There’s an old wooden rocking chair on the bare wooden floor, making
odd wooden noises as the wooden runners move back and forth. There’s no one in
the long sitting room, and most of the other (read, comfortable) furniture has
been removed, save for a side table here, a bookcase there. It’s all covered in
dust, and the two portraits on each side wall that face each other across the
room are covered in cobwebs. The chair moves, the dust settles, and memories
fade. There’s an old phonograph in the corner, its needle wheezing across an
old record, broadcasting the ghost of a piano that once inhabited this room.
The markings where the instrument indented the floor are still visible, but it
was removed long ago. Ghosts beyond the piano inhabit this room, remnants of
lives and moments. Everything feels old, but of a specific, particular time. A
nostalgia for old photographs and daily formality permeates the walls,
nostalgia not of a better time but of one more uncertain, where the future
seemed murky and the past too recent to endure with any sort of encouragement.
It’s nostalgia for the edge of complexity, when the simplicity of survival
became ambition. The faces in the portraits gaze at one another across the
room, frozen in eternal gaping unease. The rocking chair continues its
pendulous march, perpetually moving through time, offering no repose, just
anxiety. Ages pass. The sun never sets, its beams simply dance over dust motes
through the lone window at the near end of the room. The phonograph, finally emitting
string drones, slows and stops, its motor gasping its last, its frayed belt
finally crumbling. Masterpieces, a
finely handcrafted, obscure artifact, captures in its magnetic tape the slow
crumble to ruin of human passing.
--Ryan Masteller
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