See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid

father of the young Heracles, in despair. He longed to see them dead, or stilled in a permanent way, not dead exactly just stilled, the young Heracles and his wife Mrs. Sweet; if only a great hand would just appear and arrest them, the mother and her child, for how she loved the way he could destroy the child-barrier gates, and how she marveled at the way his clever fingers could undo the locks that were childproof, which had been placed on the cupboards and doors and everything else that might pose a life-threatening danger to the young Heracles; how unbelievable to him now and then, to see his beloved Mrs. Sweet—formerly so at any rate, for he must have loved her when they lived all alone and together at 284 Hudson Street without Heracles or that daughter, now carefully hidden in his pocket, out of her mother’s sight—Persephone was her name—in the thrall of a child, not even that, a baby who could only stagger across the floors from one room to the other, and dismantle the barriers that kept him out of one room from the other, and unlock cabinets that held in them poisonous housecleaning liquids and such, and if he drank them he would be dead. But the young Heracles never drank the poisonous household liquid cleaners, and he never did run into the busy street just at the moment an unthoughtful teenager in a sports car made of graphite, a graduation gift from his parents, two people who were professionals and made a salary that allowed them to make such a gift to that careless boy, their son, was driving by. And his mother, his beloved Mrs. Sweet, loved him more than can be imagined, then or now.
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    Oh, and oh again, during all that time, Now and Then, Mr. Sweet had been making a symphony, composing a piece of music that brought together many different and even conflicting modes of sound: melodies sung by occupants of a cloister, an abbey, in the middle of the Middle Ages, and in these places sex was forbidden but partaken of nonetheless; remnants of riffs (a word, an idea, riffs that Mrs. Sweet did not quite understand) played on the piano by descendants of slaves who, without meaning to, found themselves in New Orleans or a town in Alabama or a town on the banks of the Mississippi River; repeating a coda from Mozart and Bach and Beethoven (or so Mrs. Sweet understood it, but her understanding is not without its misunderstandings), and then the whole thing ended in a calamity of sounds and melodies and emotions and the audience hearing it would rise up from their seats and clap and cheer, for the audience was made up of Mr. and Mrs. Sweet’s friends, who were also in the same predicament: only they, each of them, cheered each other on and on in their wild undertakings, trying to portray the known world in a new way and hoping to persuade all its inhabitants, or at least just the people who lived next door (in the Sweets’ immediate case, it would be the people who lived in that village in New England), that things—the arts in particular—were in a constant state of flux and this flux was the very essence of living, and living in this way was to be in contact with the ineffable, the divine. And Mr. Sweet had worked away at this symphony, from before the young Heracles was born, during the time Mrs. Sweet carried the young Heracles in her stomach, at great personal cost to her, for she suffered: while in her womb, the young Heracles would often fall asleep contentedly, but in such a way that he pressed against a major nerve ending in her leg, the sciatic nerve; and Mr. Sweet worked away at his symphony of contrasting and contradictory modes of melody and so on, then, now, and also toward the time that then became his now—and it mattered not to him, Mrs. Sweet’s discomfort in carrying the young Heracles, and they then and now did not interest the world, his compositions.
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    How Mrs. Sweet loved her husband’s creations! When he played them for her on his pianoforte, she did not