The Tuner

Genre: Gaudy fiction
Inspiration: The word "fork"


The tines of the tuning fork rang in the air, piercing the smoke filled room; a sonic aurora. Stanley felt the bead of sweat threatening to fall from the ledge of his brow into his eye but he dared not move too abruptly. It must have been forty degrees in there... that coupled with the odd darkness and the cigarette smoke dancing in the few sunbeams disecting the giant room gave it a feeling of a seedy, burlesque lounge. The velvet accents and gaudy crystal that vomited across the marble floor only accentuated the uncomfortable feeling that he had travelled into a different dimension; perhaps changed forever by a cultural revolution led by Liberace.

From the corner of his eye he saw her watching. Cigarette holder in hand, her fuscia silken slip flowed across her leather arms and legs. Like a tanned hide flapping in a windy shed, the backs of her appendages swayed fluidly as she adjusted her awkward and disturbing position on the love seat 30 ft away. This was not the first time Stanley had tuned this piano.

Margaret was rich. Too rich. And she was lonely - not because she lacked the reassurance of constant companionship, she hated people - but because she had not felt subject to the lusty testosterone fueled desperation of men that she was at one time unable to escape. She often thought to herself that this was the curse of old age: to have spent so many long and irresistible years on earth subjecting men to her infallible perfection that clearly, they had grown immune. Tirelessly she vowed to search the earth for the genetic anomaly that had been spared the fate which in her mind was worse than death - an inability to recognize womanly perfection. Stanley was being tested - he had been here before and had shown a glimmer of desperate need that she knew she could incite.

Stanley had no idea that he'd projected such strong signals while tuning the same piano 5 weeks earlier. The room that day had been hotter (if that was even possible) and despite an ominous creepiness emanating from Margret's disturbing perch surpassing what he was now enduring, he was unable to resist the need to ask for some water. Margaret knew immediately that his intention was to have her rise and to watch from behind as she walked to the kitchen. It disgusted her in a way that she had been craving for 27 years.

The sweat on his brow was now threatening Stanley the same dire sentence so he tried to move as little as possible. He wasn't sure what had him back here in only 5 weeks, but he was going to do anything to avoid returning again. The tears he saw forming in the wrinkled corners of Margaret's eyes as he declined to stay for dinner then conveyed the kind of desperation he was only too familiar with.