To put a piano in a school, unguarded and unprotected, is to leave a lamb with lions, a fly with the spider, a fish with the shark. Unless watched by an angel, and placed in good hands, a school piano becomes contorted, abused, and violated. It’s cruelly beaten and arbitrarily scarred. A piano graffitied is a piano maimed. It loses its love of life, unable to sing or whisper or shout for joy. It can only wail and cry out in sorrow.

Good people do come to it, to comfort it, to reassure it. Kind, pianistic hands come to let it know goodness still exists out there in the world. But in a world of unending monstrosity, these souls are too few and very far between.

The poor creature finds itself huddling in some corner of an empty room, gasping in painful rattling wheezes and moaning its eternal question: Why?