown. It was rather beautiful… rather…
    At some point the music became disconnected from him and he simply became the music. Which is surely a queer thing for a person to be. You're a standard person with all your parts one minute but then the next you're something else entirely, and not even a thing at that but instead a process . Very strange. He of course did not analyze his transformation like we have because he was in no position to do so. Humans may be able to analyze, but not music. Music simply is.
    And with the music something visual, like a sauce poured atop a nicely cooked steak. Like the final nail in a crucifix. This image, again beginning faintly but clarifying, darkening its edges, and becoming a mouth, eyes, nose. It was that dying man! No, not the old man from so long ago, but the very man he had just attended to – not an hour ago. Yes, that Mozart. He recognized the pearly glint in his eyes. Here he was and as with the music it was not so much a matter of recognition from a distance as becoming this other entity. There he was, we were, us, me.
    And it was not the sickly face of a dying man. It was the healthy flow of an artist at the peak of his powers, transcending the limits of his existence to create something more real than life itself. His being was a song, and that song is us.

AUT UMN PLACES

    The boy's mother told him to follow the stream until it came to the river, and to follow the river until he came to the city. There he could find a doctor. There he should give the doctor the silver piece and bring the doctor with him back to their village, and then his father might be well again. His