John Henry

Casually, he takes his guitar and starts to pick idly at melodies as they talk. With a lapse of concentration he loses the plodding tune he started with and finds a neat hook. Two, three more times he plays it over and refines it until there is a groove. Gradually, she notices him becoming more distant and less engaged in her. His answers become less considered and more functional, then with a lull in the conversation, he is under. She tries to look into his eyes, partly to read him and partly to gain his attention, but he is guitar blind. No longer seeing, he can only visualise the music, his every sensory capacity absorbed by the instrument he holds in his arms. As he delicately caresses the strings, expressing in chords emotions he can't put into words, she watches, not enviously, not resentfully, but longingly. She wishes that when he held her in her arms, he could be so rapt, so lost, so free, that he could show her the same passion, the same openness.

As she tries to look through his daydreaming expression into his world, what she doesn't see is that, although he could never articulate it, he wishes the same thing.

Too deep into the groove, he makes another false move and the riff is lost. He spirals back down to her world and puts down the guitar. He stops just pointing his face at her and starts to see her again. Her head is cocked and there is a wistful look in her eye. She realises he has noticed and by way of explanation offers "I love listening to you playing your guitar"

"Thanks" he says, blushing.

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"No one was behaving from very Buddhist motives. Then, thought Pigsy, he was hardly a Buddha, nor was he a monkey. Presently, he was a pig spirit changed into a little girl pretending to be a little boy to be offered to a water monster. It was all very simple to a pig spirit."