The piano creaked with the heat, the dusty curtains fluttered in the hot wind, their once gaudy colours sun blasted to mute browns and reds. Emily had left the lid up over the keys when she left, and in her place, a lizard climbed between middle C and D, its body sinuous and flattened, its tiny hands splayed out on the ivory of the keys. Everything slept, an uneasy sleep in the heat while a fine red dust progressively wore into the substance of the room. 

To the right, only feet away from the piano, was the sofa. The sofa had once been an excellent expanse of brilliant green, an unprincipled vermillion evoking evening gowns with coffees and late night cocktails for the more daring. The adjacent table, round topped and of a darkly stained timber had cigar burns from careless smokers who had been distracted by the promise of fine port. It had been fine entertaining here once, the house sported fine stables and refined groomsman amongst the shearers and stable hands. Now, stains of that self same port or at least it’s cousin vintage, made mottled burgundy semicircles in the delicate rosewood. A European grammophone rested on three intact and one missing leg, supported in its place by a stack of four cloth bound books. The turntable is motionless and the pickup toothless, its diamond long gone. All the spent years crowded the room with wonderful memories – of music, dining, friendships made and unmade and with a future now become past. 
Emily had played the piano for many hours every day when she visited from Sydney. She would draw up her small wooden chair, place her music on the stand and open to her favourite piece, nestle in the kinetic pleasure of finger on keys, and delight in the conjuration which is music. The piano sang as she could not, she a transcendent mute and the piano only possessing any true voice. Emily drifted in one part of her mind as another focused intensely on the technique and expression she devoted to her playing. 

Times change, people die or are reborn as someone else without the inconvenience of actually dying, great fortunes once taken for granted are lost and rekindle elsewhere and houses and rooms and even pianos, can be lost to those who loved them and then finally forgotten.

Time folded in upon itself as the piano creaked and groaned in the heat, its timbers designed for the ceaseless stretch of steel cables had been undone by the dryness of the air and the savagery of this climate. A bearing fell, a beam broke, and the many disparate forces became one. All the sustained tension erupted through the broken timber, now at last allowed a channel to pour out its anger and strength. The piano was there one moment and not the next. It’s steel pillars impaling the sofa and grammophone, the turnstile would never move again. Timber shards rained down in the room and outside in the overgrown garden beyond the missing windows. The ivory keys vanished but for a few unrecognisable fragments imbedded in the timber frame of the French doors.

The lizard was no more, not a trace could be seen of the tiny animal.