Unlike last week’s Fiction Friday, this is a stand-alone piece. Which isn’t to say that it couldn’t have some connection to something larger…anyone care to guess what brought my muse to Paris in the early 1880s? But no context is necessary to read this story.
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When he shut his eyes, he could almost forget he was cold. February 1882 in Paris, and in all his long experience of nine years the boy couldn’t remember a colder winter. The wind howled down the street, past the shabby buildings and across the boy’s thin cheek. He kept his eyes shut and concentrated on the music.
The violin played in counterpoint to the wind, neither quite strong enough to defeat the other. The boy ignored the constant trudge of footsteps, the mutter of voices, the whistle of the wind, and tried very, very hard to hear only the music. He opened his eyes only at the sound of coins clinking together. He looked down at the violin case open on the ground at his feet, and easily identified the one that had been added. There weren’t very many coins there. He looked up to see a tall man wrapped in a long black cloak, hat pulled low over his forehead, casting his face in shadows.
“Merci, monsieur,” the boy murmured. His eyes dropped and he continued playing his violin.
The man didn’t move, and as the moments passed the boy became perplexed. People stood and listened, once in a while, in warm weather. In the cold and the dim of a winter twilight people wrapped their coats tight around them and hurried on, heads down, intent on whatever warm fireside was waiting before them. If they dropped a coin at all it was without stopping, often without even looking, certainly without waiting for the boy’s whispered “merci.”
The moments slipped past. The violin music didn’t falter but neither did the man move and finally the boy’s eyes stole up to his face again.
Tales of the Marvelous 