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There was a sound, and with the sound came memories. It drew her to the window, her mind teasing her with a sense of knowing what it was, her inner vision seeing white keys partnered with black, her fingers knowing the right ones to press. It brought back moments she hadn’t thought on for years. She’d had a long life, and it was good at first. There’d been dancing back in her youth. People had cared about each other in her day, but that was all back before music gone and went truly stupid. She’d once thought about bringing a woman home, but without music no one danced, and she didn’t want anyone if she couldn’t dance with her. It wasn’t just the dancing that had gone out of everyone. People gave up talking. Words didn’t carry enough meaning. What they did carry was too many half-truths and outright lies and unspoken needs. It all came back to that. There was no music, and without it there was nothing good. She’d spent a lot of time since in the silence. It was better than that noise they made these days. What a lot of twaddle.
Whatever this was, it was the sound of all the good things in the world, and all the sad things, and all the missed chances in life. It tied her to the feel of lying with her body pressed against someone else, the joy of being near and the pain of knowing they both had to rise before someone caught them this way. Whatever this was, it was like hearing a feeling. When you pressed the right keys, emotions became sound. Sound evoked emotions. You didn’t just hear what a person was feeling, you felt it yourself. It was music that could do that for you. That’s what she was hearing. It was music.
The sound came crashing down, and she turned away, back to her empty apartment. There’d be screams in a minute, if she listened. Nothing good could last for long in this world. That was why she lived most of her life alone. It was easier, or she had thought it been. The silence weighed heavily now. The unmarked time lengthened. She shuffled back to her piano. It was nothing more than a stand for her knick-knacks these days. So long as she kept the cover closed she could almost forget what it really was, forget the hours and hours she’d spent learning how to coax sounds out, forget the way playing made everything drop away so it was only her and the music and the feelings it invoked. Almost. She lifted the cover. No one could play anymore, not without consequences. It would kill her. They would kill her.
She’d already lived a long, empty life. She could go on living for years, with more of that silence strangling the notes in her heart. Or she could end it right now. She pressed her fingers to the piano keys, and knowing she would die, she lived.