He sits at the piano designed for hooves—in a way, designed just for him. He finds unsteady certainty as his touch falls into place, sliding evenly between the sharps and the flats and fitting where it feels right. Certain keys jump out at him. Keys he doesn’t expect.

The notes aren't wrong—just different.

He presses down and the sound of a major chord rings through the pews of the church. Still unsure of himself, he ambles between the notes, playing them back and forth from top to bottom. His right hoof mimics his left, side to side, leading the harmony of notes in a run over the ladder of keys.

His hooves move, guided by the melody forming in his head. Sad. Bitter. A melancholic minor chord leading him away from his root and back towards a resolution.

The notes ring out between each other as he lets his hoof slip towards his tonic. Suddenly at home in a key that's never felt familiar.

The chords blur between their voicings. He doesn't know what he wants to play, so he plays only what he knows through the motion of his forelegs, the melody speaking to the chords speaking to the arrangement of a pattern he's never heard before.

As he plays, he hums quietly. There is the sound inside him, aching to be let out.

He's never heard it ask to be free. He never even knew it was there.

His humming quivers as the voice inside him shakes.

He can't see. He blinks, and tears spill onto the keys. His hooves tingle from the tiny drops of moisture as they splash across the piano.

He has to move. The sting of the minor chord hurts too much. And so he slides back.

He goes back and forth. Up and down. Back and forth. He could play those two chords forever, never leading anywhere.

The act of the sound makes him want to fall apart. With each muttered musical syllable that creeps from between his lips, a moan a thousand times louder lingers behind it, begging him to open up and fill the spacious halls behind him with the wail brewing in his chest.

But he can't. He quells it, letting the hum eke out only tiny sniffles. His tears fall with only accompaniment from the keys underhoof, the bundle of knots unraveling in his stomach.

There is a song, and he doesn't know where it springs from. It speaks to him through his body alone, bypassing his brain and coming straight from his heart. His lungs are harp-strings guiding the rhythm of his heartbeat, and that rhythm forms the metronome that sets the tempo for his playing, rocking him back and forth as he cries.

His hat tips over his eyes as he leans forward. But still he plays, because he knows where the notes go now. He knows, though he's never known before, what the music should sound like. There's no one there but him, alone in empty rows lit by the brightness of the sun and the speckled flickering of dust as it cascades toward the ground—the dust that's there always; tiny motes dancing in every direction, reminding him that, even in solitude, no one is alone.

The crescendo comes suddenly. A chord hammered with velocity so fierce that the piano strings cry out in protest. As his hooves slip onto their final chord, he slips forward with them, and almost falls onto the keys, letting his hooves settle where they landed first. He smashes down onto the piano until the volume threatens to deafen him with its proximity.

And then down. An octave, then two, until the lowest of the notes rumbles in his bones. It rattles the seats behind him, the walls, the tapestries drawn over windows. The dancing angels of dust shake in their descent.

His hoof taps, with a touch light enough to leave a feather undisturbed, the highest note he can find that sounds right.

Ting.

D sharp. It echoes so vividly that he can feel it in his soul, piercing through whatever composure is left and leaving a hole in the weakness of his heart.

He lets the note ring as he falls. His face finds the warmth of his own foreleg, and he rests both his limbs on the wooden frame of the sheet music holder above the keys.

He cries. Finally, so hard he shakes.

His hat covers his face, shielding him from the world. The tinkling tone of piano strings is drowned out by his sobbing, taking over suddenly and all at once, the tinny ring of that high key fading away into nothingness.

The sun in the window is bright. It cascades down on him as he sits there, lost in his tears and basking in the surrounding of the song that says more than his words ever could.