Otto Paraploo
The Music Teacher's Daughter ~ Notes on Consumption and Other Forms of Love
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She wasn't one person but several, living together in the same body like those colonial organisms that pretend to be singular. Portuguese man o' war, she'd joke, except not joking—tentacles everywhere, each one dispensing a different kind of venom she called teaching.
I grew up in her kitchen, that yellow room where every lesson was also digestion, where students came to learn piano but left having been partially dissolved.
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The Colony
Mother was multiple things wearing one name. Not personality disorder—biology. Like those jellyfish that are actually hundreds of organisms deciding to be one creature. Her teaching voice, her mother voice, her 3 AM voice when she played Chopin and wept—all different animals sharing a nervous system.
The piano sat between the refrigerator and the window, and she'd position students so she could watch them from several angles at once. "I need to see your fear," she'd say. "Fear teaches better than I do."
Her method was parasitic. She'd attach to a student's natural rhythm and slowly replace it with hers. 107 beats per minute, always. By the end of a year, every student's heart had synchronized to her metronome.
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The Venom Years
She taught through a kind of beautiful poisoning. The tea she served wasn't chamomile—I don't know what it was, but it made students pliable, their fingers suddenly able to stretch octaves they couldn't reach before.
"Music requires sacrifice," she'd tell them, and they'd nod, not understanding she meant literal sacrifice. Sarah Kim lost her ability to speak for three months but could play Rachmaninoff perfectly. Marcus Thompson's hands changed shape—permanently curved into perfect position, unable to fully straighten.
They thanked her for it.
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Cone Snail Mother
When she was home, just with me, she moved differently. Slow, deliberate, like those cone snails that paralyze their prey with care. She'd brush my hair and I'd feel my scalp go numb, starting where her fingers touched.
"This is love," she'd explain, braiding something into my hair that I could never quite see. "Love makes you stop struggling."
The kitchen always smelled of formaldehyde masked with vanilla. She'd bake cookies that looked perfect but tasted like hospitals. I ate them anyway. You ate everything she gave you anyway.
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The Collection
She kept pieces of every student. Not metaphorically. There was a closet full of mason jars, each labeled with names and dates. Inside: fingernails, hair, sometimes teeth that had "fallen out naturally" during particularly intense lessons.
"I'm building something," she'd say when I asked. At seven, I thought she meant music. At seventeen, I found the thing in the basement—a piano made entirely of human bone and sinew, keys carved from femurs, hammers wrapped in dried skin.
It played itself at night. The songs were familiar but wrong, like hearing your voice on a recording if your voice was screaming.
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The Bobbit Worm Phase
In public, she transformed into something iridescent and predatory. Ten feet of rainbow beauty that could slice a reputation in half with one perfectly timed criticism.
She'd attend other teachers' recitals and sit in the back, taking notes. Later, their students would mysteriously transfer to her studio. The teachers would stop teaching, stop playing, some stopped leaving their houses entirely.
"Competition is natural," she'd say. "I'm just better at it."
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The Names
She called the chord progressions by their true names:
- Am: "The sound of accepting your fate"
- F: "What hope tastes like before it spoils"
- Dm: "Your father's disappointment"
- E7: "The moment before drowning when you stop fighting"
Students learned these names. Used them. Passed them on to their students like a virus spreading through the musical community.
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Glass Frog Transparency
When she got sick (though sick implies something involuntary), her skin went translucent. You could see her organs, watch her heart pumping something black and viscous instead of blood.
"I'm becoming more honest," she explained, her liver visibly processing the toxins she'd been feeding others for decades. "This is what love looks like without skin."
The doctors couldn't explain it. The x-rays showed musical notes instead of bones. Her MRI played Chopin's Funeral March when they ran it.
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The Tongue-Eating Louse
The worst part was watching her with new students near the end. She'd place her hands over theirs and I'd see the moment of transfer—something leaving them and entering her. They'd smile, not realizing they'd just lost something essential.
"I'm replacing what I take," she'd assure me. "They'll never know the difference."
She was right. Her former students all speak with her inflection now. They teach her methods. Some have her laugh, though they never had it before she touched them.
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The Inheritance
After she died, I found notebooks. Not teaching methods—recipes. Instructions for the tea. Formulas for the venom. Detailed documentation of each student's transformation, with before and after photos that shouldn't be possible.
The bone piano in the basement still plays itself. I've tried to destroy it but it regenerates, growing new keys from somewhere I don't want to know about.
Her students keep coming to the house. They stand in the yard at night, swaying to 107 beats per minute, humming the progressions. Am-F-Dm-E7, over and over, like they're trying to summon something.
Maybe they are. Sometimes I hear her metronome from the empty kitchen. Sometimes the piano bench is warm when no one's been sitting there.
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What Continues
I teach now, but differently. Guitar, not piano. I refuse to serve tea. I keep the lessons short, impersonal. I don't learn their names.
But her rhythm is in me—cellular, parasitic. That 12/8 sway she coded into my DNA. I catch myself humming her progressions. My students unconsciously sync to 107 bpm.
Last week, one of them brought me a jar. "For your collection," she said, though I'd never mentioned any collection. Inside: a tooth, still bloody at the root.
I put it in the closet with the others. I'm becoming her, or she's becoming me through her careful poisoning all those years ago. The colony persists, wearing my face now.
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Coda (The Mercy)
She was:
- Formaldehyde mornings disguised as coffee
- The weight of inherited hunger
- A song that dissolved you from inside
- The violent mathematics of motherhood
I carry her venom now—in my teaching, my blood, my dreams of tentacles and perfect pitch. When I listen carefully, I hear her in the spaces between my heartbeats, in the way certain students look at me with grateful fear, in how the kitchen still smells like vanilla covering something medical.
"Go," she whispers through my voice to my students, but means: "Go home and practice until your fingers change shape. Until you can't remember your name, only the notes. Until you're grateful for the consumption."
They always come back. They always thank me.
Just like I thanked her.
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[For M.C., 1952-2018, who taught us that love and parasitism share the same nervous system]