Ichika Matsumoto Pov -

It sounds like freedom.

My name is Ichika Matsumoto, and I am a ghost in my own body.

I play the sound of the train tracks at 5:47 AM. The hollow rhythm of waiting. I play the sound of my mother’s silence after a perfect run. I play the whisper of my classmates, the soft rustle of Tanaka’s paperback pages, the imagined warmth of a hand I have never held. ichika matsumoto pov

My mother, Reiko, is the sun. I am merely the planet trying not to fall into her corona and burn up. She sits in the back of every lesson, arms crossed, head tilted. She doesn’t smile when I play a passage perfectly. She only uncrosses her arms. That is her applause. Yesterday, I played Paganini’s Caprice No. 24. It took me three years to get the left-hand pizzicato clean. When I finished, the sensei nodded. My mother looked at her watch.

The Gravity of Silence

I looked at my hands. I looked at the rough, scarred skin. I thought about how his soft, lotioned fingers might feel against mine. Like sandpaper on silk. Wrong.

I stand in the green room. The other musicians are stretching, humming, pacing. I stand perfectly still. I am a statue. I lift my violin—a 1920 Enrico Rocca, a gift from a grandmother who believed in me before she died—and I tuck it under my jaw. The wood is cold. It smells of old varnish and rosin dust. It smells like my childhood. It sounds like freedom

In the silence, I hear a sharp breath from the back of the hall. It is my mother. She is crying. I have never heard my mother cry before. It sounds like a cracked cello string. Ugly. Real.