Maisie sits me down upon the piano stool and wraps her arms around me like I'm nothing but her doll, her touch is toxic and moreish. I'm endeared to her claiming of my form, unable to help blushing when her nails graze over my shoulders in this strapless dress she put me in. She paraded me as person at the party and once this house emptied out we promptly parted with the pretence. I'm nothing but her doll, the words echoing from the very first line of this wretched recounting of affairs. I'm to play her music, but these keys are as foreign to me as free will and independent thought, luxuries unafforded to a slave such as I. 

Once upon a time, I was as human as the rest of you, another in that rotten bunch. Maisie's music made me pure again, an embryonic husk of woman who sat still long after the foundational performance was over. I was petrified by her as though snakes were coiled up atop her head in place of the soft platinum curls that frame her artful face. Her grin exposed a sadistic streak and she had approached me as a shark following the scent of fresh blood. I was her kill, and it was the best night of my life. 

There have been so many parties since that night, so many performances in which Maisie could've taken whomever she liked. She left them all be, making me gush with pride I'd be reprimanded for showing too eagerly. Was this to mean that I was enough for her after all, I thought with a dizzying sense of unnatural adoration that reminded me just how thoroughly fucked my thoughts are. Her music severed nerves in my brain like razor wire, I no longer needed to think like a human, just act like one when my world hosted her pretty parties. 

The misplaced pride is gone now too, severed and discarded into that growing pile of flesh. A flaying of personality I'm all too eager to oblige, because her music makes me all too compliant. First, she made me want to die. She dismantled my will and self respect chord by chord, each falling of her snowy fingertips depressing more than just the keys. Next, she built me back up, a rising crescendo of desire. I had lost the will to live sitting there and listening to a morose bloody tune nobody else seemed to mind, then brick by brick her chords pulled me up. The piano strings were as those of marionette, cutting into my limbs and forcing me into her rhythm. At first it felt impossible to follow her discordant melodies and I felt as worthless as the dirt out in the garden, no... whoever said that dirt is worthless? It has so many practical uses, while in that moment I couldn't even keep up with one fucking song. My fingers framed my face and pulled, my nails bore into skin so sharply they left indents. My vision blurred and I felt my ego sizzle and pop and burn. An agonising burn as I lost myself to the tyranny of her tempo. Allegro annihilation and I was nothing but spectator to my own damned demise, sitting idly as a passenger in a body that was no longer mine by right. Do the dead have possessions? The ancient Egyptians certainly believed so, but I was not to find rest in any tomb. No, I'd be a walking mummified corpse of a woman forced into step and motion by that haunting melodious monster. Maisie. Maisie makes me. Makes me move. 

I am no Karloff, this mummification of mine is not an act and I do not have the luxury to walk off set should I tire of being owned. It is a baleful curse to make the superstitious rejoice and cower in a single breath, yet I am spared the horror of implication in my reverie of sound. Music plays in my head and resonates with these thoughts I like to think I can think until I can earnestly think no thought for any longer than I can stave a blink or delay intake of breath. It's a cascade of inevitability, my thoughtlessness, that grows in tandem with the apprehension and dread that would otherwise blight me. Can you not see, then, what a kindness her silencing song presents? 

Somewhere around the fourth party, or maybe the fifth, I began to enjoy the way her playing made me pliant and docile. The way I could give in and no longer pretend to make play for resistance or petty squabble in the aftermath of mixer. Once upon a time, a girl debated Maisie in her moments of lucidity. This could not have been me, because the me that remains is incapable of desire and oh such a selfish bitch this past plaything was. A doll who yearned to be human, as she believed wholeheartedly it was her right, that humanity was more than the life she'd become tethered to. Is a human more valuable than a doll? The question is so subjective I'd rather not think about it at all. I despise thought as much as that girl who revered it as some infallible thing. To worship free will is a fucking fallacy, I say, or so says the music that pushes deep into my brain and flattens it into a new base. 

Maisie molests my mind with slender digits as pointed as pincers, snipping and severing and saving this doll from such overwhelming consideration. No longer would she have to wonder what to feed herself, how to spend her time, who to pursue meaningful interaction with. The music gives her meaning, she feels magnetised to the keys as her fingertips slide across them and the dullness in her eyes gives way to glow. A bright, shining, obscene, atrocious glow. Her eyes, my eyes, doll eyes, glowed like soft moonlight over picturesque waterfront. A reflection of emotion, a pale imitation of a glow bereft of any weight or meaning. My reverence and my shame, my horror and my eagerness, all mean so very little now and so when instructed to I close my eyes completely. 

My world presses flat against my back, holding me in her cold and unloving arms as she instructs me to play her song. I buckle and groan, wondering if I can wonder if she's serious in her instructions. A doll can only do as told and yet a nostalgic sense of dread and anxiety takes hold, the lingering vestiges of human that hang unwelcome from bony fingers and make them tremble so. I hope dearly that Maisie does not see those disobedient tremors, then remind myself that to hope is to hinder my journey into the role of a porcelain figure so pristine and perfect you'd never need polish it once. If I choke here, I'll lose my lustre, maybe Maisie would select another to replace me in next week's party. Despair beckons and I ignore it, realising that for once my uncaring commander is whispering something new into my ear. Affirmation. 

"You can do this, Tara, every moment spent together has been leading up to this very moment. Don't you want it, dear? To be as dirt, fertile and free. You've listened to my song so closely, you know it better than any breathing being. Better than the humans who can disappoint in ways you'll never have to worry about again. Better than I, as the music plays in your head around the clock now doesn't it?" I can't answer her, of course, how could I? I've no mouth to speak of! Only fingers that click clack at keys and tell tale of transition. "For you, who has memorised my music to the extent that any object ever could, playing it back to me should be a breeze. You're a doll one moment and the next, my own personal music box. Well programmed to play my tunes back to me whenever I please. Do it now, stupid thing, or I'll grow tired of you. I'll put you to work down there. Down with the rest of the discarded."

Can you threaten thing? No, this thing knows better than to take personal wants and comfort into consideration on its path to pleasing Miss Maisie. I... it's just a silly machine, so it'll play the notes just fine! Ah... ahaha... but what if this thing has never touched piano in the entire duration of its function from assembly to this very sharp point in time? A stabbing moment that truly tests the will of an object to have none. To panic in the face of function failed, to become definitively less than dirt and so much more... 

Maisie clicks her tongue and it realises that it has no more time left to stall, it must play the music for her now. It knows it can't play the piano, but this is its moment. It has no choice. 

...

Digits descend onto those impatient keys that dread to disappoint their mistress just as badly as the drone that operates them. This dread is a delusion, as all feelings are, tests meant to tempt the thing into erring from its purpose. Its purpose is to play. Subject sinks into stool, smothered from behind by sociopathic monster who hollows out her new thing piece by piece. It's a ship with no debate, there's absolutely no question that the one sitting here now shares so little in common with the original they could be strangers. Who the fuck is Theseus? 

A dirty noise spills out into the room as those depraved digits tell their tale terribly, Maisie's grip tightening and tightening until the thing can barely let the oxygen in and out of its lungs. Still, it plays for her. Even though it disappoints, even though it makes mockery of music itself with each ugly chord, the music box does its best. Isn't that enough?

No.

It'll never be enough. 

Not until Maisie relents.

Not until she says to stop.

Not until... oh.

That's when it happens.

The music reaches.

Like it has finally drilled through into my core. 

Nowhere left to hide. 

And in that moment of madness.

That moment of distant defeat.

I begin to play the piano perfectly.