Day 1,175

The only time that the old upright piano played was when there were cats in the room. Any time cats were in the room they acted strangely around the piano, as if it was alive and they weren't sure how to approach it. Once they warmed up to it then it would play long and loud for them, though the "songs" were more of an eclectic mashing of keys.

As long as there was a cat in the room, it played itself somehow. It wasn't an automaton, it had no external sign that there was a mechanism beyond an average piano and should you press the keys as if to play it yourself,the sound comes out muffled and off-key as though there was something jamming the wires.

This was put down to the age if the piano and potential damage incurred by it being left in a garage for almost thirty years where the elements could seep through and warp it in minute yet devastating ways. It wasn't until someone thought they might like to repair it that we were even aware of the poor little creatures.

Fourteen kittens, their little bodies mangled between wires and so long dead that their congealed flesh was barely present. They looked more like a shredded fur stole than tiny lives that had been brutally extinguished, their little bodies left to fuse with the wires until their very souls were the piano.

It never played itself - it was the kittens trying to escape.