Violin
       

Let's make it early June—an untarnished evening when everything is rising action, a small restaurant, four friends reunited on a balcony above a river. Wine. Laughter. A sky barely night at 9. After dinner, two tables away, a woman slips out a fiddle, begins to play. Did we sing? I'm almost sure of it, suspended as we were there on that bridge of time and space. And when she lifted that violin to her chin and drew the bow toward those first low tones, shifting from bluegrass to Paganini, we shivered. We had not come expecting transcendence. It was Barb who said it was Paganini and we believed. Does it change the story if I tell you I saw my friend just twice more after that? If I tell you that she had perfect recall, every word to every song, all verses, every card you were holding. She could keep a secret. At her funeral, Jim told how she'd flirted with waiters in Italy. "When did you learn to speak Italian?!?" he'd asked. "It's not that different from Spanish." "When did you learn to speak Spanish?!?" The truth is, it's not possible to recover anything with perfect accuracy. Some gifts we are only given once.

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Copyright © 2022 Gail Martin All rights reserved
from The Southern Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission