The Eighth Note
They say the song causes memories to rush in—real or imagined, it’s impossible to know. It is only ever heard by one person at a time, late at night, over the radio.
It started simply enough—a caller on the midnight radio show in New Harbor claimed to hear a melody woven inside the silence between adverts. No words. No tune they knew. Just eight notes, haunting, and altogether impossible to forget once heard. No one else had caught it, not even the show’s host, Avery. She let it pass as a crank call, a local prankster on a slow night.
But later, as the city’s sodium lights blurred through Avery’s studio window, the melody came floating through her headphones. The song was there—thin, but unmistakable. Her fingers froze over the controls, goosebumps rising on her arms. When the next ad break ended, Avery’s voice trembled, but habit took over. She continued: “That was ‘Through the Night’ by The Faders. I—I think—maybe some of you are hearing something new tonight. Let’s keep the lines open.”
Each night, more listeners called in about the eight notes, describing them differently. “It’s like my mother humming when she thought I was asleep,” one man sobbed. “It’s every apology I never made,” a woman whispered. Others grew angry trying to hum the notes; no two versions matched. Some were sure they’d invented the song, or dreamed it.
The station’s engineer, Lila, ran diagnostics. Nothing. No interference, no hidden track. But now, Lila too sometimes heard it. She’d never owned a piano, but her hands moved in the air in careful, practiced arcs when she was alone, miming chords.
Avery began to dread and anticipate the song’s arrival. At first, she wondered if she was losing her grip. She pressed her palms to the glass booth, looked out at the rainy street. Her life, always just outside the realm of connection, felt softer, fluxing, like the moment before sleep. The eight notes gave her hope and fear: hope that she wasn’t alone; fear that she was the only one who knew it was real.
She stopped sleeping well, waiting for the next broadcast. Her memories bled at the edges: had she called her father before he died? Had she always wanted to host radio at night? Did she love Lila? She would listen to the eight notes and think, this song was meant for me. But by morning, all she could recall was emptiness, a bottomless yearning.
The city changed in subtle ways. People who had heard the notes acted differently. A barista apologized for an argument no one remembered. A teenager returned a lost kitten to a family that didn’t own a pet. Rumors swirled about reunions, about strangers meeting in silence and tears. The song changed the way they viewed their own pasts and futures, as though the melody allowed entry to another layer of reality—a shadow city beneath New Harbor’s neon.
Lila noticed the shift in Avery, the way her hands trembled, the way she would hum in the quiet between tracks. “Avery,” she said softly, “what do you hear?”
Avery hesitated. “Everything I ever wanted, just out of reach. But it feels like I could almost have it—if only I remembered the words.”
“What if there aren’t any words?” Lila traced a pattern on her own wrist, an old scar from long before they met. “Maybe the song isn’t about remembering. Maybe it’s about creating—giving yourself a second chance.”
Avery nearly laughed. “I don’t even know who I’d be, if I had that chance.”
But one night, Avery found a cassette in her studio mailbox. No note. She played it and, beneath static and faint voices, the eight notes filtered through—the clearest she’d ever heard them. As she listened, Avery felt herself become unstuck, unmoored. She saw versions of her life scatter in reflected glass: lives where she’d called her father, lives where she’d told Lila the truth, lives where she was nobody at all.
And she understood. The song wasn’t a memory at all. It was possibility—a brief passing through every path she could have chosen, every person she almost became.
On air, Avery spoke: “If you’re hearing this, and you know the song, you’re not alone. It’s not your memory. It’s our chance. So tonight, I choose.”
She walked into the producer’s booth—past midnight, the city hushed—and placed her hand over Lila’s. Avery’s voice shook. “Come with me, after. Let’s make something new.”
Lila’s smile trembled, yes bright as the dawn.
For weeks, the song persisted, but less often, fading as quietly as it had come. Callers thanked Avery for playing it, but she never did—she only listened, one last time, with the woman she chose, as the eighth note drifted away.
In New Harbor, on silent nights, the song sometimes returns—a radio broadcast that can’t be traced, heard only by those who need it most: the lonely, the regretful, the hopeful, each making their own eighth note, their own second chance, carried far into the night.
###END###
