Lily Tobias

The universe sends signs. I have yet to receive one
as clear as my brother. Sitting on my couch he told the tale
of how he came to possess the violin his son now plays,
told it just as though he were giving medical history to a doctor,
which is to say he spoke without the slightest understanding
of synchronicity. Already I’m thinking

too much about how to tell it, how to relay his words but infuse them
with the sauce of fantasy so that I might make an epic of it. But it isn’t
my story, and really it isn’t a story at all. It’s lines on a graph, it’s
point A to point B: He was working when he saw in a dumpster
no less than six violins in various conditions of disrepair;
some with splintered necks fallen beside worn out bows.

I don’t recall how many he took but I know not all, which is a wonder
to me. My brother the fiddler that never was. My brother who saw wood
and horsehair where I saw a call to arms. My brother who with
the curve of his neck makes a pillow for his son.