Daniel squeezes into his jacket and hooks two fingers around the handle of his violin case, his body weightless and unreal. His keys jangle in his pocket, dulled by a half-finished packet of gum. He glares at his violin, and fantasizes smashing the torture device to splinters. Done as a musician, reborn as a composer.
Five thousand multiplied by the number of pieces he's completed is more money than he has made in his entire life. More than his college debt. He could pay his nagging dad the deposit back, refund the mechanic expenses from the time he crashed his car, and never have to ask for his help again. He would no longer owe anyone anything.
Marina said he lays golden eggs, and he feels invaluable instead of worthless, as if his skin is made from expensive instrument pieces, rosewood and ivory, artfully crafted by a luthier. It's stupid. Daniel was frankensteined from plastic trash and CD shards and bad music.
"Stay here for the night."
The handle is balmy in his palm and the latches jitter.
"Oh! You have a guest bedroom?" He tries for a casual tone.
"I do, but it's occupied."
Marina opens the door to her right and a rectangle of light fills the pitch-black room. Canaries flutter in a massive cage. No windows, and the walls are lined with foam soundproofing. They sing in thirds, fifths, and sevenths, all in the same key.
"They sound so... good together?" He says.
Birds don't do that. They just repeat calls. She must have sung to every one of them individually, until they only repeated those notes. Female canaries don't sing, they only chirp, and these all have the bright flame coloration of males.
"Don't they? Like my own personal orchestra."
The canaries are excited by Marina's presence, bang against the cage bars, sing louder, fluctuate octaves. She closes the door, and all that is left of their song is a high-pitched hum.
"You will sleep in my bed."
Daniel steps backward, and shakes his head so hard his brain knocks around in his skull and gives him a mild concussion. When he opens his eyes and the hall spins, Marina is still there.
She grabs his wrist and leads him through corridors with long tasseled carpets and biblical oil paintings. He trips onto a king size bed and gets a faceful of memory foam and the citric acid scent of Marina. If he knew they were going to have sex, he would've showered.
Flowy dress pants billow around her pale legs, then puddle on the floor. She strips down to her gray cotton underwear, her firm breasts less than a handful. It does cross his mind that she could be pretending to like his music to manipulate him into fucking her, and he is not sure whether to be excited or disappointed by this.
Marina unbuttons his jeans, pulls them down, and his erection undulates. She blinks at it, and he is compelled to apologize. The crevice of her bare chest slots on his knee. Jeans crumple to his ankles, and she unties his muddy converse dangling from the side of her bed, perfect fingers struggling on the double-knots.
Daniel yanks off his own shirt to show some initiative. Sex is not complicated, he's done it an average amount of times, in the backseat of a nissan with a peeling paintjob and sun damage, in his university disabled bathroom, upstairs at a friend's house party. Calm down. In his froot of the loom boxer briefs, she flattens him to the bed.
His body is wet with sweat, warm streaks trail his forehead and slide down his arms. Every time he touches her body, his oily fingers smudge her complexion. He has much more body hair than she does, at his inner thigh and lower abdomen, dark blonde and curly.
"Hands up."
Marina snaps a pair of handcuffs on his wrists and locks them to the headboard. He didn't imagine her to be a kinky type. She is going to ride his cock with him bound, or maybe sit on his face and force him to eat her out. He is so hard it hurts. She never asked for consent but the answer is yes.
She climbs off of him, and pulls on an oversized t-shirt. She clicks the lights off, tucks the blankets over him, and gets into bed, facing away. The bed is so large a whole other person could fit in the gap between them.
"Good night, Daniel."
A bleary Marina wakes him, and he jerks, to find his hands still cuffed, a sharp clang above his head. Her hair is in a ponytail instead of a braid, but otherwise she looks the same because she never wears makeup.
"Good morning..." Daniel blinks and his tearducts are crusty.
"You sleep in late. Could I commission you to write some music for me?"
Marina dangles a key in front of his face.
"...Sure."
She unlocks the handcuffs. Daniel finds his clothes from yesterday folded in the corner and puts them back on.
Marina stirs a wooden spoon into clear egg yolks on a frying pan. He imagines hugging her from behind, and breathing in her neck. The cotton would be soft around her thin waist and she would smell like her bed, like grandma perfume. Even though she was naked in front of him last night, he doesn't feel allowed to touch her, he needs permission to move closer.
Instead, he takes a seat at the dinner table, rubbing the smooth wood as a supplicant for her hips. There are six blank music sheets on the table and a fountain pen— she must think he doesn't need an eraser, that he doesn't make mistakes. Denji clenches the pen hard. In the garden, bees float around roses, their fuzzy bodies dusted with pollen. Sheers have cut the thorns from their stems.
The blinds fall down.
"You seem distracted," Makima says. Her hand is on the cord. She places a plate of unseasoned scrambled egg yolks in front of him.
"...Sorry."
Denji draws circles and lines with the fountain pen. He makes a mistake, mouths a silent cuss, then makes the obviously wrong note look like it was on purpose by adding accompanying harmonies. A commission should have some guidelines, a desired tone, or something, but he isn't about to take her charity for granted. She's the first person to ever find value in him.
He has wondered what a conductor must do on their time off. Practice waving their arms around? Marina lounges on the couch, until she checks her wristwatch and disappears down the hall.
A flock of red and orange bursts from the soundproof room, and the house erupts with song. They flap around the livingroom, fly up to the high ceiling, and perch on the swooping arms of the chandelier. Some tightrope across the windowsill and peck at the wood. A couple land on his shoulder and chirp harmoniously.
Marina is on the couch again. Canaries land on her shoulders and flutter in her hair. One pokes its beak into her scalp, snags threads of hair, as if making a nest. She stares forward at him, unphased. If he had feathers, she would be as unbothered by his touching. He was born the wrong species.
"Is it really okay for me to stay here?" He asks.
"I prefer it. I like to watch you work."
Birds eat sunflower seeds out of her hand. She lets the kitchen sink trickle, so they can bathe under the steady stream. Some poke at the blinds, desperate for sunlight.
"Someone has hurt you very badly, haven't they?" she asks.
Daniel considers his dog, his mom, his dad.
"Hasn't everyone been hurt badly?" he says.
"The good composers suffer. Schumann, Beethoven. Rot makes people more delicate. They age like wine, or like cured meat."
More like moldy tennis shoes. He isn't done when Marina picks up his music and flips through the pages. He winces, expects disappointment. She strokes the top of his head, gently tugs wavy knots, and tells him he's done a great job.
The concert is tonight. Marina lets him borrow a black button-down and dress pants, and he'll just have to wear his shitty converse because there's no way her shoes would fit him. All of her clothes are from the men's section and they are about the same size, so it isn't obvious. Even though his reflection looks perfectly normal in the mirror, (if anything a bit baggy around the hips,) he can't shake the feeling of being trapped tightly in her clothes, unable to escape.
Daniel grins when he steps out of her car at the symphony hall and the concertmaster is inventing colors of red. Concert attire is all black like a funeral. The performance is a blur, but he doesn't miss any cues. The conductor thanks the audience when they finish, but the quiver of her left eyelid says she would rather grovel.
Marina rotates the wheel, metallic logo glinting, while the turn signal chirps over Swan Lake playing faintly from her speakers. Daniel suggests dropping him off at his apartment. She reminds him he isn't done with his commision. He says he needs to take a shower. She says she has a shower at home.
Loamy white bubbles cling to her pale chest, and gather at crevices, the gap of her thighs, her armpits. Her skin is glossy like the plastic of a freshly manufactured doll. Daniel feels almost clean standing next to her in the shower, not clad in clothes that yearn to be abused in the laundry machine. Still, he does not touch her, and she does not touch him, except to nudge him to the side and reach for shampoo.
"You didn't seem to be happy with the performance," Daniel says.
Hot water sprays into his mouth as he speaks. The temperature tints them both slightly pink. Girls always like showers way too hot, it burns and his chest feels itchy.
"I wasn't."
Marina closes her eyes as the bubbles fall from her strawberry red hair, gathering at her eyebrows and the line of her lips, the tops of her ears. In fluorescent highlights on her thighs are colors, not just white, but pastels, pinks and blues. Without her criticizing gaze, he stares. Her pubic hair is auburn, and her nipples a dark blush, and he hover-touches her, careful not to actually bump her as she shifts from side to side. She would be so slick and smooth under his palm.
"I hate music," she admits.
The drain gurgles. He puts his hands behind his back while the water rinses the foam away from her eyes. His body has betrayed his secret— he's hard again. His erection strains when she glances at it, so he covers it with both hands, presses it flat against his navel.
"But you're a conductor?" Daniel blurts.
Marina sighs. "That's probably why I hate it. I used to love it. It used to make me feel things."
She continues, "the more I know about music, the more mistakes I notice. It's so rare that something makes me feel again."
Daniel is half-listening to her, because her hands are moving a lot as she speaks, and it is a conscious effort not to move with them. Not quite my tempo. Watch my hands. Memorize the sheet music because it is more important to watch my hands.
"When I find something like that, I can't let it fly away."
She turns the faucet off and the bath nozzle vomits out excess water.
The next day, the house is silent. A dip in the bed replaces Marina, and the handcuffs have vanished, even though he remembers her putting them on last night. Daniel stands in the hallway in his boxer briefs. The hum is gone.
"Marina?"
The acoustics in her home are fantastic, if she were even silently flipping a book he would hear it. He opens the room that housed the canaries, and the knob does not fight him. The birds are gone. The cage door, the length of a cello, is open. There is no evidence the canaries were ever there, no red feathers, no excrement, not even the scent of birdfeed.
A silvery glint like a knife catches light, a small object inside the cage. Daniel crawls inside the cage on his knees. It's a pen.
The cage door closes behind him. Makima snaps on a lock.
"You seemed to be getting distracted. Keeping you here will increase your productivity."
She slits pages of blank sheet music through the bars. Even if he screamed, the soundproofing wouldn't let any of it pierce through. At least, finally, someone loves his music.