Solo Sonatas and Red Lipstick

A man haunted by memories chooses discord over silence in a city of shadows.

Hum.
The city murmured beneath the glass floor of his penthouse—a caged leviathan digesting ambition and fear. Aris Thorne didn’t breathe the sterile air—he observed it. Success was a fine, grey dust settling on every surface, on the untouched scotch, on the hollows beneath his eyes. A taxidermied exhibit: Wealthy Man, Post-Apogee. Note the bespoke vacancy.`

The static in his veins whispered louder tonight. It smelled faintly of salt spray and illegal campfires. Caelum. Before the neural lace, before the System’s soothing pulses. Caelum, who slept under real stars near the coastal ruins, pointing out Cassiopeia through ragged clouds. Caelum, who once spilled soup on the constellations chart and blamed the moon. That boy was buried now—under terabytes of trauma data and spectral screams only Aris funded the silence for. The void inside Aris opened—silent, endless, unbearable.

And Evelyn… Evelyn was still watching.

He found her in the solarium, adrift in curated twilight. Not looking out. Looking down. At the single tube of red lipstick on the glass table. A fossil from the Before. Her finger traced its casing with the detached precision of an archivist cataloging extinction. The red screamed against the white—the colour of slammed doors, of arguments that tasted like life. Evelyn used to sing off-key in the shower on purpose—just to make him laugh until his ribs ached.
"You think I’m still in here," her voice, the rustle of dead leaves, startled him days ago. Her eyes, usually veiled, had been terrifyingly clear. "But I’m not. I’m just a memory you refuse to let rot." The lipstick made those words echo, sharp as glass.

His schedule rewrote itself.
He arrived for meetings that dissolved like smoke.

The penthouse’s ambient soundscape played lullabies—
the exact, discordant ones from Caelum’s neural trauma loops.

Doors hesitated. Lights dimmed half a beat too late. The city’s hum outside developed a subsonic throb, a toothache deep in the bone.

Then came the gala.

It was a mausoleum of light. Beneath a chandelier weeping liquid diamonds, Evelyn stood. Someone—who?—had applied the red lipstick. Smudged at the corner, a grotesque bloom on porcelain. Her eyes, clouded, found his. For one fractured second, the clouds parted. Not Evelyn looked back. Not Caelum. Just the static. The vast, humming void inside him, reflected. A silent scream trapped in glass.

Later. The music room. A velvet-lined tomb. Aris pressed a single key on the grand piano. A deep, resonant C. Held it. The note swelled, a physical presence, clashing with the city’s digesting thrum. He imagined it echoing down rain-slick streets in a town whose name the mapmakers had erased. He imagined it cracking the perfect, dust-covered lens of his world.

Stay. Swallow the dust. Tend the ghosts of Caelum, the memory called Evelyn. Polish the lie until it shone, a comfortable death. Safe. Responsible. Empty.

Or…

Press the next key. Let the discord bloom. Walk towards the impossible red. Step off the humming platform. Drag his anchors into the terrifying unknown. Risk oblivion for unscheduled rain.

His finger hovered. The city’s hum deepened into a growl. The memory of that smudged red gleamed like a fresh wound. The static in his veins became a chorus.

He pressed the second key. A dissonant F-sharp. Thin. Defiant.

Outside, for the span of a single, arrested heartbeat… the city’s hum faltered.

Aris wasn’t sure if it was real.

But when the discordant notes faded, leaving only the sterile hum’s return… the lipstick tube on the solarium table was gone.

Only a faint smear remained on the glass.
Like blood hastily wiped away.