Brooke Middlebrook: FIRST LESSON • Cleaver Magazine

Flash Nonfiction by Brooke Middlebrook
FIRST LESSON

Us fourth-graders are sitting in a circle in the cafegymatorium awaiting our first flute lesson—all girls except poor AJ, no more saxophones left at the rental place—with instruments assembled in our laps, and Mr. Ellis comes in like always, scat-singing by way of greeting in his corduroy blazer, snapping his fingers to whatever swinging beat bebops in his blood, ready now to teach this new crop of students how to read music, sure, and the correct fingerings for Mary Had A Little Lamb—we’ll get there—but first he needs to show us how to simply make a sound, and he probably doesn’t realize how important this first step is to my parents, how this will save them from having to listen to the horrible blustering noises I’ve been making in my room the whole past week, trying to figure it out myself, and save them from my crabby attitude when this has proved impossible, just as he will never know that eventually in college I’ll squeak my way into the orchestra as third chair—third out of three—in the elite group that performs in a beautiful golden theater that may as well be Carnegie Hall, where we’ll start with Mahler One—that’s what everyone calls his first symphony, that’s how hip and in the know I am—and it will be up to me, because third flute is also solo piccolo, to play the opening notes—the last shall be first—that quiet opening A joining a veil of strings very much like the orchestra’s tuning pitch, a sound that signals something’s about to begin, and once I still my prickling nerves it will feel like all of my breath, the tube of my body joined with the tube of this instrument, all of my being, is channeled across the hole in the mouthpiece, a hole in space and time, just to get that A to speak—that’s the term for when breath becomes sound—to glow pianissimo and remain in tune, because those simple notes are an embryonic melody, announcing the motif that will repeat throughout the symphony in different forms, and I will be chasing that glowing reunion ever after, devoted to it, but first I need to know how to make a sound, a real sound, with this dumb nickel-plated thing, and Mr. Ellis bops over with his gray goatee to show us the shape we should make with our mouths—it’s called our embouchure—and he goes around the circle adjusting head joints and aligning keys so our little pinky fingers can reach the lowest ones, and as sunlight filters through the dusty windows of the room where we learn to shoot layups during PE and where we drink 2% milk at lunchtime, he’s serious as he extends his forefinger, quickly, gently touches the pad of it to the center of my bottom lip, telling me to place the flute here, and blow. And I do, and it speaks.

Brooke Middlebrook is a writer from Berkshire County, Massachusetts. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Bennington College, and recent work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2025, The Citron Review, and Shenandoah.