Waking Music

Mila wakes from a sound and follows it.

         Smooth wind was breezing against the windows in a consistent hum, an owl was hooting on intervals of time, dim shadows of winter tree branches swayed back and forth on the floor from the wall to the bed, and Mila slept soundlessly, her foot twitching with the owl.
         Some hours into her sleep, Mila was woken by a soft noise. It was far away, echoing throughout the house, and it was quiet by the time it reached her. She listened for it. It was dark; her blankets, pillow, and the lamp all lacked color, but she closed her eyes to hear the sound more clearly. She felt the air vibrating around her ears, imagining a wind current flowing through her room, looping in twists and knots, making the objects behind it look like they were encased in a bubble.
She followed it with her mind. To the ceiling, near the windows, below the bed, through the white door. Being unmuffled by the door. She listened to it getting louder as the current swayed from a dead plant on a shelf to air vent on the floor, louder as it explored all corners of the house, the dining table overflowing with miscellaneous items to the kitchen cabinets left open and empty, the cat’s empty bowls to the cat in the living room laying beside the old chair nobody sits in, turning at the front door and looping around to the stairs of the basement, where there was only one current bubbling down the stairs. The one-way stairs. But the sound, which was now ringing, was still on, and the current kept flowing.
         The wind current circled down the steps, looking at every inch of the scratched paint on the walls and dusty hand railing before floating over the basement floor with two ways to go. Left or right; the current followed its instinct and went in the unlit room on the right.
         A washing machine lacked color, the few pieces of clothing were scattered. The current followed them. From the dirty shirt on the dryer to the small shirt on the clothes rack, the sock halfway down the drain of the sink, a large dirty shirt on the entrance of a pitch black room below the stairs. The current flowed inside, listening to see. A book on a nightstand. A sitting chair in front of a piano. It looped around and echoed against the walls, getting louder and louder as it got closer to its birthplace, when it finally looped around the piano seat once more, breezed along the walls, below the piano and touching the bottom of the stairs above, and through the woman on the seat, through her spine and neck and skull, laying on F through C#, her eyes open, and the loud wind current vibrated into the piano, and died there.