The first time Sam heard it, he assumed someone upstairs had left a piano playing.
It wasn’t a melody.
Just one note.
Long enough that he wondered if he had imagined it.
He looked toward the hallway.
“Did you hear that?”
Ink didn’t look up from the book he was pretending to read.
“Hear what?”
“The piano.”
“There isn’t a piano.”
Sam waited.
The house settled into its ordinary sounds. Pipes. Wind against the window. A car somewhere beyond the trees.
Then it came again.
The same note.
Not louder.
Closer.
“I heard it.”
Ink closed the book.
“But not with your ears.”
Sam frowned.
“I don’t understand.”
“I know.”
That answer irritated him more than silence.
He stood and walked through every room in the house. The kitchen was empty. The study was dark. The small room at the end of the hallway still smelled faintly of cedar from the old shelves someone had built decades earlier.
Nothing.
When he came back, Ink was standing by the window.
“There wasn’t anyone.”
“There never is.”
“Then where does the note come from?”
Ink rested a hand against the glass.
“Have you ever noticed how one candle can light another without becoming smaller?”
Sam nodded.
“The second flame was always possible.”
“So?”
“So perhaps the note wasn’t trying to be heard.”
Sam looked toward the hallway again.
“What was it trying to do?”
Ink smiled.
“Find the part of you that was already vibrating.”
The room stayed ordinary.
The books were still on the shelves.
Rain rested against the window.
Somewhere beyond the trees a train passed without announcing where it had been.
Sam looked toward the hallway once more.
Nothing.
He almost laughed at himself.
“Do you think it’ll happen again?”
Ink shrugged.
“It already did.”
Sam started to ask what he meant.
Instead, he found himself listening.
Not for another note.
For the silence that had been underneath it.
Leon Basin
Stories from Silicon Valley about what machines can’t replace.
basinleon.github.io/blog/fiction