Although I knew what was proper, I’d buttered the whole slice of toast at once and positioned a large spoonful of raspberry jam on its center. I was considering the possibility of generous sweet smears and whether I’d have enough jam to use on the second slice of toast.

My mother hovered. I waited for her to remind me how I was supposed to eat the toast.

Instead she asked me if I remembered my violin teacher, which I thought was a dumb question. For years she’d delivered me to his living room where I stood for an hour near the upright piano and played what I had learned. From one week to the next it seemed to me I made little progress, and I wondered what he was teaching.

My friends who studied music elsewhere learned something of theory. How to transpose. Keys. I simply was given pieces, and when I’d performed them to his satisfaction, I was given the next. For years I didn’t question what happened, or didn’t. But by the time I stopped the lessons, I wanted something...else. Some transformation during the hour.

The living room had a smell, something like sawdust and maple syrup.

His wife was always in the room. She sat at the piano as though she were going to be called upon to accompany me. Sometimes she played a phrase on the piano, and I was to play it on the violin. They had a son, who was, as we called it then, slow. Most days he came in and listened. I didn’t like that, and I was always glad when he left the room. He never stayed long, but he made me nervous. I didn’t mind the daughter, who was older than I. She was pretty, and, as far as I knew, didn’t play violin or piano. Or maybe she played both. But most of the time I didn’t see her at all.

Did I say we lived in a small town?

I suppose I would have heard about it in time. My parents had probably talked about how to break the news to me. He was dead, she said. His wife and son, too. Gas.

She didn’t know what had happened to his daughter.

She said they’d been making movies and got caught. It took a while before I understood what she was talking about. His wife and a man. I suppose he would have lost all his pupils. But he could have moved. Probably the daughter did move. Maybe they thought it would spoil her chances if she’d had to take her brother right then while she was so young.

The way my mother told it, he didn’t have a choice. I thought about the films. Black and white. Grainy. It was in the newspaper, my mother said, as though that answered my question about why they had to die.

I spread the jam, red and thick.

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Miriam N. Kotzin is a founding editor of Per Contra: The International Journal of the Arts, Literature and Ideas, and a contributing editor of Boulevard. She teaches creative writing and literature at Drexel University where she directs the Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing. She writes both fiction and poetry, including collaborative fiction with Bill Turner. Her work has received three nominations for a Pushcart Prize. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in more than fifty magazines including Carve, The Pedestal, Slow Trains, Flashquake and Offcourse.