The little yellow radio transmitted only two signals clearly despite its glossy, new façade, one of them Christian talk shows and the other a 24 / 7 classical music station. The child had plastered it with colorful stickers and placed it on the window ledge in her bedroom just behind a pair of gauzy curtain panels. Stretched prone on the carpet, she passed idle days listening to it propped on her elbows with her skinny knees bent at right angles, her mind racing and her tiny calves keeping time with Bach like a metronome. Strewn about were pages ripped from a spiral notebook and kadoobies scattered willy-nilly among crayons and colored pencils, yesterday’s magnum opus making way for today’s, here expressions of the Brandenburg Concerti and Goldberg Variations keeping company with the Four Seasons, and layered under them, monochromatic studies set to the calming, repetitive salve of Einstein on the Beach and Piano Phase.

There were but two pieces of furniture in the outsized room: her bed, pushed into one corner and dressed haphazardly in the manner of a young child, and a floor lamp outfitted in a fringed shade looking comically vulgar in this setting. The walls were bare, save a pair of harlequin figures in dime store frames, and elsewhere some of the girl’s own work affixed to them with scotch tape. The carpet reeked of cat piss she’d long forgotten along with the Tom who always returned to share her company after his nighttime sorties, until one morning when he did not.

Standing in the cramped lobby of The Maestro’s studio she stepped behind her father so that she was half obscured by his towering figure. The Maestro smiled at her and then stared hard at her father, who glanced around the space assessing it, his eyes following the worn orange leatherette upholstery on a small love seat to a glass water cooler in the corner, thence to the beleaguered coffee table strewn with back issues of popular magazines, and today’s edition of the Times. Beyond this a cloister-like hallway led to the open door of a music studio; an upright piano was visible, stacked high with reams of sheet music illuminated by bright sunbeams spilling through the window beyond.

Nice place you got here.

The Maestro’s ears caught every third or fourth word the child’s father uttered between his fits of phlegmy coughing, and now looked down again at her, a decidedly frail girl whose hair was tied back into an impossible mess. The skin under her eyes was purple and between her nose and upper lip, red and cracked. She wore trousers in lavender the same shade as her skin, notably too short but that still fit her slim figure through the waist and hips. Over a knit shirt she had pulled on a fitted ivory cardigan and buttoned it to the top; in her right hand she clutched the cloth shell of a careworn bunny, all that remained of it, and in the left her father’s shirttail.

She will need a cello sized for her, The Maestro instructed over the man’s nattering, still holding the child’s gaze, but today she can borrow mine. You can wait here if you wish, or come back in an hour.

Her father pried her fingers loose from his clothing and pressed her hand into The Maestro’s, who again smiled upon her benevolently, leading her down the hallway to the music room. When the front door creaked open, the pair stopped and glanced back in time to see the child’s father slip out with the folded Times tucked under his arm.