This is the way I heard it.

They say your life flashes before your eyes, moments before it ends.

Not all of it.

Just the important parts.

The bits of your childhood, for instance, the shape, the person you grow to become.

As they hoisted George into the back of the ambulance, the 19-year-old artist couldn't

help but wonder what images might crowd their way into his final moments.

What exactly might a man recall from his childhood if he never had a childhood in the first

place?

I shut, siren wailing above his head, George sees himself at the piano, sitting beside

his beloved mother.

He's seven years old, receiving his first piano lesson.

He's intrigued, but distracted, partly because his friends are outside playing stick ball,

and partly because he's already figured out the piano.

The relationship of one note to another, chromatic, diatonic, cord progression, harmonies, rhythms,

time signature, each key and its attendant tone make immediate and perfect sense to his

brain.

Whatever his mother plays, George plays it right back, flawlessly.

Weeks later, George sits at a grand piano in a crowded drawing room somewhere in Kenosha.

He's playing Chopin, an a-tude.

He plays for memory, the crowd applause, his mother weeps from the back of the ambulance.

George can see it like it was yesterday.

...