Tomorrow, Without Music

By Pierakis Pieri

"What weighs more: an instrument that won't play or the song it remembers?"—Question posed at the threshold

I. The Prodigal

The road to Epidaurus had not changed. Pine and limestone, dust and cicadas, the same narrow curve where tourist buses struggled each summer. Aias walked it in October light, the bouzouki case hitting his spine with each step. Twenty years since music died. Ten since he'd fled this place. The pilgrims had been gathering for weeks—he could see them from the hill, their tents scattered between ancient stones like offerings to a deaf god.

The theatre opened before him: four thousand seats carved from limestone, the same acoustics that once carried whispers to the back row, now carrying only whispers. The pilgrims filled every tier. Above them, someone had spray-painted on the ancient stone: "Music was a virus—silence is the cure." Below it, older graffiti, fading: "Hear nothing, live forever."

They held instruments like relics: violins with bridges collapsed from lack of tension, flutes that had become metal tubes, drums that measured time but couldn't make it dance. Some had travelled from Mumbai and Lagos, from São Paulo and Reykjavik, carrying their silent inheritances. A woman cradled a kora with twenty-one strings that would never sing. A man held a didgeridoo (four thousand years of continuous sound, ended). They watched him descend the ancient steps, recognising something in his gait, the way he moved like someone returning to a childhood home that might reject him.

Xanthos stood in the orchestra circle, the round stage at the theatre's heart. Twenty years had carved gullies in his face, turned his hands to paper and bone. He was arranging caption cards in spirals, each one describing sound in the language of absence: "[wind through strings like memory]," "[the pause before applause that never comes]," "[breathing becomes sighing becomes nothing]." The cards covered the limestone in concentric circles, a labyrinth of lost music.

Segun knelt beside him, sorting objects with methodical precision: wine glasses by thickness, stones by their willingness to ring, metal rods by length and sorrow. His hair had gone white—when had that happened? Aias heard him murmuring—Yoruba prayers his grandmother taught him, the ones that used to be sung but were now only spoken. "Ẹ jẹ́ ká gbọ́," he whispered. Let us hear. The same prayer, every morning for twenty years. The Nigerian-British man's hands still moved with the certainty of someone who'd once made rain from rice, thunder from sheet metal, footsteps from coconut shells. Now those same hands tried to make music from everything except instruments, building songs from the detritus of a world that had forgotten how to sing.

They didn't look up. They knew he was coming. In this theatre, every footstep announced itself.

Aias stopped at the edge of the orchestra. The bouzouki case pressed against his back—his father's, the one that went silent that morning twenty years ago, the morning that ended with a shotgun and a seven-year-old boy standing at a stranger's door. He remembered Xanthos opening that door, seeing the bouzouki, understanding everything without words. The adoption papers signed within a week. The subtitle writer who'd spent his career translating music for the deaf suddenly raising a child who'd inherited permanent deafness to melody.

"You came back." Xanthos's voice carried perfectly in the space, the theatre's gift to actors now a curse—every word too clear, too present, unfiltered by music's absence.

"You knew I would."

The old man finally looked up. His eyes were clouded with cataracts, but he saw enough. "You're older."

"You're ancient."

"Segun, the boy's returned."

Segun stood slowly, knees protesting. He studied Aias with the focus he'd once reserved for reading soundwaves on computer screens. "You look like your father. Both of them."

Both of them. Sergio Castellanos who made the bouzouki sing, who couldn't live when it wouldn't. And Xanthos, who'd raised him in the ruins of music, teaching him to read absence like sheet music, to find rhythm in footsteps and heartbeats and the spaces between words. Two fathers: one who died for music, one who lived for its ghost.

The pilgrims were descending from their seats, drawn by the reunion. They formed circles within circles, instruments held like shields or prayers. Aias recognised the hunger in their faces—the same need that had driven him away at seventeen, the desperate hope that someone, somewhere, might restore what was lost. He'd run from that need, spent ten years in cities where no one knew he was the adopted son of the men who translated music's corpse.

"Why now?" Xanthos asked.

Aias set down the bouzouki case. "I heard you were dying."

"We've been dying for twenty years." Segun's laugh was dry leaves. He gestured for him to continue.

"The translations. I heard you were close to something."

Xanthos and Segun exchanged glances—a conversation in micro-expressions, the kind of harmony that remained when musical harmony died.

"Not close," Xanthos said finally. "Complete. We're going to finish it."

"The song from the last night. The one you were captioning when—"

"When your father played his final concert. When I wrote my final musical description. When the world went deaf at 3:17 AM." Xanthos picked up one of his cards, held it to the light. "[Voice cracks on 'wretch,' finds grace anyway]." He set it down in its precise position. "The 'Epitaph of Seikilos.' The oldest surviving melody."

"'While you live, shine,'" Aias quoted.

"You remember."

"You taught me to remember everything." The bitterness surprised him, how fresh it tasted after ten years. "Every ghost note, every phantom chord, every—"

"Every translation that fell short." Xanthos stood, his spine fighting to straighten. "That's why you left."

The pilgrims pressed closer. The word "music" sounded the same in every language now: like loss, like absence, like a door that wouldn't open.

"If your father spoke in music, how do you learn his language in silence?"—The orphan's riddle

II. The Preparation

The next morning, Segun led Aias through the workshop they'd built in what had been the theatre's storage facility. Twenty years of failed attempts lined the walls: wine glasses arranged by pitch they'd never produce, bicycle spokes tensioned to mathematical intervals that carried no meaning anymore, sheets of metal tagged with descriptions like "almost timpani" and "approaching snare." The evolution of their method laid out like an archaeological dig—each layer more desperate, more precise, more accepting of failure.

"Your room's unchanged," Segun said, pushing open a door at the back. He paused, pressing fingers to his temple—the gesture automatic now, twenty years of translation headaches leaving their mark. "We get them too," he said, seeing Aias notice. "The migraines. Worse when we get close to actual melody. Like the brain's rejecting what it can't process anymore."

The sight of his room hit Aias like vertigo. His narrow bed with the same blue blanket. The desk where he'd practised writing captions under Xanthos's tutelage: "[melody ascending like smoke]," "[rhythm like heartbeat after running]." The walls still held his teenage attempts at notation—symbols for sounds that didn't exist, mathematical equations trying to solve for music. On the nightstand: a photograph of his biological father performing at Epidaurus, bouzouki mid-strum, mouth open in song no one would ever hear again.

"He kept everything," Aias said.

"He kept you." Segun's hands moved through the air, unconsciously shaping sound that wasn't there. "Even after you left. Especially after."

In the main workshop, Xanthos was already at his table, surrounded by towers of caption cards.

"Tell me about the translation," Aias said.

Xanthos didn't look up. "We've been building toward it for twenty years. Every attempt, every failed approximation—they were all practice for this."

"The 'Epitaph of Seikilos.'"

"The version your father played. His arrangement." Xanthos pulled out a card, handled it like scripture. "[Bouzouki enters where ancient lyre would have sung]." He set it down carefully. "I captioned his entire last performance. Three hours of music, ended by three seconds of silence at 3:17 AM."

Segun had moved to his collection of objects, hands selecting and discarding: copper pipes too harsh, clay pots too hollow, everything too something or not enough something else. "The pilgrims think we're going to restore music. They don't understand we're just building a monument to its absence."

"In Lagos, my grandmother would say 'Òrìn ní ìmọ̀lẹ̀ ayé'—music is the light of the world," Segun added, his British accent softening around the Yoruba. "When the light went out, we didn't die. We just learned to see in the dark."

"Then why are they here?"

"Same reason you are." Xanthos finally met his eyes. "To witness the attempt."

They spent the morning teaching Aias what had changed in ten years. The method had evolved from crude approximation to something almost like alchemy. Each emotion mapped to specific materials: joy was chalk breaking in patterns, sorrow was sand through different gauges of mesh, anger was rubber stretched to its breaking point. They'd developed a notation system—not for music but for the ghost of music, symbols that showed where melody would have lived, where harmony would have built.

"But you've forgotten one," Aias said, selecting an empty wine bottle and breathing across its mouth—not to make sound but to make the shape of waiting. "Absence. Ten years of absence."

Xanthos and Segun stopped. In twenty years, they'd never translated the hollow note of return postponed.

"Show us," Xanthos said.

And Aias taught them the translation of waiting: breath held but not released, strings tensioned but not struck.

"Show me your method," Aias said after.

Segun selected seemingly random objects: three wine glasses, a handful of ball bearings, silk thread. Xanthos shuffled through his cards, pulled one out: "[a mother humming her child to sleep, fighting her own exhaustion]." They worked in synchronisation built from two decades—Xanthos reading the emotional trajectory while Segun created its physical analogue. Wine glass edges traced with wet fingers (almost singing but not), ball bearings rolled in careful patterns (almost rhythm but not), silk thread pulled across ceramic (almost a voice but not).

A woman in the watching crowd began crying. She clutched a violin case to her chest, rocking slightly. "My mother," she whispered in accented English. "She hummed like that."

This was their success: not recreating music but evoking its memory, making people remember what they'd lost specifically rather than generally. The difference between grief and mourning.

"Now you," Xanthos said to Aias.

"I haven't—it's been ten years—"

"You haven't forgotten. I made sure of that." The old man's certainty was blade-sharp. "You dream in captions. You wake thinking in translations. You see a bird and wonder how to recreate its song without sound. Don't pretend otherwise."

Aias approached the table of objects. His hands remembered before his mind did—selecting a piece of limestone from the theatre, thin copper wire, water in a pewter bowl. He looked at Xanthos's card: "[joy collapsing into itself, becoming memory]."

He began. The limestone scraped in diminishing circles. The wire tensioned and released. The water disturbed in specific patterns. His body remembered the lessons: how to layer non-musical sounds to suggest musical structure, how to create expectation and resolution without notes, how to make silence speak in dialects of absence.

When he finished, Segun laughed—not bitter but surprised. "Ten years and you got better."

Xanthos stood, moving to a locked cabinet. Inside: hundreds of cards, rubber-banded and labelled. He pulled out a thick stack marked with the date music died. "Your father's final concert. Every song, every moment between songs, every breath the audience took." He spread them on the table like tarot cards, a future that had become past. "The 'Epitaph of Seikilos' was his encore. The last complete song performed on Earth."

Aias read the cards, his father's performance translated into language: "[opening notes like a question]," "[ancient melody made modern through love]," "[voice and bouzouki becoming one instrument]," "[the audience knowing this is special, not knowing it's final]."

"We need three people," Xanthos said. "One to read the captions, one to create the sounds, one to—" He paused, looking for words.

"To remember," Aias finished. "To hold the memory of actual music while we translate its absence."

"You were seven when it died. You barely—"

"I remember enough." The lie came easily. He remembered everything: his father's fingers on the strings, the way the bouzouki's body vibrated against his small chest when his father let him hold it, the sound of six double strings creating harmonies that would never exist again. He remembered too much.

The pilgrims had filled the workshop, pressed against walls, seated on the floor. Someone had brought bread and olives, had settled in for something—a vigil, a wake, a birth.

"When?" Aias asked.

"Tomorrow night. When Epidaurus is most perfect." Xanthos gathered his cards for the "Epitaph of Seikilos," ordering them like movements in a symphony. "We've sent word. They're coming from everywhere."

"Who?"

"Everyone who remembers. Everyone who doesn't. Children born in silence. Adults who've forgotten what they've forgotten." Segun's hands were already moving through practice runs, testing objects against each other. "Four thousand seats. We'll fill them all."

"And if it doesn't work?"

Xanthos smiled—the expression strange on his carved face. "Then we'll have failed perfectly. In the place built for perfect sound, we'll have created perfect silence."

That night, Aias lay in his childhood bed, listening to Xanthos and Segun working in the main room. The sounds of their preparation: cards shuffling, objects clinking, footsteps in familiar patterns. Through the window, he could see lights throughout Epidaurus—campfires, flashlights, phone screens glowing like electronic candles. All those pilgrims waiting for something they couldn't name.

He pulled out his father's bouzouki, ran his fingers over the strings without plucking them. The muscle memory was intact—chord shapes, scales, the complex fingering for the "Epitaph of Seikilos" his father had taught him the week before music died. His hands knew the song. His ears had heard it. Tomorrow, he would help translate it into the only language left: the space between sound and silence, the ghost frequency where music once lived.

"When does a translation become more true than its original?"—The Subtitle Writer's Paradox

III. The Teaching

The disciples arrived with the dawn—not just the ones who'd been camping but others, word spreading through networks of the musically bereaved. They carried instrument cases like coffins: a tabla set from Mumbai, an erhu from Beijing, a tenor saxophone that would never wail again. By noon, three thousand had gathered. By evening, Epidaurus would be full.

Xanthos assembled them in the theatre, using its natural acoustics to teach what couldn't be taught. He stood centre stage, fragile as paper, while Aias and Segun arranged the translation materials in precise patterns. The limestone seats rose around them, each tier carrying his voice perfectly, cruelly clear in the absence of music's softening.

"You've come to witness either a birth or a funeral," Xanthos began. "Perhaps both."

A child in the third row—no more than five, born into silence—called out: "What's music?"

The question hung in the air like dust. The older pilgrims shifted, unable to answer. How do you describe colour to someone born blind? How do you explain water to someone who's only known drought?

"Music was organised sound that made people feel," Xanthos said finally. "Like speech, but for emotions that had no words."

The child nodded solemnly, understanding nothing, everything.

Segun stepped forward with his collection: wine glasses, stones, wire, wood. "We don't restore music. We translate its absence into presence. Watch." He selected three items seemingly at random, but Aias knew better—twenty years of practice had made Segun's choices precise as surgery. A ceramic bowl, copper wire, dried leaves. He began creating patterns: the bowl struck with increasing speed, the wire pulled across its edge, the leaves crumbled in specific rhythms.

"This isn't music," Segun said while working. "But your brain wants it to be. Your brain remembers patterns, expects resolution, creates meaning from repetition."

An old woman in the front row was weeping. She held a photograph—a young man with a guitar, frozen mid-strum. Her son, Aias guessed. Dead or just silenced, it amounted to the same thing.

"Some of you will feel it physically—migraines, nosebleeds. The closer we get to true translation, the more your body rebels."

"Now you," Xanthos said to the crowd. "Find a partner. One who remembers music, one who doesn't."

The pairing took time—the before-music and after-music populations eyeing each other like citizens of different countries. A woman from Senegal with her silent kora spoke quietly with Segun in Yoruba. "The griots say music was how we remembered history," she said. "Now we remember the remembering."

"Those who remember," Xanthos continued, "close your eyes. Recall one song. Any song. Hold it in your mind—not the words, not the notes, but the feeling it created."

Three thousand eyes closed. The theatre became a cathedral of concentrated memory.

"Those who don't remember: watch their faces. See how remembering music changes them. That's what we're trying to translate."

Aias moved through the crowd, watching one generation try to explain the inexplicable to the next.

"Aias will demonstrate," Xanthos announced, and Aias found himself pulled back to centre stage.

He hadn't agreed to this, but his feet moved anyway. The crowd watched as he selected his materials: fragments of limestone from the theatre itself, his father's bouzouki strings (removed years ago, kept like relics), water in seven different containers.

"The 'Epitaph of Seikilos,'" he said, his voice carrying to the back rows. "Tonight, we translate it."

He began with limestone creating rhythm, strings suggesting pitch through tension, water creating melodic illusion. The pilgrims leaned forward. Even children who'd never known music felt something shift—pattern and purpose, the skeleton of music without its flesh.

A man called out: "Why translate what we can't have?"

"Because forgetting is worse than losing," Xanthos answered.

As the sun moved across the sky, they taught in waves. How to read caption cards like sheet music. How different materials carried different emotional frequencies. How repetition created expectation even without melody. The sound was overwhelming—not music but the desperate attempt at music, like hearing a city being built or destroyed.

A teenager with green hair approached Aias during a break. "My grandmother was an opera singer. She killed herself after Tomorrow."

"Many did," Aias said, then showed her how to hold absence like an instrument.

As evening approached, Xanthos gathered them all again. The theatre was nearly full now—four thousand souls waiting for something they couldn't name. The Mediterranean light was golden, perfect.

"Tonight, we perform the 'Epitaph of Seikilos,'" Xanthos announced. "Not as music but as memory. Not as sound but as shared human attempt. We will fail—this is certain. But in failing together, we create something else. A new kind of communion."

"What if we hear it?" someone called out. "What if the music comes back?"

Xanthos smiled, sad and knowing. "Then we'll have three seconds of paradise before it kills us. Music exists at a frequency we can no longer survive. We've evolved past it, or it's evolved past us. Either way, we're incompatible now."

"But we try anyway," Segun added.

"We try anyway," Xanthos confirmed.

As the pilgrims began arranging themselves for the night's performance, Aias stood with his two fathers—the one who'd raised him, the one who'd become family through shared obsession. They looked old in the dying light, but also somehow essential, like the theatre itself—ancient, purposeful, still serving their function despite the world's transformation.

"Are you ready?" Xanthos asked.

"I've been ready since I was seven," Aias said. "I just didn't know it."

The stars were beginning to show. Somewhere in the crowd, someone began distributing candles—light to see by when darkness came, or prayers made visible, each flame a hope that might outlast its wick. The translation materials were arranged on stage: a monument to twenty years of failed attempts about to become either vindication or final proof of futility.

Either way, Aias thought, after tonight the work would be complete. The question was whether any of them would survive the answer.

"At what frequency do questions stop needing answers?"—Unmarked caption card, still falling

IV. The Circle

Night at Epidaurus. Four thousand candles creating a galaxy in the ancient stone tiers, each flame held by someone who'd come to witness the impossible. The moon was new—darkness complete except for the flickering light that made shadows dance where music once lived.

Aias stood between Xanthos and Segun on the orchestra floor, the circular stage that had held twenty-five centuries of performance. The translation materials were arranged in precise patterns: water bowls in mathematical intervals, limestone fragments graded by density, wine glasses tuned to almost-pitches, copper wire stretched between anchor points that would have been note values if notes existed. At the centre: his father's bouzouki, stringless, a wooden body that remembered vibration.

The crowd fell silent without being asked. Even the children understood something was about to end or begin.

Xanthos stepped forward, his voice carrying to the back rows without effort—the theatre's gift, perfect acoustics for a world without music. "The 'Epitaph of Seikilos.' Carved on a tombstone two thousand years ago. Instructions for how to sing at the grave of someone loved. The only complete ancient melody to survive into the modern age, until the modern age forgot how to hear it."

He held up the caption cards from twenty years ago, his handwriting still visible in the candlelight. "I wrote these while Sergio Castellanos played. Aias's father. The last performance of the oldest surviving song."

Segun moved to his position among the objects. "We translate not to recover but to remember. Not to restore but to honour. If we succeed, you'll feel the shape of what we've lost. If we fail, at least we failed reaching for heaven."

They began.

Xanthos read the first caption: "[Opening note held like a question, searching for its answer]."

Segun struck limestone with copper, the sound bright and hollow, suggesting pitch without achieving it. The echo rolled up through the tiers, each row hearing it perfectly, the theatre's acoustics carrying absence as faithfully as they'd once carried presence.

"[Melody ascending in ancient intervals, the mathematics of Greek harmony]."

Water poured between containers at specific speeds, each transfer calculated to suggest melodic movement. The sound was almost hypnotic—pattern without music, structure without song.

Aias closed his eyes, summoning memory. His father's fingers on the bouzouki strings, the particular way he'd bent the notes during this passage. The smell of rosin and sweat, the taverna's cigarette smoke creating halos around the stage lights. His father's face in that final moment—eyes closed, slight smile, a bead of perspiration on his forehead catching light like a jewel. The way he'd opened his eyes at the end, looked directly at seven-year-old Aias in the front row, and winked. The last communication between them that wasn't screaming or silence.

"[Voice enters, weathered but certain: 'While you live, shine']."

Segun pulled silk across ceramic, the friction almost vocal, almost human. In the crowd, people were swaying slightly, their bodies remembering rhythm even if their ears couldn't hear it.

As they continued, something shifted in the air. The translation was working—not creating music but creating the space where music had lived. The absent frequencies seemed to shimmer between the sounds they were making, like seeing colour in the gaps between black and white.

"[The ancient words: 'Have no grief at all']."

A child in the front row began humming—not producing melody but the ghost of melody, the attempt at song that all children born after Tomorrow made, trying to sing without knowing what singing meant. Other children joined, their voices creating a wordless choir of absence.

"[Building toward resolution, the melody knowing its end]."

The crowd was moving now, four thousand bodies remembering music in their muscles if not their ears.

"[Life exists only for a short while]."

Segun increased the complexity—multiple objects now, creating polyrhythmic patterns that suggested the bouzouki's six double strings, the way they'd created harmonies with themselves. As he worked the translation, Aias noticed him incorporating patterns from his childhood—the talking drum rhythms his father had taught him, translated now into stone and water. Complex polyrhythms that had once carried messages between villages, now carrying the message of absence between hearts. Aias felt tears on his face, didn't wipe them. This was his father's arrangement exactly, translated into the language of absence.

"[Time demands its toll]."

The limestone and copper created a tolling effect, not quite bells but the memory of bells, the suggestion of bronze through stone. The sound rolled through the theatre like weather, touching every listener.

"[Final verse, accepting mortality with grace]."

This was the part where his father would smile, Aias remembered. Would lean into the microphone and make ancient Greek sound like a love song to the present moment. Segun was building toward something—all the objects working together now, creating complex patterns that were almost, almost, almost—

"[The last note holds, then releases, then—]"

Silence.

But not ordinary silence. This was the silence that came after, the specific absence that followed presence. Four thousand people held their breath.

Then it happened.

For three seconds—exactly three—they heard it. Not the translation but the actual song. Sergio Castellanos's bouzouki and voice, the "Epitaph of Seikilos" as it had sounded that last night. The music existed complete and impossible, filling the theatre with what they'd lost.

Aias felt his skull crack—not literally but something deeper, the part of him that had learned to live without music suddenly exposed to it, like eyes adapted to darkness suddenly flooded with sun. Beside him, Xanthos made a sound like breaking. Segun's hands flew to his temples.

The three seconds ended.

The silence that followed was absolute. No one moved. No one breathed. The candles flickered but made no sound.

Then Xanthos fell. Not dramatically—he simply folded, knees to stone, then forward, Aias catching him before he hit completely. Segun dropped beside them, his white hair brilliant in the candlelight.

"We heard it," Xanthos whispered. "We actually—"

"Don't speak." Aias held him, one arm around Segun too, the three of them a trinity of translation, of attempt, of failure that was success. "Save your strength."

"No." Xanthos's hand found his face, traced it like reading braille. "This is what we built toward. Twenty years of preparation for three seconds of truth. We proved it still exists."

"At a frequency that kills us," Segun added. "We've evolved past beauty."

The crowd was pressing closer but staying respectful, forming circles within circles. The children who'd hummed were still humming, their attempted melody now a mourning song. Someone began passing water, wine, bread—the ancient offerings.

"The disciples," Xanthos said, his voice fading. "They know the method now. They can teach others. Not to restore but to remember. To honour. To keep the shape of music alive in its absence."

Aias felt them dying—not violently but certainly, their bodies unable to reconcile the frequency they'd touched. They'd known this would happen. Had known for years that actually hearing music again would be fatal. But they'd built toward it anyway, two men who remembered music preparing for the moment of remembering that would kill them.

"My fathers," Aias said, the word plural, necessary.

"Our son," Segun replied. "Born into silence. Raised in translation. The bridge between what was and what is."

Xanthos was struggling to speak, his hand still on Aias's face. "The bouzouki. Your father's. Keep it. Teach with it. Show them that instruments are sculptures now, beautiful and purposeless. But still beautiful."

The disciples had formed an inner circle, kneeling around the three men, witnesses to the passing of impossible knowledge.

"Tell them," Xanthos whispered, his voice barely carrying even in the perfect acoustics. "Tell them we heard it. Tell them it was worth everything."

They died as the moon set—Xanthos first, then Segun moments later, their hands finding each other across Aias's lap. Two men who'd spent twenty years translating absence, dying from three seconds of presence.

Aias sat between them until dawn, the crowd maintaining vigil, four thousand candles burning down to nothing. When the sun crested the hills, turning the limestone gold, he stood.

The disciples were ready. They'd already begun preserving the materials, documenting the method, preparing to scatter across the world. Each would take a piece—some the caption cards, some the objects, some just the memory of what they'd witnessed. They would teach others to translate absence, to honour the ghost of music, to help humanity remember what it had lost without dying from the remembrance.

Aias picked up his father's bouzouki, cradled it like a child. Around him, the ancient theatre held its perfect silence, waiting for performances that would never come, acoustics that would never again carry song.

But they would carry story. They would carry attempt. They would carry the translation of what once was into what might be enough.

The work was complete. The work would never be complete.

Both truths held, like harmony and silence, like presence and absence, like the three seconds of music that proved beauty still existed, just beyond the frequency of the living.

In the empty theatre, Aias did what he'd been taught since childhood—he listened to the silence carefully, as if it were music, as if absence itself were a kind of song only the bereaved could hear.

By Pierakis Pieri