The Song Nobody Finished

In the beginning there was nothing. No ground, no sky, no walls. Only a long silence, so long it seemed tired of itself.

And in the middle of that silence, something moved.

First came a creak of wood, like an old house settling at night. Then a sigh. Then an enormous yawn, the kind that starts in your feet and ends in your ears. Whoever was yawning wasn't sure they had ears.

“Mmm… what time is it?” asked a voice.

Nobody answered. There was nobody there to answer.

Mr. Guitar opened one eye. Then the other. He looked at his hands, thin and a little clumsy. He looked at his body, round, made of honey-colored wood, with a hole in the middle where the air slipped in.

Up top he had a long neck, stretched out as far as a neck can go, and at the very end some tuning pegs that wiggled whenever he was thinking.

“Well,” he said. “I’m a guitar.”

He said it without surprise, the way you find out it’s Tuesday.

He stretched, and something creaked inside him. His six strings rang all by themselves. Six sounds floated into the air, from the lowest to the highest. E, A, D, G, B, and E again, two octaves higher.

He stayed very still, listening to them fade.

“Those are my strings,” he whispered. “And I know their names.”

He didn’t know how he knew. The thickest one, the sixth, shook eighty-two times a second. The thinnest, the first, three hundred and thirty. He knew it the way you know the way home with your eyes closed.

He looked around. There was still nothing. An empty land, pale gray, smooth as a blank page.

“All right,” he said, scratching his head. “If there’s nothing, I’ll have to start with something.”

He turned a peg, just a tiny bit. The G string went up a hair, came down, and settled right where it should. It didn’t need tuning. But he liked doing it, the way you get ready for something important.

And then something strange happened.

Without meaning to, he began to hum. Four little pieces of melody, one after another, as if someone were whispering them in his ear. They sounded like home, then like a cloudy afternoon, then like a road, then like a question.

In the fourth piece, just as it was about to arrive somewhere, the melody stopped. Not because he wanted it to. There simply wasn’t any more.

He stood there with his mouth a little open, waiting for the next note. It never came.

“How odd,” he said softly. “I don’t know that song. But I know it.”

He hummed it again. The same four little pieces and, at the very same spot, the same silence.

It didn’t scare him. It made him want to know what’s behind a closed door.

He sat down on the ground, which wasn’t ground, and rested his chin on his knees, which weren’t exactly knees.

“Somebody started this,” he told the emptiness. “And somebody is going to finish it.”

The emptiness didn’t answer. But far away, so far it might have been his imagination, something sounded just once. A low note, long and calm. As if someone had rested a finger on a key to say, “I’m still here.”

He wondered if that note would come back. He didn’t know what to tell himself, so he decided to stay a little longer.

Mr. Guitar smiled without knowing why. And he kept on listening.

End of chapter.