Someone found a piano and called to the others, who gathered round and swiped grime from it with their palms. One of them touched a key, drawing forth a glassy, timorous sound. They shuffled it, cords protruding from their necks, along mist-slicked streets to the library. They grunted it inside, past the shattered computers and abandoned desks, to the atrium. On the center dais crouched the shepherd, brooding over embers which blinked up at him like a man dying. The men set the piano on cracked tiles at the foot of the dais and waited.

The shepherd turned from his embers to their plain and brutal faces. "What is this?" His scorched voice rattled among the wings of emptied shelves. No one had imagined the books could run out, but now the books were ash in their throats, and winter lingered.

"What is it?" He razored fingernails along his thigh, which oozed pus and blood into his pants leg. He'd explained that the world was pushing the rot from itself. He'd explained that nothing is remade without first pushing the rot from itself, which is why the world must be bathed in blood. Every man obeyed him because the others obeyed.

He considered them from a spidery crouch with his crushed-glass eyes. They stared at the floor, at their hands, but not at the piano.

"Did you bring it here because one of you knows how to play it?" He searched each in turn for proof of knowledge. His boot heels cracked and ground the grayed outer embers of past fires. "Did you bring it because you think it's something more than wire and wood?" The men winced at his stridulating voice.

"I think it's beautiful," said a girl. She and her brother had only just arrived. She didn't yet know any better.

The shepherd bared his yellowed teeth and dropped from the dais. His long arms were sinewy flesh and tensile bone, terminating in fingernails that clicked like chelae. He considered the girl's white and soft throat. The girl looked about for her brother as the shepherd advanced. Some of the women covered the eyes of their children.

One of the men yanked a loose leg from the piano and hit the shepherd, causing his head to pitch forward at a faulty angle. The shepherd's body became an anchor that dragged his shoulders to the floor. The other men stood watching while the one with the piano leg worked like a spike driver. Meaty echoes drifted through the empty stacks. When the man's work was finished, the others lugged the shepherd out back into the gray drizzle. They stripped him and cut the meat from his long bones, taking care to carve around the oozing divot in his thigh. They sliced him like fruit with a bad spot and sparked fire under an overhang and fed it with his clothes and some bookshelves. When the fire was hot enough they roasted the good meat of him on iron pikes pulled from the fence gate.

As evening spread through the library, everyone who was willing ate flesh for the first time since the deer had moved into the hills. The mothers had to show the little ones how. One of the men who had done nothing began to boast, and the others watched him until he fell silent. The man who had killed the shepherd ate in silence, though the others waited on him to speak.

The brother to the girl who'd called the piano beautiful pushed his shepherd-greased palm along its curved panel. Other children joined him. They put their sooty faces to it. They plinked its keys.

It was out of tune; even the ones who had never heard a piano knew this.

A minor note reminded an old woman of her sister, who used to play John Field because their Irish grandfather had taught her how. The woman tried to recall her sister's music as Chopin, only she couldn't remember the name Chopin. When her sister had played Field's nocturnes, she would creep into the room and sway behind the curtains. Their fabric, coarse on the outer side, would cause the small hairs on her face and arms to rise, as if an electric current ran through her skin. She would move electrified within the soft musty dark and mourn as only a child can mourn what is to be lost.

She tried to hum a song she couldn't remember had been called "Dernière Pensée." A stooped man whose father had been a preacher thought perhaps she was trying to hum a gospel hymn his grandmother used to sing on the long drive to church down smooth, summer-hot roads, so he joined his throat with hers and between them they almost stumbled upon a melody and its broken-chorded rhythm. Everyone could hear something aching to emerge from their ash-lined throats. Their voices drifted apart and faltered and finally the man shuffled to his double-shadowed corner beneath a staircase and lay down.

The woman missed her sister and the musty curtains and the sound of her grandfather's patient instruction. She missed her bed and fresh butter and friendly neighbors. She collapsed beside the piano and held tight to one of its legs and wailed. The drowsing men watched her as the women tended their thin and dirty babies.

The boy who had first touched the piano pressed a key. He shook his head, pressed another, found a note to accompany her keening. He found another near that. He watched her chest and pressed the keys reverently with each expulsion of breath. Children stood swaying around the piano, until finally the woman soothed herself. "Cry some more," they begged her.


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Wells Woodman lives in North Carolina.

"To Carthage Then We Came" is the runner-up for the Mythic Picnic Prize in Fiction.

Read his postcard.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of Stuart Williams.

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