litlinks 2025

Silence

by Yasha Potanin, Marist College

I remember the square as bigger than the rest of the city. Streets bowed to it the way people bow to a stage. Pigeons stitched grey cursive in the air. Chestnuts burned their sweet smoke into the blue winter.

Adults were being adults. So, like the five-year-old I was, I wandered.

Under a sagging green awning proudly stood a piano, as if it had been rained on for a century, only surviving out of spite. You, with your too-thin coat and hair like Santa, leaned your cheek to the wood as if listening to a secret.

Then you played.

It wasn’t the tidy kind I’d always heard on the TV, nor anything virtuosic. But it was the kind that made the air breathe long before you realised you held your own too tightly. The notes arrived, wild and exact. People walking past grew slower, taller. I put my palm on the low iron rail and trembled; the tremor went through skin to bone, then farther, somewhere I still don’t have words for.

Clair de Lune. Moonlight. That was the first of many.

When your hands made a final shape and the sound fell shut like a door, I cried because I wanted the door open again and I didn’t know how to ask. I can’t imagine what flowed through your mind when you beckoned the mini-me to take a seat by your side.

Mum tells me I sat there for hours. She often reminds me nowadays of the fear they felt when I disappeared, and the looks on their faces as they saw me humming along to a stranger, far past when the sun had set.

“That,” I told her that night, hitting a spoon against the table. “That.” She wiped the counter and looked at me as if I’d picked up a burning coal and wouldn’t let it go. I begged for lessons with the gravity and annoyance that only a child could summon. She said we would see. I said I had, and now I wanted to hear it forever.

***

Lessons came. I learnt the religion of scales and etudes. I learnt the tendon ache that comes with success. I learnt the first note in a piece was home and that you can leave home without slamming the door.

At eleven the door still slammed.

“You’re playing without heart, Rue,” my teacher said.  

“Don’t call me that.”

“It’s your name.”

“It’s not my name. It’s a word you say when I’m wrong.”

“But you are.”

“Well, I’m sick of being wrong!”

“That’s why we…”

I closed the lid. The thud shook the little room. “I don’t want to practise anymore,” I said, because through all the aches, the fake applause from parents in a shoddy recital hall, I had never once heard what I had heard that night.

“Rue,” she said.

I replied with silence.

I promised myself I’d return when I was taller, wiser, and ready.

That sat like a forgotten coin in a fountain.

***

At seventeen, the world dimmed. The tap in the bathroom used to tick. One day it didn’t. On the bus, the hiss of brakes backed away as if they were embarrassed to be loud. At a family dinner the table shook with laughter, and I smiled a beat too late at a joke I never caught. My father’s eyes flicked to me; my mother’s hand held my knee as if anchoring me against a tide only she could hear.

“Progressive” and “irreversible” were the only words that stuck at the clinic. I nodded because that was what you did in rooms like that. But a road dead-ended in me. I wanted to ask if there was a footpath through the hedges, a small miracle the world would forgive. She kept going. Numbers, timelines, strategies for loss. The silence in the room drowned out her voice. I left with a paper bag of words and ears full of now-documented emptiness.

Mum cried. Dad told me it was God’s plan. But I couldn’t care less.

That night I found the square. I could still see your sleeves pushed back, the way you breathed before falling into the song. I could feel the rails cold in my palm. But you weren’t there.

And neither was your sound.

I was alone in that empty city square.

Slowly, I hummed to fight the silence. After six years, I began the first page of Clair de Lune under the midnight sky. Then the next, then the last. And when I finished, I started again. I listened to my voice, my phrasing, and kept note of every moment I broke so I would never forget.

It was just me, the moon, and Debussy’s melody.

And maybe, for a moment, I wasn’t alone.

***

The next day I distracted myself with one mission. I ignored the advice and prayers of everyone around me because there was only one person I wanted to talk to. It felt foolish as you were a decade older; you had been old even then, but obsession is a tool grief hands you when it wants more.

I stayed diligent even after days of surgery and attempted repair work. I stayed strong even when the sound on my left had long been forgotten.

Every night I went to the square, stood where the rail once trembled, and tried to fit myself like a ghost into the memory. The piano wasn’t always there now. Sometimes they dragged it indoors at night. Sometimes a boy in a hoodie pounded pop songs until his friends filmed him, bored by their own boredom. It was dying.

I learnt how to sign so I could keep asking questions.

I kept looking. I asked around. I scrolled local message boards. At a charity’s office, a volunteer with soft eyes recognised what I meant. This was it.

He signed in basic words. Old. Piano?

I nodded eagerly.

He stared at the wall.

I’m sorry.

The edge of the counter was the only anchor I had.

What?

Slowly, his fingers extended upward, then down. I understood too soon.

Dead.

Silence.

In his sleep. Peaceful.

Peaceful hit me like a door slammed in my face.

Did he… Did he have a name?

He told me then. He wrote down everything else too and offered me a photograph someone had left. You on a fold-out chair next to the piano, a thermos on the side, a grin so ordinary it hurt. I took your picture. But I didn’t cry. I just carried it out to a sun that had the nerve to shine.

***

I returned to the square under the same stubborn moonlight. The blue winter evening had forced most inside but the piano was still out. The lid was already open. The bench, slightly skewed.

I sat.

The wood under my thighs was cold in your hardworking way. I traced my fingers on every key, every moment. I placed your photograph on the stand, a place where only you could see me, and I you.

At that moment, I guess, I wanted to talk there and then.

I put my fingers down where they belonged. F. A flat. Then, I took a deep breath, and I pressed home.

The little sound that remained was trapped underwater. But I kept going. I pressed harder as if it were a stubborn door and force might remind it of its purpose. I was playing inside a dream I had every night for the last twelve years. Notes existed more as thoughts than as anything I could trust. In my head, the melody tried to bloom and instead became a sketched outline of a flower. Silence leaned in with every bar, eagerly rehearsing its own applause.

Someone passed behind me and slowed. A child came close, palm pressed to the rail. He looked at his hand, puzzled, as if the metal’s refusal to hold back was his own fault. He pressed harder. He let go. He blinked at me, not sure if I was a person, machine or something else. Then, he was gone just as fast as he came.

When I finished, nothing changed. You weren’t there.

Silence. Sweet, faithful silence.

I was still alone in that empty city square.

That’s when I began to cry.

I pressed my forehead to the cool wood of the lid. I pictured you leaning your cheek there, listening in to what the instrument might become. I tried to imitate your listening, your breathing. I wished for a million things. I imagined myself never slamming the lid, performing to a packed hall as you watched, arms crossed, from the back.

I may have been taller and wiser. But the door was gone. There was no promise I could make that wasn’t a lie.

My head rested on the keys for hours. Listening to the silence.

And for that long, maybe it was enough.