Pitch

The box was slim and red and square as a girl’s palm, with a nice click to the lid. Gold writing, but words didn’t matter. Only one thing fit that shape, a round-as-a-MoonPie, silver-on-one-side, enamel-black-on-the-other pitch pipe. I put my lips and breath along the edge, rectangular holes where silver and black met. My tongue remembers the metallic buzz of the G♯ ♭A♯ ♭B C♯ ♭D♯ ♭E F alphabet I longed to learn.  

I was supposed to use the pitch pipe to tune my child-size rented violin. No one showed me how, and I didn’t ask. I thought that what I already knew was all there was. That what I had in my possession was all I got. Of the three of us—girl, tuning disc, rented violin—only one was pure. I played off tune, standing at the ornate oak-and-wrought-iron music stand my mother had bought at an auction in Knoxville because it belonged to someone famous in the opera. 

I kept the beautiful thing in the clicked-shut box, touched only by velvet the blue of that crayon called midnight. There was a hush inside that box where music crouched. So that is where I put the twenty-dollar bill I stole from Mrs. Madden. Her name was Joan. The only friend my mother had. 

I don’t remember why I was in Mrs. Madden’s apartment alone with the Madden kids and my pitch pipe, violin, golden cube of rosin, and horsehair bow. Babysitting? No one should have thought that was a good idea. But you see, they saw what they saw, a Rasma as extraordinary as her name and her choice of instrument. They saw what they needed to see: a responsible, exemplary girl who ought to be able to conjure the alchemy of music. Not what I was: a good thief. 

A bowl of oranges is where the money lay. A small fortune in one crisp bill. More than my mother had scrounged up to buy the pitch pipe and pay the school for my violin. Almost all the money in the world, more than a child could explain having in her hand. I took it because it was there, and then it was mine. Folded, flat, no bulge, as if it had been ironed to fit. 

No one could understand where the money was. Have you seen Mrs. Madden’s missing money? they asked, turning their heads and plates and cups, fanning through the napkins. Maybe I said no. 

Maybe I shrugged. Either way, I didn’t lie. The money was mine. It lay like the promise of music beneath the moon in my red box with gold lettering on top. It stayed there untouched. 

Rasma Haidri is a South Asian Norwegian-American poet and essayist living with her wife on an island in the Norwegian Sea. She’s the author of Blue Like Apples (Rebel Satori) and As If Anything Can Happen (Kelsay Books). Visit her at rasma.org.     

This essay first appeared in Bending Genres, issue 41 (2024).