Me, The Devil & Her

Mozart similarly met the devil.

Baby, it was your hair that made me fall in love with you. Ginger from head to to toe burned through my body upon the first touch … and the last. I didn’t know upon meeting you that violin was your proclivity, and the night I found you, violin prone with the hair wound up, bow-bound, into the stings up to your ear, with safety scissors I delicately hacked trying to extricate you from that mess. Your hair, horse hair, all one entangled mess. The way you got into it always made me worry a bit. Writhing about like the women in the front row at a Mississippi tent revival. Like some spirit overtook you when that eggshell of an instrument began to resonate from your hands pulling the bow across it. I always thought luthier sounded a bit like lucifer, and that night, I am convinced, the hand of the devil came down to tangle your locks into that bow. The hand of the devil is what made me walk across that floor to you and and cut until a good inch in length was removed from all sides of your left ear. That failing, we had to break the bow in three places to finally free you from the hellish mess. Scissors to the side and various pieces of bow strewn about, I took you crying in my arms there and we rolled the floor like we hadn’t since the first time, that first night. I went to see string shop on 9th Street in the morning to get a new bow for you and as I left the merchant said to me with his red eyes glowing, his forked tongue waggling, “Try to be more careful with this one.”