Chapters The saddest passage in all of music is in the andante section of the final movement of Beethoofen’s cello concerto in C minor. The orchestra recedes into the background while I recapitulate the theme of the first movement. They descend chromatically, swelling with misery, and I stretch a long note into a cry of despair. The note is so sad that it is painful.
It was morning, and I was immersed in the allegro first movement. I was scheduled to perform the concerto with the Manehattan Philharmonic in two weeks. They were Equestria’s preeminent orchestra, and my debut with them would be a major step in my career. If it went well, it would establish me as a top orchestral soloist. I would be able to devote all my time to performing, to the music that was my purpose and life.
A sharp knock on the door startled me. I was supposed to have nothing on my schedule for hours. The knocking, rapid and impatient, continued. With a grumble, I got up. It was Rarity.
My roommate Vinyl Scratch had been in the marketplace, headphones on, shuffling her hooves in time to a beat. She stumbled, as if she had tripped on a rock, and caught herself by flinging her hoof to the side. When she tried to raise herself upright, she listed to the opposite side and stumbled again. She swayed to and fro, spinning her head like she was too dizzy to keep it level. Rarity and Rainbow Dash were about to ask her if she was okay when she fell over, slamming her flank hard into the dust. She waggled her hooves in the air as if she wanted to get up but couldn’t find the ground. By the time they lifted her onto Rainbow Dash’s back, she was gulping air like she was drowning, and her lips were turning blue. Rainbow Dash flew her to Ponyville Hospital, and Rarity galloped to me.
We huffed with exhaustion as we charged into the hospital lobby. The pungent antiseptic odor burned our lungs. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere, not even in the sickly beams of sunlight that slashed through the corners of the window blinds. The bright interior lights reflected off the plain white walls and waxed linoleum floor, bathing the empty rows of identical seats in lonely, colorless brightness. The front desk was unattended, and its cubicle walls were bare, with neither family pictures nor personal notes tacked to the walls. Rainbow Dash sat in a chair in the corner, hugging her knees to her chest. She was motionless, entombed by the room’s stillness.
“Rainbow Dash? Where’s Vinyl Scratch?” asked Rarity.
Rainbow Dash didn’t look up. Her voice crackled against the oppressive silence. “I had to balance her on my back. She was going to fall off.”
“What’s wrong?” asked Rarity.
Rainbow Dash whimpered, “She would’ve fallen off if I’d gone faster.”
I put my muzzle right up to hers and demanded, “Where is she?” Dash hid her face in her knees.
Redheart appeared next to us, silently manifesting into the empty space. Her nurse’s uniform was crisp, immaculate, and nearly glowing. She waited, calm and unhurried, ears relaxed, until I lifted my head from Dash. Her face was neutral and betrayed no agitation, but her eyes glistened. She said, “I’m so sorry.”
I cried a lot that day. Rarity volunteered to stay with me. She said, “It’s not good to be alone at a time like this.” I thanked her but said no. She was my wardrobe designer but not a friend. I went home and, between sobs, picked up my cello and tried to play. I have been playing since I was big enough to hold an instrument. I have never wanted to do anything else. Music is my greatest comfort and dearest companion. So I kept trying to play, and stopping to sob, and wiping the tears off my cello, and trying to play again.
That afternoon, Applejack came to give me a pie. “Least I can do,” she said. “How’re ya holdin’ up?” I said I was fine. She raised an eyebrow. “Come on now, sugar cube, we both know that ain’t true. Any way I can help?” I thanked her for the pie and said I wanted to be alone for now.
I hadn't eaten since that morning, but I had no interest in the pie. I felt obliged to eat it anyway, but halfway through, I couldn’t stomach any more. I left it in the kitchen and picked up my cello again. But I forgot there were crumbs on my hooves, and they fell into the bow hair, and I got angry at myself for being a slob. Cleaning the crumbs reminded me of why Applejack had brought the pie, and I cried again. My tears fell on the crumbs and mixed with them, turning them soggy and melting them into the rosin on my bow. I was angry at myself for making a mess, and angry at Vinyl for making me make a mess, and angry at myself for being angry at her, and in my anger I cried even harder.
I had met Vinyl at Filliard School of Music. She had entered as a pianist. She could sight read a full score with a dozen staves, make a piano reduction in her head, and play it, all at once. At a school as selective as Filliard, that alone wouldn’t have distinguished her. It was how she played that stood out. Making music came as easily to her as walking on four legs did to everypony else. Her talent was obvious, and if she had been a classical performer like me, I might have felt threatened. But, unusually for Filliard, her passion was popular music. She always had her headphones on. When she walked, her hooves moved in rhythm, and they clopped a little louder on the strong beats. I thought of myself as a guardian of the Equestrian canon and an heiress to hundreds of years of Equestrian musical tradition. I looked down on Vinyl’s music as puerile, and I wanted nothing to do with it. In short, I was a snob.
By the time I was a senior, I had won competitions, had bookings with regional orchestras, and was preparing for a career as a serious solo artist. The great cellist Trotstropovich agreed to take me as a student after I graduated. It was a rare privilege. He lived in Canterlot, but one of my professors said I should consider living in Ponyville. “Getting up the mountain takes a few hours by train. Too long to commute every day, but not bad if it’s occasional,” I was told. “And Vinyl Scratch is from Ponyville. You know her, right?” I nodded and mentally lowered my estimation of Ponyville.
Trotstropovich observed to me that the musical atmosphere in Ponyville wasn’t as rich as Canterlot. “Frankly, you won’t find anypony on your level,” he said. “You won’t find many in Canterlot, either, but they’ll visit sometimes, and you’ll have a better chance of meeting them if you’re there.” He ruminated for a moment, then continued, “You’ll meet them when you travel, though. And ponies in our business travel all the time. Well, until you get to my age, and then it’s only half the time! Anyway, when you’re not traveling, it’s important to be near friends and family.”
Canterlot, I soon learned, was an expensive city to live in. It was too expensive unless I wanted to be a starving artist or share a tiny apartment with three other ponies. I didn’t have any family outside my home city of Trottingham. At Filliard, I had been more interested in my studies than in making friends, so I didn’t know who else in my class might be moving to Canterlot. When I asked around, I found no one. Ponyville seemed to be my least bad option.
Vinyl and I left Filliard on the same train. At the time I thought it was by chance, though now, I think she must have planned it. While I didn’t care for her music, I knew that appearing rude was bad for business, so I tried to make polite conversation, just like every time I had been forced to interact with her over the past four years. Vinyl, however, thought in sounds, not words. If you asked her how her day had been, she replied with a combination of hums, whistles, and tongue clicks. It wasn’t out of rudeness but because that was the best way she knew to express herself. If she used a word, it was less a tool for communication than an instrument in the song she was making for you. Before long, I gave up. I was staring out the window when she managed to ask, “Need a roommate?” Which I did. Ponyville might have been cheap compared to Canterlot or Manehattan, but a budding soloist doesn’t command a high fee.
After Vinyl died, I began having trouble with the Beethoofen cello concerto. It had been in my repertoire since before I went to Filliard, and I had already performed it a dozen times. Yet now, the long sad note in the third movement sounded wrong. I tried it every way I could think of. Louder. Softer. Accented. Not. More vibrato or less. Faster vibrato or slower. Bowed heavier, lighter, faster, slower, near the bridge, near the hoofboard, at the center of the bow, at the frog, at the tip, with all the bow hair, with only some of the bow hair. The note never sounded sad enough. I spent six hours working on four measures and made no progress.
I kept imagining that Vinyl would suddenly walk through the door, as if she had merely been on vacation, and offer to help. The first time she helped me with a difficult passage came a month after we moved in together. I had worked on the allemande from Buck’s sixth cello suite for hours, and I was frustrated. I don’t know how she knew I was frustrated, but when I looked up, she had taken her headphones off and was watching me.
I glared at her. “Can I help you?” She started to sing the phrase I had just been playing. I interrupted, “I’m busy.”
Vinyl wasn’t easily offended. One of her qualities was patience. She sang the phrase again.
This filly, who preferred the trash played at clubs to the songs of the masters, wanted to talk to me about music? I played the start of the phrase. “There. If you’ll excuse me—”
Vinyl shook her head. She sang the phrase a third time and exaggerated it. It was highly rubato, and her pause after the low C was almost a caesura. The trills were soft, and she accented the dissonant G sharp. She motioned for me to play.
If she was going to interrupt me while I worked, then I would have to move out. But she was here now, and the easiest way to get back to my work was to cooperate. I played the notes leading up to the low C.
Vinyl’s tail twitched, and she shook her head again. She sang the first three notes, and I played them. She grimaced.
As we went back and forth, I became intrigued. She was as particular about phrasing as I was. When, at last, I played and she nodded, I said, “But that won’t work. Because then it goes”—and I played the next phrase. Vinyl pursed her lips. By now I had forgotten to be annoyed at her. I said, “I guess I could go like”—and I played the phrase again.
Vinyl sang it more legato, and she punctuated it with little gestures of her hooves to bring out the parallels inside the parts of the phrase.
“Oh, like this?” I played the phrase the way she had sung it. “Then it’d be”—I played both phrases together. “Actually, that’s not bad.” I tried them again. “Not bad at all.” Vinyl broke into a smile.
Around the same time, I realized Trotstropovich had been right. Ponyville had a community orchestra and semi-professional groups like the Pony Tones, but all the professional work was in Canterlot. Besides me and Vinyl, the only other full-time musical performer in Ponyville was the Canterlot Symphony’s second flutist, and he was a pegasus, so he could fly directly instead of riding the train up and down the mountain. Most musicians in Ponyville supported themselves by teaching, like Toe-Tapper, or were enthusiastic amateurs with day jobs, like Fluttershy.
The only advantage I could see to living in Ponyville was Jasmine Leaf’s tea shop. Like nearly everypony from the Griffish Isles, I had been a habitual tea drinker almost from the moment of my birth. Despite my pride in the quality of Trottingham’s tea shops, I had to admit that Jasmine Leaf’s shop was the best I had ever seen. She had started as a retailer, but now her real business was as a wholesaler. The volumes, and so the profits, were higher. She kept the shop mostly because it made a convenient tasting room for potential buyers.
So she told me. I was an ordinary retail consumer, but she was always eager to talk to me. The time she spent with me must have cost her more bits than she made from my purchases. I appreciated and even enjoyed her affability, and I sensed that she wanted to be friends. We were two of the most ambitious mares in Ponyville, both dedicated to our professions and climbing toward their summits. We understood each other even though we didn’t understand the particulars of each others’ businesses. But while I wasn’t opposed to the idea of being friends, I was too dedicated to my craft to sacrifice my time to frivolity. Despite her overtures, I tried to remain no more than an acquaintance and regular customer.
Two months after Vinyl and I moved in together, I had a frustratingly long train ride from Canterlot to Ponyville. My lesson had left my mind full of Debaysy’s cello sonata, and I was itching to pull out my cello, but some kind of mechanical problem delayed the train for a full hour. The wait made me consider a permanent move to Canterlot. I tried to weigh Ponyville’s barren musical environment and the time I was wasting on the train against the money I would waste on a Canterlot apartment and the prospect of having to find a new roommate or three. Vinyl had been a perfectly adequate roommate, so when I made it home, I asked her if she would consider moving. She wouldn’t. I tried reasoning, pleading, and wheedling, and I would have tried badgering, but she ended the conversation by putting her headphones on. Not only did she want to stay in Ponyville, she seemed convinced that, when I came to my senses, I would want to stay in Ponyville, too.
She was right. Most of Equestria’s major train routes met near Canterlot. But Canterlot itself, being on a mountain, was a terrible place for a junction station. Ponyville, on the other hoof, had one of the largest junction stations around. Jasmine Leaf had mentioned that as one of her business advantages, but I didn’t appreciate it until the autumn concert season. I began performing all across Equestria, and I took the train constantly. Living in Ponyville saved me endless hours going up and down the mountain.
My gigs kept me away from Ponyville for days, sometimes even weeks, at a time. One day, after two weeks of back-to-back gigs and a long train ride from Vanhoover, I arrived home and wanted nothing more than to relax. Unpacking took only a few minutes, and then I sat down and took out my cello. Vinyl was playing her keyboard, and, unusually, using her speakers. She must have been deeply focused because she hadn’t noticed me enter. I said, “Excuse me. Could you switch to headphones? Thanks,” and started tuning.
Vinyl looked up, startled. She fumbled with her headphones for a moment, but when she realized I was tuning, she stopped and gave me an A. I gave her a grateful nod, and she held the A while I tuned my A string. When I started to tune my C, G, and D strings, she switched to those notes. Just as I was satisfied with my tuning, she gave a little smirk and played a huge F minor 13th chord: F, A flat, C, E flat, G, B flat, and D. After all the perfect fifths from my open strings, the effect was ghastly, even though the chord contained the very notes I had just been tuning. As I winced, she struck dense multi-octave G major and C major chords, resolving the noise with a perfect authentic cadence. By then, however, I had recovered. I swiped at my open D string, and the fortissimo major second interval was ear-splitting. We both laughed.
Vinyl and I began making jokes like this regularly. Sometimes they were dissonant. Other times they were melodramatic, like a cadence that promised an ending it never delivered. One of Vinyl’s favorite tricks was to transmute a familiar piece of music. Dour funeral marches became polkas, and dignified madrigals turned into bluesy folk songs. One time she turned a children’s song into an operatic aria. I still remember her warbling, “The wheels on the cart, la la la la! Go round and round, la la la la!” When she inserted a cadenza, I laughed so hard I fell out of my chair.
Gradually, our musical pranks turned into games. Sometimes we set each other challenges, like me only being allowed to play pizzicato or her only being allowed to play with her left hoof. Once I dared her to play with her hind hooves, and not even she could do that. But most often, we simply made music together. We traded ideas and chased melodies back and forth. While I had taken composition courses, I had never tried improvising. I had always associated improvisation with jazz, which, while respectable, was not un des beaux arts like my own music. But playing with Vinyl was too much fun for me to turn up my muzzle and trot away. Our notes were as consonant as perfect fifths, and her melodies were counterpoint to this Melody. She was a musical equal, and it was a joy to be around her. Despite my busy gig schedule, I came back to our cozy cottage whenever I could.
A few days after Vinyl’s passing, her parents came to our cottage to sort through her belongings. Her mother, High Fidelity, offered to give me Vinyl’s DJ equipment. But I didn’t know what half of it did, and the other half I had no use for. When I performed in a concert hall, I needed only my cello, my bow, and spare strings. I needed my own sound system only when I played chamber music for rich Canterlot socialites’ garden parties, and Vinyl’s equipment was too sophisticated for that.
Besides, I took those gigs rarely. The same ponies who paid to hear me in a concert hall ignored me when I was supposed to be background music, and that was hard for me to endure. My parents had sometimes joked that I was the “main Melody” because I liked attention so much. I knew I was an exceptional performer, but I wanted to be the best, and I wanted everypony to know I was the best. I wanted my face in the newspaper and to be recognized on the street. So I took garden party gigs only when I had nothing else on my schedule, and I did them only for the money. Some day, I’d do product endorsements, and then the only fancy estate I’d set hoof in would be my own.
Vinyl had the opposite attitude toward gigs. She always had more offers for gigs than she had time for, and she seemed to pick them based on whether she liked her client. For the right pony, she’d spin records for clubs, music festivals, weddings, school dances, and even birthday parties for foals. She should have raised her fee, but how much she was paid hardly seemed to matter to her. Trying to raise her fee might not have mattered, anyway, because she was terrible at negotiating. If she was interested in a gig, she almost ignored what she was offered. I thought she was continually underpaid. I once told her she needed an agent and offered to put her in touch with mine. She made a noise like a lioness having her food stolen by a band of hyenas. It was amazing how she could evoke such precise images with sound.
Vinyl’s gigs as DJ Pon-3 sometimes kept her out late at night. In the early morning hours when she returned, the door hinge usually squeaked a perfect F sharp, though it went out of tune on hot summer or cold winter nights. The sound often woke me even though Vinyl, always considerate, tried to keep quiet. I could always tell it was her from the rhythm in her step. I found her rhythm comforting, and its sound helped me get back to sleep. Once, when I couldn’t distinguish a rhythm, I got up to see what was wrong. She looked and smelled awful. In a rare moment of volubility, she said, “Drunk pegasus puked on me.”
Vinyl’s work as a DJ was her main income, but like me and garden parties, it was really a side gig. Early in her studies at Filliard, she had switched from performance to composition. I thought of her as a composer even though she didn’t like that label. In school, the ponies who had called themselves “composers” were pretentious twits who thought a G was better written as B quadruple flat (true story). Vinyl was a composer because she wrote original music. She could write a passable song in fifteen minutes and a good one in an hour. At times she seemed to generate ideas faster than she could write them down. Her keyboard was next to her computer, and she sat in front of them endlessly, sometimes playing, sometimes arranging. When she was focused, she leaned toward her computer screen, resting her horn on top of it and scrunching her muzzle to let her sunglasses get a hair closer. Her ears twitched in time to her arrangement while she muttered peculiar noises like, “ba wee doo zot,” and, “shoo dum da rupp.” She would have seemed clownish if her face hadn’t looked so serious. But despite all the time she spent composing, as far as I knew she had never tried selling her music. I had no idea what she did with it.
To my surprise, Vinyl’s parents didn’t know she composed. They knew that she rarely performed anymore, a fact they attributed to her quiet introversion. They thought she had given up her musical ambitions entirely and worked as a DJ only to make ends meet. Together, we investigated Vinyl’s computer. I had long believed that some of her time at her keyboard and computer was spent arranging or remixing others’ music in preparation for her gigs. We found no evidence of that. Instead, we found hundreds of original songs. Hundreds! The oldest predated her studies at Filliard, but most of them had been written since we started living together. We were just a few years out of school and she had already written more music than some composers wrote in a lifetime. I knew she could write fast, but I had no idea she had sustained such a pace for so long.
Vinyl’s clumsiness with words was manifest in her song titles. Most were nondescript, like “remix,” or nonsense, like “aaa.” Out of curiosity, we clicked on one named “intense wub wub.” It was a funky dance tune with a driving beat and a catchy melody, the sort of music you would hear at a nightclub, the sort that made you want to get up and start shaking your hooves. She must have played her music at her gigs, I realized. If all her songs were as catchy as this one, then it was no wonder that she always seemed to be in demand. But “intense wub wub” was also sophisticated. It wasn’t a hackneyed four-chord song like so much popular music. The song always seemed to be developing, and no phrase ever felt like it was fully over. The effect made you writhe with anticipation. As it entered the bridge, it became less frenetic but no less taut. It was like being in a cramped room on a hot and stuffy night, entwined in an intimate, sweaty caress with the main dance theme.
I suddenly had the sensation that we were doing something indecent. I had long known there were songs Vinyl didn’t share with me. Sometimes, even though her eyes were covered by her sunglasses, I could see from the slack position of her head that she wasn’t looking at what was in front of her. Her ears, rendered useless by their inability to hear the tune that had seized her, drooped. When she sat down at her keyboard, what erupted from her came without conscious effort and, it seemed to me, constituted a kind of diary entry. Because Vinyl neither performed nor sold these songs (so I had thought), I assumed she wrote them only because she couldn’t stop herself. I had experienced similar compulsions myself, for when I didn’t play my cello, my hooves tingled almost to the point of itching, and, desperate for relief, I would have to lift an imaginary cello and bow in my hooves and begin playing a phantom instrument. I had never wanted to probe Vinyl’s private life, and I knew now that she hadn’t shown me half, maybe not even a tenth, of her output. That music had been hers, to share on her terms, and, for all that she had respected and trusted me, she had chosen not to share it with me. If she hadn’t passed away, I never would have learned about it. I stopped the music. Listening to it without her permission felt like violating her trust. Only in the following silence did I realize I was shaking. I told her parents, “I’m sorry.”
High Fidelity whispered, “What do we do with all of it?”
“I have no idea,” said Ivory Keys.
Vinyl’s autopsy found an undiagnosed congenital heart defect. The doctor said it was “minor as such things go.” With proper care, she might have, perhaps should have, lived twice as long or even longer. But nopony had known, so nothing could have been done.
Her funeral was the week after she died. I didn’t feel like going. Even though we lived together, we weren’t friends. We had shared professional interests in music and mutual respect, nothing more. When we spent time together, it was never just for fun. It was for music, always and only music. So while I was sad that she had passed, I didn’t want to dwell on it. I had lost a close professional relationship, not a personal one.
I went to Vinyl’s funeral because I felt sorry for her parents. I hadn’t met them many times before, but they had seemed to love everything about her, from the way she shuffled to a beat to her melodious style of communication. Their relationship with her had been much deeper than mine, and they were, I was sure, grieving much more than I was. My presence at the funeral would be a sign of respect and condolence. I hoped it might provide them some comfort.
It was my first time attending a funeral for somepony my age. I arrived at the town hall a little before the service started. I wanted it to be still, to have row after row of statuary ponies in noiseless, grief-choked air. Instead it was filled with ponies greeting each other and chattering about their lives. I hated it, and I defied it by keeping my outrage silently within myself. I sat by myself in the second-to-last row and watched Pinkie Pie make last-minute adjustments to the black streamers that lined the room. Her mouth was a flat line, and her step had lost its bounce. It was strange to see her in a somber mood. When one of her events had needed a DJ, she had often turned to Vinyl.
Jasmine Leaf was seated on the other side of the hall. When she noticed me, she gave me a timid wave. I stared at her aghast and wondered how she could be so gauche. I had never before thought of her as obnoxious, but her liveliness and sociability, however restrained, were thoroughly offensive at an event like this. I kept staring, open mouthed, too shocked to know what to do, until she gave me a wry half-smile and dropped her hoof into her lap. She turned to face the front of the hall and hung her head.
Except for me, the only pony who seemed to be taking the funeral seriously was Rainbow Dash. Her face had the bleak expression of a pony who had violated her own creed. In her telling, she had not been fast enough or loyal enough to save Vinyl. No consolation from her friends and no future success could ever erase that failure. She looked as though she had erected an impenetrable shell of despondence around herself, and despite being flanked by Rarity, Applejack, Fluttershy, and Twilight Sparkle, she seemed entirely alone.
Pinkie Pie jogged to the front of the hall, where High Fidelity and Ivory Keys were sitting. They spoke softly, and she nodded and jogged away. As Ivory Keys watched her go, he saw me. He motioned to me with his hoof, so I walked to where he and High Fidelity sat.
“Sit up here,” he said.
On the stage, ringed with flowers, was a large portrait of Vinyl. In it, she was smiling, headphones around her neck, wearing her favorite reflective purple sunglasses. Next to the portrait was a casket of deep golden wood. The casket lid was up, and the lining inside was bone white crepe.
“I couldn’t,” I said. “I’m not family or anything.”
“Please. It would mean a lot to us.” He gestured to an empty seat in the second row of chairs. I couldn’t say no.
Mayor Mare presided over the ceremony, but I hardly heard anything she said. The last movement of the Beethoofen cello concerto kept sneaking into my head. There was always music in my head, but normally, when I wanted to focus on something else, I could keep it subdued. Now I couldn’t. When I realized I wasn’t listening, I felt guilty and tried to redirect my attention back to what Mayor Mare was saying. But whenever my eyes drifted to the casket and the crepe lining, I remembered that Vinyl was inside, and I stopped listening again, and the concerto returned.
Twilight Sparkle delivered the eulogy. She was too bookish and neurotic to understand Vinyl. Vinyl had always been mellow, and she had never been interested in coursework or studying for its own sake. In our first year at Filliard, we had been in the same music theory class. The professor’s droning lectures could have put even Twilight to sleep. When I wasn’t yawning, I dutifully tried to scribble notes. Vinyl spent the whole semester in the back of the classroom paying no attention. She gently bobbed in time to some beat in her head while she jotted in her notebook. I couldn’t figure out why she even showed up, and I was sure she would fail. At the midterm, she turned in her exam after only thirty minutes. I was sure she was giving up, and I felt like it served her right. I never asked her how she did in that class. Probably perfect.
Some of the other students, ponies who would have been the best at any other school but who were nevertheless incapable of her artistry, tried to hang around her. They wanted to be seen in her company so that her reputation would rub off on them. Maybe Vinyl had asked to be my roommate because I had never tried to wheedle my way into her good graces. And whatever Twilight Sparkle’s faults, she knew even better than Vinyl what it was like to endure unwanted attention. Twilight’s remarkable skill with magic had made her a celebrity. Ponies who didn’t know her expected things from her, or challenged her, or wanted to be acknowledged by her. Neither Vinyl nor Twilight relished the spotlight. Neither had time for flatterers and parasites. Neither could fully get rid of them. Vinyl, though, had been better at hiding.
At the end of the service, we viewed her body. The longer I had gone without seeing Vinyl, the more I had wanted to see her. Yet now, about to see her for the last time, I didn’t want to. Some part of me still hoped that the funeral was a mistake and that she was only missing, not dead. But I knew that seeing her body would extinguish that hope.
Her parents went first. They held each other silently for a while. Next came out-of-town relatives Vinyl had never once mentioned. Then it was my turn. As I approached the casket, I felt stoic. I knew I was supposed to cry. I considered pretending.
Vinyl had been primped by the funeral home to look as if she were asleep. Her sunglasses were off, and I wondered how many ponies in the hall besides me and her family had ever seen her without them. Every hair of her mane had been carefully placed, giving her a tidier hairdo than she had ever managed in life. But her cheeks and eyes were a little sunken, and her skin was a little gray, and her smile was missing. She looked like a life-sized doll, like a toy that could only pretend to make music, like a puppet that had never been alive and had never moved to a beat. I blinked, and then I couldn’t see her through my tears, and I was heaving with sobs.
As I reeled away from the casket, High Fidelity caught me in a hug. I squirmed out of her embrace, mumbled, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and stumbled back to my seat. I held my head in my hooves and looked at the floor. I breathed deeply, hoping to stop the tears, but a slow, undeniable trickle ran down my face. I just wanted the service to be over. I wanted to go back to the Beethoofen cello concerto and that sad note in the third movement that was vexing me. And I wanted Vinyl back so that I could ask her how to play it.
Rainbow Dash approached the casket with none of her usual swagger and braggadocio. She was reluctant, moving forward only when coaxed by gentle nudges from her friends. When she reached Vinyl, she saw not the body of a pony but the embodiment of her failure, and she wailed with responsibility and regret. Her friends held her steady, and they cried a chorus of sadness and grief that was at the same time terrible and harmonious, a chorus through which they shared their pain with each other and, in doing so, salved it.
As they left the casket, they passed High Fidelity and Ivory Keys. Rainbow Dash glanced at Vinyl’s parents and lowered her head in shame. High Fidelity sprang out of her chair and hugged Rainbow Dash. “Thank you,” said High Fidelity. “Thank you for what you did. Thank you so much.”
“I—” began Rainbow Dash. She sniffled, then grew quiet. She put a hoof around High Fidelity and wept silently. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” High Fidelity shushed and rocked her.
As High Fidelity hugged first Rainbow Dash, then Rarity, then all of their friends, I felt tears returning. I held my head in my hooves again, hoping that brushing the wetness away from my eyes would stop the tears before they were fully started. I sensed somepony sit down next to me, but I didn’t look up. An arm stretched over my shoulders. Automatically, without any conscious thought, I shoved it away. It was Jasmine Leaf, and I had pushed her so hard that she had rolled backward onto the next chair in the row. She looked at me with fear and horror. Then her face grew calm, adopting an expression of wisdom and maturity and patience. She righted herself, sitting erect in the chair I had pushed her onto. She leaned toward me and said softly, “I’ll be here when you need me.” For the rest of the funeral, she sat quietly, eyes fixed straight ahead, neither looking at nor talking to me. When the funeral was over, Jasmine Leaf stayed in her seat, still looking at the portrait of Vinyl and the casket. I knew she was waiting for me. I left without saying a word.
I spent the rest of the day wrestling the Beethoofen cello concerto. The quality of my performance with the Manehattan Philharmonic could determine the rest of my life, so I felt a desperate perfectionism born of cold-hearted rationality. I had never before struggled this much with any piece of music, let alone one I was so familiar with. I wanted to consult my teacher, but he was in Fillydelphia to play the Berlioatz cello sonata in a charity concert, and he wouldn’t be back until after I left for Manehattan. I wished I could consult Vinyl.
There weren’t many ponies I could turn to for musical advice, and I was afraid of what rumors might spread if ponies knew I wanted help. I knew Fluttershy would be discreet, so the day after Vinyl’s funeral, I asked her if she would be willing to critique my performance. “I need just a little bit of feedback, and I was hoping you might lend me a hoof. Rarity tells me you’re a good amateur,” I explained.
“Does she?” Fluttershy blushed. “Well, I don’t know how much help I can be, but I’ll try.”
I would have invited her to my home, but I thought Vinyl’s passing would make her feel awkward. Instead I hiked to her cottage near the woods. I didn’t know her well, so I didn’t know it was surrounded by birdhouses and animal dens. Once I was inside, Fluttershy told me that her animal friends wanted to listen, too, but she had warned them this was not a concert and made them promise not to disturb us. That was when I noticed the menagerie in her house. Crowded around the room were rabbits, mice, birds, squirrels, chickens, a spider, and even a bear. I panicked for a moment when I saw the bear, but Fluttershy assured me that he was very sweet.
I had brought a piano score for Fluttershy to follow. I started at the beginning of the andante section of the third movement. When I reached the long sad note, I wanted to scream in frustration. At the end of the andante section, I put down my bow and said, “You see? It’s not coming together.”
Fluttershy whispered, “That was breathtaking.”
“How can you say that?” I moaned. “It was terrible!”
“They didn’t think so,” she said, indicating the animals. They were sitting in rapt attention. Even the children were quiet.
I played again, halting in the middle of the long sad note. “Nothing I do makes it sound right to me,” I said. “I’m never happy with it.”
“I don’t think the music is the problem,” she said. “Could it maybe be—” She stopped. “How have you been feeling?”
I shook my head. “It’s not that. We were just roommates.”
I played more, and Fluttershy tried to help. She was, as Rarity had said, a good amateur. But she had never spent a whole day shaping a single phrase. She had never practiced for tens of thousands of hours. She had spent those hours on her calling, helping animals. She was serious about animals in the same way that I was serious about music. She dabbled in music in the same way that some ponies dabbled in pet ownership. She was modest and knew the width of the gulf between an amateur and a professional. I left her cottage grateful but unsatisfied.
That night, on the overnight train to Manehattan, the concerto kept me awake. Every time I began to doze, an ugly jumble of tone clusters drove me out of my slumber. The notes and chords wouldn’t leave me, and even though I knew how each one should sound, somehow they had all become dissonant. I imagined the concerto a hundred different ways, but a hundred different cacophonies shrieked back at me. The noises reverberated through my skull all night, accompanied by the rattle of the train car and the squeal of the wheels and the chugging of the engine. I got no sleep.
I spent the morning studying the concerto in the arid fashion of the worst music theorists, the kind who can read a score but can’t play a note worth hearing. It was tedious work that kept me gratefully and quietly occupied. When I got off the train in the late morning, I went straight to the concert hall, pausing only to buy a sandwich. I was supposed to meet with the conductor after lunch, but I needed to start warming up immediately.
One of the concert hall staff escorted me to the rehearsal room, which was actually a small concert space. It was used for chamber music concerts, preconcert lectures, and auditions. It was empty except for a grand piano on the stage and a chair and a music stand for me. A hundred plush, empty seats watched me tune my cello and warm up. I felt nervous and edgy, so I tried playing a few gentle passages from the adagio second movement to calm myself down. It didn’t work. The concert was going to be a fiasco. I hung my head.
“Brava!”
I jerked upright. At the other end of the hall, an elderly orange pegasus hovered in the door clopping his hooves. I cowered for a moment, ashamed that somepony had heard me. My failed attempt to relax wasn’t worth pitying, and nopony with an hour of musical education would actually cheer for it. He was surely a member of the hall’s staff, I thought, or maybe some donor with more money than musicality.
The pegasus flew onto the stage and offered me his hoof. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Joyful Noise.”
Joyful Noise! Joyful Noise was an institution in Equestrian music. He had led the Manehattan Philharmonic for over a quarter-century, ten years as principal conductor and the rest as music director. His enthusiasm was legendary. It hadn’t dimmed even as his mane turned white and his skin wrinkled. I trembled as we shook hooves.
“I’m sorry we had to meet here”—he swept a hoof at the hall—“instead of our usual rehearsal rooms. It’s too big for the two of us, but the opera’s using one room, the ballet’s in another, and the last is being repaired after a disastrous plumbing leak last week. Shall we get started?”
I could only nod. Joyful Noise! I had known he was going to conduct, but it was my first time meeting him, and I felt overwhelmed and terrified. It was said that he was only joyful as long as he liked your work. It was also said that he had exacting standards. Two weeks ago, I was sure I exceeded those standards. Now I was sure I didn’t. He would surely notice my problems with the concerto, in fact, had probably already noticed. His applause must have been a courtesy.
He set a score on the piano and flipped it open. We discussed tempi and dynamics. After a while we played, him on piano and me on cello. He wanted the first movement to be quicker, while I pushed for it to be more stately. I wanted the second movement to be soft, but he convinced me it needed more dynamic range.
We made steady progress until the third movement. The sad note that had been distressing me so much sounded almost as bad as the nightmarish noises that had chased me on the train last night. At the conclusion of the phrase, I stopped. “Can we try that again?” I asked. We played the phrase again, but it sounded no better. “I’ve been fighting that note for over a week now, and I can’t get it to sound right.”
Joyful Noise raised an eyebrow. “What’s wrong with it?”
“If I only knew.” I sat in dark silence and thought about Vinyl.
When I didn’t say anything more, he said, “I’m sorry to bring this up, but I heard that a friend of yours recently passed away.”
“My roommate. We met at Filliard.” I sighed. I was tired of explaining our relationship. “She would’ve known what to do about that note.”
Joyful Noise closed the keyboard cover and swung one leg over the piano bench, straddling it and facing me. “Three years after I started here, my father died unexpectedly. I heard on a Wednesday evening. We were scheduled to perform Coltzart’s Requiem on Friday. It was a favorite of his. Well, in the middle of Thursday’s rehearsal, I started crying and couldn’t stop. I had to halt the rehearsal and tell everypony to take a break. Somepony passed me a hoofkerchief; I never found out who. After the rehearsal, Forte Piano, who was music director then, came to me. He was a real serious type, always gruff, more forte than piano. But he said, ‘If you need to miss Friday, I’ll take care of everything.’”
I understood his true meaning immediately. He was trying to protect the Philharmonic. If I couldn’t perform adequately, then he wanted me to back out now. He would get somepony to replace me, likely the Philharmonic’s principal cellist. “A generous offer,” I said. Except it wasn’t, not for me. Canceling now would give me a reputation as unreliable. No orchestra, not even a minor one, would risk hiring me after that. “But I’m guessing you performed. I know I would have.”
Joyful Noise swung his leg back over the piano bench. “Forte hated when conductors spoke from the podium. He thought it made the symphony feel like a pops concert. So that Friday, before we started the Requiem, I turned to the audience and announced that the performance was dedicated to the memory of my father. Remembering Forte’s tail twitch still makes chuckle.” He lifted the keyboard cover. “The note sounds fine.”
Despite Joyful Noise’s approval, I wasn’t satisfied. The concerto’s sad note was supposed to be an emotional climax, and instead, it sounded empty. Normally I felt confident this close to a concert, but I spent the evening in my hotel room anxiously trying to fix the note. I tried to imagine what Vinyl would have done with it. During our musical games, she had sometimes taken pieces I had been working on, changed them in subtle ways, and thrown them at me. The first few times she did it, the notes the composer had written were etched too deeply into my mind, and I scrambled simply to play what I knew. Before long, however, I learned. When she changed chords or modified the rhythm, I could respond in kind. Soon after that, I could make modifications of my own, and it became great fun. I could make a song sound however I wanted.
Except now. I tried every trick I had ever heard Vinyl use, hoping to make the note sound like anything at all, but it was always an unfeeling void.
The next morning was the first rehearsal. Joyful Noise was a phenomenal conductor, and the orchestra was extraordinary. With the tiniest wave of his hoof he could completely change their timbre. We worked through the concerto methodically, familiarizing them with how I wanted it played. After the sad note, Joyful Noise stopped. “How was it?” he asked me.
From the way he stood and the tone of his voice, I knew he was satisfied. Yet I said, “Can we do it again?”
“What’s bothering you?”
I chewed my lip, unable to articulate my reasoning. I settled on, “It’s not sad enough.”
Joyful Noise raised his baton. “All right, everypony, you heard her. Sadder.”
I mentally cursed myself. I was playing with some of the greatest musicians in Equestria, and I had given them a useless instruction, one that couldn’t possibly help them make the music sound right. But there was nothing they could do, anyway, because I was the real problem. I was sure there was something wrong with how I was playing that note, but I had no idea what it was, much less how to fix it. After the rehearsal, I spent the rest of the day on tedious technical drudgery. Scales on every string. Scales crossing strings. Intervals. Bowing exercises. Hoofing exercises. Pizzicato exercises. When I had done every exercise I could think of, I did them all again. I felt like the kind of hack who plays with perfect pitch and rhythm but no more emotion than a waxed floor.
The following day was the concert. We held a dress rehearsal in the morning. The orchestra was spectacular, while I sounded dreadful. I was sure the concert would be a disaster. The audience would jeer at me and laugh me off the stage. It would be thoroughly and irredeemably humiliating.
My parents were both music teachers in Trottingham. I started playing violin and piano when I entered preschool. At that age, I thought they were entertaining toys. I first heard a cello a year later. I was with my father when he stopped by a music store for some reason or other. From the back of the store, I heard a beautiful sound. I followed it, transfixed, to a practice room, and peeked in.
The room had a keyboard on one side and a poster of Beethoofen on the other. Sitting on a chair in the middle was a student, school-aged and much older than me. She was warming up on a sonorous reddish-brown cello. I watched her bow stroke back and forth and her hoof slide up and down the hoofboard. The instrument shone like there was a spotlight on it, and the sound was deep, rich, husky, and silky all at once. It was gorgeous. I was in love.
When the student saw me, watching half hidden from behind the door frame, she stopped. “Hi,” she said.
“Wha’s dat?” I asked, hoof in my mouth like the overawed filly I was.
“This? It’s a cello,” said the student.
“Cello,” I murmured.
My father interrupted. “Sorry to bother you,” he told the student. “Octavia, it’s time to go.”
“I wanna cello,” I told him.
He didn’t think I was serious. When we got home, I tuned my violin down as low as I could and tried to hold it like a cello. The strings came loose, and the bridge fell off. My parents thought it was funny the first time. Before long, it wasn’t funny anymore. They rented me the tiniest cello they could find, and I thought it was the best toy ever.
When I entered school, I brought my cello for show-and-tell. My teacher asked if I wanted to play for the class. I think she expected me to play a note or two, or at best to scratch my way through a children’s song. After all, I hadn’t yet learned to read, neither letters nor music. But I enthusiastically burst into an etude I had learned by ear. When I finished, everypony clapped. They were impressed, but I didn’t understand why. I thought everypony played music the way I did.
My parents didn’t want me to tour as a child prodigy, but they did get me excellent lessons at the Trottingham Conservatory of Music. A few years later, at the same time the fillies and colts at school started swooning over each other, I decided I was a musician. I didn’t just want to be or plan to be a musician. I was. Music was the only thing that mattered to me. Not romance, not sports, not hobbies, not any of the things other ponies occupied themselves with. Music was my essence and my being. My life would be music and music alone, from that moment until I breathed my last.
My games with Vinyl, which were at first a trifling pastime, gradually became serious. We began to make music together, good and fun music that was somewhere between my classical style and her contemporary one. For a long time, our music lasted only as long as we played it. That changed after a long jam session one Tuesday. I had recently come back from a concert in Vanhoover and had a couple of weeks at home before my next performance. Vinyl had worked a late-night gig at a club in Canterlot over the weekend, but now she had nothing on her schedule until later in the week. That morning, soon after we woke, we started jamming and didn’t stop. We must have played for twelve hours straight, maybe more. When one of us needed a break, the other kept the music going. We spent most of the day toying with one melody in particular, trying out variations and developing it in different ways. By evening, we had made a breakthrough. The melody had become a song. I had never thought of myself as a composer, and Vinyl refused to describe herself as one, but we had written a song. Our song.
I like performing. I like the feeling of being on stage in front of a crowd and having them listen to me. I wanted to perform our song somewhere and somehow. Vinyl didn’t like that kind of attention. She was shy by nature, so even though we had a song, she didn’t want to perform it live. Besides, we had only one song, not a whole set. We compromised and recorded it instead. A week after we wrote it, she set up microphones for us in our home. To muffle the room’s echo, I hung blankets like tapestries. The final recording was quick. We made a few takes, and she set to work editing them together. I cooked us a celebratory lunch.
I wasn’t sure whether we would ever write a second song. My concert schedule made it impossible to spend many days jamming with Vinyl. Sometimes when I was free, her gig schedule meant she wasn’t. But when we both had a few hours, we would play. It was months before we had anything else decent, and months more before our second song was finished. The songs got easier after that. All that time, I knew she was writing her own music. While I didn’t know about her blistering pace, I knew she was faster alone than with me. I sometimes wondered why she took the time to write songs with me at all.
After we had an album’s worth of material, I coaxed her into performing it with me. I arranged for a casual performance at a pub in Ponyville. I told a few ponies about it, but we didn’t put any real effort into advertising. We had an audience of maybe forty ponies. Most of them were regular pub patrons who weren’t there for our performance. I wasn’t sure whether Jasmine Leaf would be there, but I felt pleased when I saw her in the audience.
The crowd loved us. After our set, Vinyl and I went to Sugarcube Corner and ordered doughnuts. We stayed for hours, sitting at a café table and giggling like fillies while we hummed little snatches of music to each other. We ate so many doughnuts that we both had stomachaches, and we left only because the bakery closed. As we staggered home, drunk on hot chocolate, we belted melodies from our songs at our unfortunate neighbors. We had a marvelous time.
That was two weeks before Vinyl died. It was our only live performance as a duo.
By the night of my performance with the Manehattan Philharmonic, my nerves were wrecked. I could have rivaled the meanest jokes about Twilight Sparkle, the kind that claim she has a nineteen-part checklist for drinking a glass of water or that she had to read a five-hundred page book to learn how to say, “Hello.” I walked onto the stage in a trance. I remember the audience clapping. After that, I must have I sat down and played.
Playing music transports me to a world where sounds and melodies and harmonies take on real and tangible existence. When I play, nothing else enters my mind. Not bright stage lights in my eyes, or the chill of a cavernous concert hall, or coughing from the audience. The only thing I’m aware of is the music.
I played the first movement with majesty and panache. Yet I was already looking ahead to the third movement, its recapitulation of the melody, and its long sad note, and I was frightened. The second movement, supposed to be calm and confident, came out wistful instead. Even though every note was how I had planned, the effect wasn’t what I wanted. By the time we began the third movement, I already knew what would happen. The long, sad note—the note that had bedeviled me so much—the note I had labored so diligently on—sounded worse than when I had practiced it, worse than during rehearsal, worse than I could have ever imagined it: dry, bland, dull, stony, apathetic, and lifeless.
The moment I was backstage, tears welled up in my eyes. I fought to keep them down as I took a curtain call. The audience kept cheering, and I wiped my eyes and took another curtain call, and another, and another. It seemed endless. The whole time, my throat clenched, my chest heaved, tears blurred my vision, and the long, sad note rang in my ears.
As quickly as I could, I put my cello away and strapped it to my back. I knew I was about to collapse into a blubbering heap, and I wanted to get away before it happened. But when I was just steps away from the exit, Joyful Noise caught me. He grinned. “That was wonderful,” he said. “Really terrific! How soon can we have you back?”
“Don’t mock me!” I screeched. His eyes went wide, and he shrank back. In shock, I covered my mouth with my hoof. I had just snapped at one of the most powerful figures in Equestrian music. If my career hadn’t been over before, it was now. I started to sob. “I was horrible! I’m completely incompetent and I don’t deserve to be on a stage!”
“Ms. Melody—” he began.
Two weeks of pain burst white-hot and savage from my lungs, tearing through my throat and surging into a scream of rage and helpless misery. “The only good thing about that performance was that she wasn’t there, so I couldn’t disappoint her!”
Before he could reply, I darted through the door. Outside, a crowd of audience members already hovered around the entrance, waiting to glimpse me up close. I barely had my nose through the door before they were shouting, thrusting their programs at me, and demanding autographs. The concert hall’s security guard tried to push them back, but they were mad with excitement. I tried to call out, “I’m sorry,” but my voice was so rough with anger and tears that it didn’t carry over the tumult of the terrible crowd. I shoved my way through and fled.
I fled from the crowd. I fled from the concert. I fled across glittering boulevards and through dim putrid alleys, losing my way as I tried to outrun the long sad note that had tormented me ever since Vinyl’s death and that I could hear even now in my ears.
I fled down an empty street lined with dark, sleepy houses and manicured front lawns. There was light in one of the houses, and I heard somepony playing a piano inside. “Shut up!” I screamed at the window. “Just shut up!” The piano stopped for a moment. Then it roared and the sad note lunged at me. I knew that I must be delirious, that the note could not have physical form and could not lunge, but I could feel it moving, reaching for me, and I panicked and fled again. “Shut up!” I screamed. The street was quiet except for my voice and the drumming of my hooves, but I kept screaming, “Shut up! Shut up!” I cut across busy streets, galloping wildly through traffic, trying to escape the phantasm, always screaming, “Shut up!” I screamed until my breath couldn’t keep pace with my galloping, screamed until my lungs burned, screamed until my voice turned hoarse and could do no more than chant in a scratchy whisper, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” But the note still chased me, dissonant and unrelenting and ineluctable.
A shop window on a bustling sidewalk halted me. Its brightly lit sign promised, “all nite donuts.” A weird, gross compulsion seized me. I barged into the shop, and the warm, sweet smell of fresh doughnuts clogged my nostrils and fogged my mind. I shouted, “I need a dozen doughnuts right now!” Everypony in the shop froze and gaped at me. The young couple at the head of the line, a green earth pony stallion and a tan unicorn mare, cowered and backed away as I cut in front of them. I flung a hoofful of bits over the counter at a middle-aged yellow pegasus wearing a striped red and white apron and a white paper cap. He had already assembled a box for me. “I’ll take that one!” I smacked the glass display case with my hoof. “And that one! And that one!” Smack! Smack! The staff and customers were silent. The only sounds were my raspy voice, my hoof against the display case, the clicking of tongs, the crinkling of wax paper, and the note I couldn’t escape.
The pegasus tied the box shut. I grabbed the string in my teeth and galloped back to my hotel room, still pursued by the note. I set my cello in the corner and flung myself onto the bed with my box of doughnuts. I tried to tear the string, but when it slipped through my teeth, I ripped off a corner of the box instead. I jammed a sugar-glazed doughnut into my mouth. When I had chewed my first bite halfway, I opened my mouth wide and pushed the rest of the doughnut in with my hoof. Crumbs of glaze spilled from my mouth and spread across the duvet cover, and sound of the note in my ears grew painfully loud. I grabbed a blueberry cake doughnut and pushed it in behind the glazed doughnut. It was more crumbly and less fluffy, and together, the two doughnuts made a thick wad of dough that I chewed with desperation.
Tears formed in my eyes as I swallowed the wad of dough and the thunderous note continued a fearsome crescendo. I hurled a chocolate glazed donut into my face, rammed it down my throat, and grabbed a jelly doughnut. The jelly leaked out of my mouth and collected in globs around my lips, and the lubrication helped me thrust the rest of the donut in. I gulped, swallowing both the doughnut and a whimper. When I grabbed a powdered sugar doughnut, a fine dusting of sugar floated into the air, caking on my hoof and mixing with the jelly around my mouth to make little lumps that fell on me and stuck in my coat. My sixth doughnut was filled with custard, and when I swallowed, my stomach heaved in protest at the heavy, sticky mass.
As I reached for a seventh doughnut, one with strawberry pink icing and rainbow sprinkles, the note became deafening. I clutched at my ears and shrieked with pain. I wanted to stifle my cries with the doughnut, but I was seeing double now, and when I tried to grab it, my hoof swiped at empty space. I took it in both hooves and raised it, shaking, to my lips. It slipped, landing frosting down on the bed and scattering sprinkles over the duvet cover. My hooves felt heavy and clumsy as I lifted the donut again. I chewed, but my jaw was numb and limp, and I was too weak to hold my mouth closed. Sloppy bits of chewed doughnut fell out, and as they did, I picked them up and inserted them back into my mouth. My stomach heaved again, and liquefied, half-digested donuts came out. I covered my mouth with my hooves and tried to swallow, but my stomach exploded, and I spewed vomit onto the bed. I crumpled from pain and nausea, landing on the box and in the pool of vomit.
I lay that way all night, too weak to move, and I descended, weeping, into an exhausted sleep of despair. In my dreams, Vinyl’s image visited me. She was a great distance away, but she was so vivid that I could distinguish every hair on her coat. Her skin was luminous, and its glow suffused the dream world with a thick radiance that seemed to press against my skin. Her eyes rested on me with an incandescent gaze at once piercing and gentle. Her mouth moved, but I could make out no sound, not from her nor from anything else. I reached out my hoof, hoping to touch her one final time, but the distance was too vast and her glow too dense, and I was unable to reach even a little way across it. I wanted her to reach back to me, so I called to her. Her mouth moved again, but I still could make out no sound. “I can’t hear you!” I called. “I want to hear you!” She didn’t move. I pleaded for her to come back to our cottage and back to me, but she remained where she was, gazing at me with an expression of tranquility and forgiveness, as I called, and called again, and called again.
I woke to a frightful stench. The morning sun was slowly warming the mixture of sugar, dough, and vomit that had dried on my flank. I groaned. When the sound of my voice died away, I realized that I was encapsulated in utter silence. I marveled at the silence while I soaked in the bath. I was used to having music in my head at all times. It had been there for as long as I could remember. Now there was nothing but the noise of the water sloshing in the tub as I scrubbed at the filth encrusting my coat.
The bath water got so dirty that I emptied it and took a shower. After that, I spent nearly a half hour brushing my coat and mane. There was still a disgusting mess on the bed, but there was little I could do about it. After I had packed my things, I scribbled a note for the cleaning staff that said, “Sorry,” and left them some extra bits. The whole time, not a single note of music entered my mind.
The pony behind the hotel’s front desk knew my name without being prompted. “Good morning, Ms. Melody. How was your stay?”
I wasn’t in a mood to talk, but she looked like she expected an answer. I said, “Fine,” hoping that if I sounded impatient, she’d leave me alone.
The clerk at the train station also knew my name. “How may I help you, Ms. Melody?” He sounded eager.
I kept my voice flat. “Ticket to Ponyville.”
“Right away, ma’am.” He was quick and seemed excited. I avoided his eyes and stared at the wall behind him.
I took a seat inside the station while I waited for the train. Before long, a pair of ponies seated on the opposite side of the station noticed me and started talking in a low voice. One of them, an azure mare a little older than me, kept looking back and forth between me and her newspaper. I heard her say, “I think that’s really her.”
Her companion, a lemon-colored stallion, turned all the way around in his seat to look at me. “That does look like a cello case,” he said. The mare kept watching me until their train arrived.
My train was too crowded for me to sit alone. I ended up next to an old stallion whose face was buried in the sports section of the newspaper. He got off a few stops later in Hoofboken and left his newspaper. When I was sure he was gone, I picked it up and opened it to the front page, hoping for something distracting like a lurid scandal. I had no such luck. Above the fold was boring local politics. I read only a couple of paragraphs before flipping the newspaper over.
Below the fold, a headline proclaimed, “Virtuoso Melody thrills, inspires with Beethoofen.” Next to it was a picture of me playing in front of Joyful Noise and the Manehattan Philharmonic. I hadn’t even realized there were photographers last night. I read the headline again, and my stomach lurched, but as I had skipped breakfast, nothing came out. I tossed the newspaper onto the empty seat next to me, but the picture, still visible, seemed to taunt me. I threw it into the next row of seats where I couldn’t see it. Then I realized I had to dry my eyes.
The rattle of the train was pleasant today. For most of the ride, it was the only thing I heard. My mind was completely empty of music as I watched Equestria roll by. There were so many ponies, so many families, so many little homes, all seeming so peaceful and content. I had always imagined that, when I was famous, I would buy a mansion. I hadn’t wanted a flat like my parents or a cozy cottage with a roommate. I had wanted something huge, ostentatious, even gaudy, and I had wanted it all for myself. But right now, I didn’t.
That evening, I opened the door to our cottage—my cottage, now—and froze in shock. All of Vinyl’s belongings had been removed. The framed albums Vinyl had hung on the walls; her speakers mounted from the rafters; her disco ball; her shelves of records; everything had vanished. In place of her keyboard and computer were bare floorboards.
After a whole day on a bumpy, boring train, I would normally have been excited to take out my cello and start playing. Instead, I looked for traces of Vinyl. Her dishes were missing from the kitchen cabinets. Her toiletries were gone from the bathroom. Her bed had been removed. Before my trip, seeing her belongings had reminded me of her passing, and those reminders had saddened me. Now the emptiness of our home did the same thing. I spent the rest of the evening sitting on the couch and staring blankly and uncomprehendingly at the desolation.
I wandered aimlessly through our house all the next morning, looking for signs of Vinyl, checking and re-checking rooms that I knew were empty. She had left behind only negative spaces, scratches on the floor near her chair and nicks in the paint on the wall. When I tried to distract myself by going outside, I found a letter in our mailbox. It was a sympathy card from Jasmine Leaf. I stuffed it back in the mailbox, went inside, and cried.
Late that morning, High Fidelity and Ivory Keys knocked on my door. They wanted to take me to lunch. I agreed. It would be a welcome distraction. I still hadn’t touched my cello. I hadn’t imagined even a single note since the concert.
They took me to Café Hay. While we waited for our menus, Ivory Keys asked me, “So how was Manehattan?”
I hesitated. I was supposed to be a rising star, and the concert was supposed to be my big breakthrough. I was tempted to lie, to tell them it had gone well and even that it was a great triumph. But my mouth opened on its own, without rational thought and as if by emotional instinct. “I’m through. I’ll never work again.”
While we ordered and waited for our food, I told them how I had struggled against the sad note. I told them about the disaster of the concert and my outburst at Joyful Noise. And I told them how much I had wished for Vinyl. “She was the best roommate,” I said.
High Fidelity and Ivory Keys shared a sidelong glance. High Fidelity said, “When we were packing, we found something. Something Vinyl left for you.” She reached into her saddlebag and pulled out a box. It was short, rectangular, a little longer than it was wide, and gift-wrapped with shiny white and gray striped paper. It was tied with a purple ribbon and had a tag that said, “Happy birthday, Octavia!”
“What is it?” I asked. “My birthday isn’t for another month.”
“We don’t know anything about it,” said Ivory Keys. “Except that it was hidden and has your name on it.”
“Should I open it?”
“It’s yours now,” said High Fidelity. “It’s up to you.”
I took the ribbon in my mouth and pulled the knot loose. One fold at a time, I removed the wrapping paper, not tearing or even wrinkling it. The box was thin white cardboard and looked like it held a sweater. The lid seemed awkward to slide off, and it moved reluctantly. Only after it was off did I realize I had opened the box upside down.
Inside was a stack of music paper. The top sheet, which was only partially full, concluded with a sustained chord and a bold double bar line. It looked like a finale. I flipped the sheet over. I didn’t recognize the melody, but it tugged at my mind as if I should. I couldn’t figure out why Vinyl would give me sheet music. I already had editions of all the major cello works and most of the minor ones. I knew much better than she did what else I wanted, and she would have known that.
But as I read the next sheet, the notes began to rearrange themselves. They seemed to leave the page and float above it, drifting into patterns on the edge of my recognition. Their constituent ink percolated through the air, abandoning shape and forming a diffuse cloud that pulsated in a steady rhythm. From the cloud, I heard faint noises that rose and fell in time with the pulses. The cloud expanded and enveloped me, and the noises grew into sonorous choruses of voices and instruments. All around me were clear melodies and rich harmonies, and it was music, and I felt the music, and the music was around me and in me and a part of me. I could hear music again, and it was beautiful.
“What’s wrong?” asked Ivory Keys.
I wiped tears from my eyes and whispered, “I know what this is.” As I flipped the stack of music over, my heart pounded a beat into my ears, a beat that carried memories, a beat full of anticipation and excitement. The title page said, “Suite for Cello and Piano. By Octavia Melody and Vinyl Scratch. Arranged by Vinyl Scratch. Dedicated to Octavia Melody, my best friend.” I read the dedication a second time, then a third. “My best friend,” I whispered. I hugged the score to my chest, careful not to crumple it, and sniffled. “My best friend.”
“Are you okay?” asked High Fidelity.
I nodded and wiped my eyes again. “I’m going to miss her forever.” I put the score down and showed them the title page. I told them how we had come to write music together, about our recordings and our pub performance. “It was just for fun. For us. But this”—I laid my hoof on the precious score—“is for me. It’s our whole set, arranged so that I can perform it in even the stodgiest concert halls. I can’t imagine playing it with anypony but her. Not yet. But I think I could someday. I think that’s what she wanted. If that’s okay with you?”
Ivory Keys nodded. “We’ve decided to publish her music. We’ve written to some publishers, but we’re worried they’ll think it’s just a vanity project. If you started performing it, maybe they’d listen.”
Just then our food came. I put the score back in the box and stowed it where it wouldn’t be damaged. I munched pensively, my mind abuzz. I dabbed my mouth with my napkin and said, “She knew how much I like performing. She wouldn’t have given it to me if she hadn’t wanted it performed. So I have to. I have to perform it. For her. I’ll have to find a pianist. And somewhere to do the premiere. But I have a few connections now and—” A wonderful idea entered my mind. “Joyful Noise did ask how soon they could have me back. I need to write him an apology, anyway.” I thought of the sympathy card sitting in my mailbox. “Him and others.”
“Thank you,” said High Fidelity. Now she was tearing up, too. “Vinyl always said you were nice.”
I leaned over and hugged her. “It’s the least I can do for my best friend.”
That afternoon, I went to the cemetery. It was enclosed by a low wall of ancient stones worn smooth by tears. I entered, my cello on my back, through the great wrought iron gate that demarcated the limits of life. The air inside was slow, laden with the spirits of ponies lying at rest, and never disquieted by the acts of the living. The cemetery measured time in eons, in ponies buried and remembered and forgotten.
I walked up a dirt path trod by generations of visitors. Pilgrimages like mine had begun long before I had been born and would continue long after. The oldest headstones I passed were crumbling and mossy, and most of their names and dates and inscriptions had been effaced by time. Here and there I recognized old Ponyville family names, like “Apple” on a rough-hewn fieldstone or “Rich” on a marble mausoleum. Each had been erected by family and friends not for the benefit of the pony buried beneath, a pony who could no longer see nor care about the marker, but as monuments to and declarations of the love still borne in the hearts of the living. Row after row, grave after grave, were epitaphs saying, “loving father,” “devoted mother,” and “dearest friend.”
The path guided me up a hill to a stout oak tree encrusted with decades of bark. Its gnarled old branches stretched over the cemetery like shields that repelled the cares and follies of the world. In its shade was a timeless rest, a final symphonic movement that extended into eternity and was marked with a solemn, “tacet.” There, lit by the fading yellow beams of the afternoon sun, was a fresh plot. At its head was a temporary marker, a white-painted board of pine wood that said in heavy, black capital letters, “Vinyl Scratch.” Before it was a slightly sunken rectangle of earth covered by fresh sod and a bouquet of flowers. There, in the ground, was my best friend.
I took out my cello and closed my eyes. I could hear Beethoofen’s cello concerto in my mind even before I started to play. When I reached the sad note in the third movement, it was perfect.
