Art by Vincent Giarrano

It took Maud some time to realise just where she was. She hadn’t expected death to be like this. In fact, if you’d asked her before the event, she would have said death would be a dark void if anything at all.

But here she was inside the musician, and she was alarmed by the whole experience.

If this was her fate to inhabit the body of a living person what had happened to the previous one?

Was this how it all went? Would she move from body to body?

On the surface the young lady in question, whose name she discovered was Daphne seemed a fine young person. What was challenging she quickly discovered was that Daphne was not such a great musician as evidenced by the awful noise she was creating on her guitar. It was one thing Maud thought to have all the best electronic gear you could imagine but being able to use it in a fashion that gained you satisfaction was another. And turning up the volume wasn’t the answer.

It might explain she thought the vacancy she was now filling.

At the moment Maud became conscious of her surroundings Daphne was in the throes of a new composition. Maud listened for a moment extracting a few words from the jumbled mess that seemed to be her mind.

There was a reference to ‘her soul being renewed’ and ‘starting all over’ and other convoluted phrases Maud assumed Daphne thought appropriate.

“How much of this do I have to put up with?” she asked herself as Daphne applied a D minor chord followed by a G Flat thus testing even her sense of melodic harmony.

With the torture well under way, Maud marvelled that in death a lot of her senses were far more acute than in life. The music she was now a part of resonated clearer than any music had before, and she wondered what influence she might have on Daphne’s musical future. How might she ease the girl’s enthusiasm away from the tortuous rifts she was playing into something less confronting and angry?

It would be a project she decided.

There was a possibility she might be able to talk to her mind and influence her one way or another.

She thought this for in Maud’s mind, there had to be a way to reach a compromise that would allow them both to exist.

She began by planting the seed of how nice a gentle C chord could be.

Written for: https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2019/04/02/photo-challenge-257/