The Wound

Hand on the peg. The string's resistance travels through wood, through wrist, into your arm bones. The peg bites into your thumb. You turn it and hear the pitch climb before you feel it. A quarter-turn more and the note arrives: warm, full, ringing with a sweetness you know before you name. You have found it – the narrow band where the string sings instead of fading, where the wire gives everything without giving way. One thread slack, and the note blurs. One breath tighter, and the wire screams and snaps. The music lives only here, in tension that pulls towards release.

The Path

Your hand has found the place. But finding is not holding. Two temptations pull at your wrist. The first: slacken. Let the wire sag until it asks nothing of you. Your arm relaxes. The note dies. You feel the relief, and the silence of a string that forgot what it was made for. The second: tighten past the singing. Your wrist craves the clean violence of the snap. You turn and turn, and when the wire parts you feel something like joy. Then quiet. Then you reach for the next string. The third way: you hold. Your hand stops precisely where the singing lives – while every muscle aches towards release. Neither string nor hand rests. The peg will groove your skin. You will dream of slackening and dream of the snap. But you will wake and find the peg, making the small adjustments that keep you in the narrow band where sound becomes music.

The Shadow

The Ever-Tuner found the note once – perfect, ringing. Then he heard it slip. A fraction flat. His hand moved to the peg. He cannot bear imperfection long enough to let it settle. Each adjustment overcorrects the last – flat, sharp, flatter, sharper – the oscillations widen because he refuses to let the string rest. Some nights he finds it. The note, true and full. He holds his breath, and for three seconds, four – music. Then he hears the slip beginning, and his hand is already moving. He dies still tuning, hands locked on pegs whose strings snapped hours ago. He was still hearing it slip. It was never as wrong as he thought. ⧫ Another found the note too – one afternoon she remembers only in sound. It stopped her breath. Now each time she lifts the instrument, her hands remember what perfect sounded like – but her hands are not what they were. Better to preserve the memory than pollute it with her decline. So she hangs the instrument on the wall. Some evenings she stands before it. Her finger hovers over the string – so close she can feel the wire's faint warmth. She pulls back. She dies in a house without echo. The strings still tuned, untouched. A reliquary for an afternoon she was too afraid to fail against.

The Cut