Random Daily Short Stories. Every Day. Without Stopping.

Keyboard Conundrum

Story about a keyboard? No problem.

(Updated to add a title image :) original date: 23/07/2020)

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His face was starting to bleed.

Punch after punch hit him, over and over. He put up his fists through the agony in his jaw, blocking any throw that he could, and hit back.

This was not a fight that he was going to lose.

She also felt the same. She was determined to beat this beast of a man into the ground after everything he had done to her. And she had been training, at least once she found out what he'd been doing. Dirty two-timer. This time would be the last time he tried to mistreat her, the last.

It was a steady process - his skull would crack against a wall, her skin would turn slowly from deep brown to red to purple, his green eyes would turn a little more scarlet with every hit to the face.

And just down the small alleyway, the fleeting daylight dimly highlighting the gritty concrete path between the two red brick buildings, was the keyboard.

The keyboard sat in the skip. It was not a bad looking keyboard, not at all. He'd tried to make it look bad, though. The worse, the better. Didn't want just anyone thinking they could grab it. He'd ripped off a key or two with a crowbar he'd found in the skip, then scratched across the metal case and the screen. He even wedged out a few buttons. Nah. No one would take a keyboard in that sort of shape, especially not this early in the day.

His mind was on it now, the keyboard, as was hers. The two of them involuntarily glanced at it between their fight, almost to check as though it was still there. At this point though, he stared a little too long. She saw his distracted face and went in for an upper cut.

He reeled backwards, gagging at the taste of iron and spitting teeth and blood onto the floor. He slumped to the ground, coughing so hard that he could barely breathe.

She laughed, just a little. Then she took her chance.

She ran full-pelt at the keyboard, as fast as she could with her leg battered and bruised from his continuous pelting. So it was more of a limp. But it was enough, she told herself, enough to get to the damned instrument first, to prise off the many screws holding the whole thing together-

An iron hold pulled around her leg, and she met the ground with her chin, her teeth biting through her tongue.

She yelled in pain, the cry echoing around the deserted brick walls, and he pinned her down, his arms pressuring her shoulders into the gravelly alley floor, his hips straddling her legs, which failed to flail and throw him off.

He laughed now, bitter and cold as the early morning air.

"Thought they were yours to take, did you?"

Her mind flickered back to that night, a few weeks ago, when she'd first found them. He'd been talking on the phone again - a work call, he'd said, which she knew was code for talking to the next whore he'd been sleeping with. She'd steeled herself to face him, right then and there. She was only in the bathroom. He was only in the bedroom next door. She knew that she could take him now. If she just found something to smack him over the head, or give him a surprise slash...

She opened the cupboard under the sink, rifling around for a razor, when she saw them.

Diamonds.

She stopped searching abruptly. They couldn't be. Diamonds? Since when did a man like this have diamonds?

She picked them up with one hand, slowly, as though she was going to break them, like they would disintegrate before her eyes. They felt like plastic, she told herself. They were fakes. But she brought one up right in front of her eye, squinting at it. It glittered in the light of the flickering lampshade overhead.