the shoulder shrug

‘You hear how it weeps?’ he said to me as the bow glided across the strings.
‘I do, I do,’ I said.
I would sit there for hours listening to the saddest music ears could bear, and would often return home unable to eat, unable to even talk, with a heavy pallor descending across my young cheeks. My mother would sit next to me on my bed and place her cool hand on my forehead and say, ‘What is it? Do you feel ill?’ But what could a child say who has started to understand the pain of another?