An Afternoon With George in the City

[sd gross]

One more - a 'folk' tale!
This was one of the winning entries in a Bohemian Java Jive competition. I had to stay within certain 'parameters' although I can't remember what they were!

“An Afternoon With George in the City”
by Stephen D. Gross

Lovingly he lifted the chipped, mellow-toned Bundy to his lips and the signature opening riff from Rhapsody in Blue sprang from it like suddenly-freed wild horses racing prairie lightning.
As Keiko fitted the key into the locked basement door, two things happened: The faux hop-scotchers fell silent, and a Breughelesque Golem bound purposely up the cellar stairs, enchanted, drawn immutably by the thrilling beauty of the Gershwin masterpiece he’d come to so ardently love.
Keiko motioned him toward the open window, and in the street, the sudden silence turned to a panicked skittering. Glancing briefly at the discarded sword, Maurice put all his heart into the Rhapsody. The enraptured Golem crept stealthily toward the open window.
The demons the “Realtor” had brought with him had disappeared in the dank alleyway’s shadows - seeped like dirty coffee into the cracks in the broken sidewalk. He’d stunk like a decomposing whale and his footfalls had nicked and scorched the hardwood floor. His voice rasped as if the half-dead were trying to claw their way up out of his belly. Did he really think he could fool anyone?
The Realtor had been after Keiko and Maurice ever since they’d left the tiny cabin in the forest. He needed the Golem to do his bidding, never dreaming Keiko and Maurice had already reanimated him.
They’d found the mouldering tome in Maurice’s great-aunt’s house, a dusty, rutted wagonroad leading into the bleak Romanian countryside and beyond the edge of a dark forest. A book had fallen behind her willowood dresser years ago and it’s dry, fragile leaves and faded text appeared to turn to dust as they stared at it. His dying great-aunt croaked like an injured raven when they discovered it, She looked away, and then, realizing Maurice was her last living relative, quickly made him a present of it.
The re-animation was what Keiko and Maurice called “guided by unseen hands”. The imprinting was another matter. Residual threads of his ancestry echoed distantly in the Golem’s memory. When he first heard the Gershwin he behaved as if physically connected, plugged in. He became willing, compliant, driven to please Maurice. He hungered for it, fed on it as if obsessed. Keiko and Maurice discerned, that in some otherworldly sense, the Golem had a heart. They responded with compassion, but larceny was never very far from their hearts. They ‘fed’ the Golem when they needed him.
Even if The Realtor hadn’t been humming Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyrie, the Golem still would have bitten his nose and ears off. But it didn’t help. He thrashed around considerably, a danse macabre accompanied by Keiko’s piano-and-vocal rendition of Cole Porter’s How About You? As he stared at the mangled body, condensation trickled down Maurice’s glass eye. “Maybe I should take up the accordion..”, he said to no one in particular.