Every morning, as soon as the five turned to six and the right digits faded to zeros, Lena’s melody played from the alarm clock on her side of the bed. It began with a simple piano arpeggio, climbing from the scale to the top of the mountain and halfway back down again—five notes up, three down. Harold had played her mid-ranged melody with one hand, just for her, for what seemed like years and years ago, had recorded it on the grand piano in the TV area; and every time, exactly ten seconds after the clock with its dark countenance and red facial features turned six, Harold’s machine on his side of the bed played his pre-recorded harmony that lifted the melody toward the sky. The strings and song swelled and died almost as soon as they began with the two major-seventh chord structure he had titled, years ago, “Lena’s Melody.”
       As Lena listened to it and stared up at the ceiling, daydreaming, which she had begun to do every morning for what seemed like forever—though she knew it was precisely 725 days— he displayed an image like a movie projector on the rough surface of the ceiling: her husband, Harold, head under the morning sheets with her, holding her gaze and smiling, saying nothing and yet everything. The light made the sheets, the room, everything glow brighter than heaven. When their baby began to cry, they both grinned and shot up, their world no longer just them and a sheet. Harold, however, was faster, and Lena, the Lena on the ceiling, turned to her left and sat up on her elbow to watch her husband, her shiny brunette hair hanging loosely and draping at the straps of her white nightshirt and tan shoulders. And Harold, with the rectangular spotlight that angled down, perfect and unobstructed, no blinds to cast a single shadow upon them, hugging and wrapping gently around her husband and infant daughter, falling with the weightless, glowing solar dust pouring through the window. By the translucent and somewhat ghostly curtains that blew in the morning breeze, he looked down with a soft smile and wiped at the spittle and spurting bubbles on their child’s tiny lips, her, fifteen months old, protesting with little whines.
       But now, back in reality, her husband shot up out of bed, rising like some silent count. She could almost hear the da-nah-da of Bach’s organ as he rose, could almost hear the sound of a movie tape slapping a rhythm as it spun from its reel. She smiled softly to herself as his blurred image—the real image—formed in the corner of her eye, and the shifting images on the ceiling faded back into the stale popcorn texture.
       She moved her gaze from the bumps of the ceiling to Harold, who spun to his right, positioning his bare back to Lena, only in his blue-and-white striped boxers. He got down from the bed, standing straight without a word. When he reached the bathroom door, he closed it with a quiet bang; Lena stroked with her flat palm, wedding ring still on, the depression he made in the bed, attempting to feel his warmth.
       After some time, twelve minutes, she whispered, he would come out to breakfast and fidget with his laptop at the kitchen table. He did it every morning. Out of curiosity, and as though she were playing a little game only with herself to kill time, Lena shuffled out of bed, throwing the white sheets in her pristine white room to the side without folding them, and got down on her hands and knees to peek under the bathroom door. The yellow light shone through, and she could see Harold’s bare feet against the polished white tiles, his skin with seemingly no protruding veins and his leg hairs perfect and untangled, pulled down firmly like iron filaments to a magnet. She could hear the sound of an electric razor and nothing more. She saw no movement at all.
She got up, wiping at the reddened indents that the white carpet made on her skin, and she sighed when they wouldn’t wipe away, and she walked to the crib that, from her perspective, was in the right corner of the room. Now, she knew, if she were to look, the clock would tell her it was seven minutes past six—the time when the baby always seemed to cry. Like clockwork, and with Lena just a few steps away, the baby surely did begin to wail, the noise crescendoing from a muffled hum to a steady pulse that came in bursts of “Wahhh, Wahhh, Wahhh,” with a breath, and then again, “Wahhh, wahhh.” Lena concluded that her daughter, Sophie, was musical just like her father was, a little virtuoso, she thought, and another grin crept across her face like the morning sun that shone through the blinds just above the crib, casting lines of light and shadow from the half-shut blinds on her baby swathed in faded pink.
       As soon as Lena cradled Sophie and cooed to her, Sophie stopped her crying. Instead, she stared blankly up at her mother with tiny lips that were not wet and spewed no bubbles. Still, her mother wiped carefully at her mouth with her blouse, the same one with the falling rose petals she wore yesterday, and put her back in her crib, Sophie quickly sleeping silently, her father closing the bathroom door and walking without a word, now fully dressed in a blue button-down and black slacks, to the kitchen table.
       In eight minutes, Lena whispered to herself under her breath, Harold would have coffee at his seat across from the window, and Lena would have breakfast placed to the left of him; as always, Harold would not even sip at his coffee, leaving it to grow cold.
       And so, killing time, Lena, waiting for Harold to complete his second step of the morning, simply sat on her fuzzy carpet floor and stared at the photographs, the darkest part of the room, on the walls and on her wooden nightstand, watching, as if in an Edward Hopper painting, for how the light played and danced across them as she swayed slightly, making the memories come to life and animate the smiling figures, baby and husband and her. It made Lena, yet once again, though somewhat painfully and quiveringly, smile, and she made some clucking, choking noise in the back of her throat as her eyelids fluttered. She turned her eyes quickly to her daughter.
       Sophie slept soundly and wouldn’t awaken for another half-hour. Lena sat down without a word at the kitchen table, her husband with thick black headphones on, and messing with mixing a song, his eyes glowing from the screen, squinting behind his thick black frames and dirty lenses that he never cleaned—his left hand covering his mouth and chiseled chin as he worked. In the past, Lena developed digital designs as they both ate breakfast, since Harold was on his computer every morning—it was essential that he begin to work with his passion as soon as he awoke, or so he once said—but she grew tired of her company requesting that no more art be created—it confused people too frequently, wouldn’t let them sink their teeth into something familiar, and was bad for their numbers, or her ‘higher-up’ and once friend Lorie claimed, shutting down Lena’s pleads and proposals—and instead only watched as he worked, whispering to him and knowing that he would never hear her, missing the warmth of her husband, missing the feel of her pen in her hands with her ideas flowing from her mind and fingertips to the glowing screen of her tablet. She missed creating with color and hated the drag-and-drop method which had become her job, which she could do in five minutes flat. But most of all, she missed color in her life.
       Lena, eyelids fluttering, faked a quivering, cracked smile at him, then looked down at her reflection in her steaming black coffee to see her dark hair shroud her, surrounding her face. Her hands trembled slightly, but just enough to distort her shrunken image, and the rays from the polished glass to her left, the ones that shot through the white blinds, were just enough to make the image visible. With her right index finger slightly curled, she picked away at a piece of chipped paint on her coffee mug, still grasping it tightly with both palms and laced fingers, and inhaled, trying to smell some sort of pollen from the synthetic flowers at the center of the table, but was distracted by the rhythmic drippings of the coffee pot near the cupboards and the drippings of the stainless steel sink that wouldn’t seem to stop anytime soon, and the sound of Harold, who didn’t notice Lena or appeared not to, clicking on the pad of his laptop.
       Still trembling and peering in at her darkened reflection, she took her daily medication, her two huge, white pills, thought of taking more than she ought to take, set the cup that held an ocean, the fog of a morning lake, and her image within it back on the table with its four claw feet, and spoke, monotonously at first, with occasional vibrato when she held back tears and got choked up with no pitch and no rhythm and too many rests and not enough notes and sound, “You know… or you don’t, seeing from the way you hardly speak to me, or maybe you do and just don’t care—can’t care—I don’t know why I thought I could change anything: the past, the present, the future. I know it’s all just the same and that whatever I do, I’ll be stuck with a husband who’ll always be the same and with a child that will never be able to grow up. I guess I just thought—or hoped, I mean—that I could start again and that, if you were both still here, still with me, I could make it, could finally WANT to get out of bed in the mornings and WANT to watch you as you worked and WANT to rock Soph—the baby. Maybe I thought if I told them everything about you that they could help make you into something better than what you always were, that they could make you into the perfect husband, whatever that means anymore, that they could improve you, shape you, and not what I thought you should be, but what you always said you wanted to be.” Lena caressed her mug and darted occasional glances at Harold, continuing, her voice beginning to alter in pitch as it shook, “Sometimes I see you working and know that, for 725 days, and yes I still count, and no if you were still here I know you wouldn’t be surprised and would probably smile at me, or maybe even kiss me on the forehead—God, I miss when you did that so, so much and nothing I could do or ask of them would make you do that with any emotion anymore,” she trailed off, lips pursed. 
       “What happened to you—to us?” Again, she fell silent. Again, she spoke. 
“Harold, you’re never going to finish that song, and the only thing I have to remember you by is the melody you made for me and your strings that I can’t extract from the clocks and yes, I’ve tried, over and over again I’ve tried; THAT’S the only thing I have left of you, the only part that says you still love me, the only part that shows you maybe still care,” she leaned in close, eyes darting across his face, “If you’re still in there, do you still care? Do you still, if you can, they said you still can, love… me? Could you do that? Could you kiss me, just this once?” She reached across, applying soft pressure to his left arm, “Here, do you feel this? You’re not turning, and you’re not looking at me, so I know you don’t. I KNOW you don’t. You used to smile at me when I did this, you used to look at me with your big, soulful eyes. Now, it’s like… it’s like the skin isn’t even yours anymore.” She released her grip and stared back into her still reflection.
       “I saw you, you know. At the grocery store yesterday. The you I remember, the you I lost. You barely even looked at me. You were with your new wife: Carissa. Carissa, Carissa, Ca-ris-sa. You always loved the girls with pretty names and freckles, didn’t you?” Lena folded her arms and looked out the window, looking across her lawn. A yard windmill, rainbow, spun in the summer wind. 
       “You had your daughter with you, or she had her, and you both—sorry, you all—just looked so happy together: a perfect little triangle, small but strong. And yes, your mouth parted under those fluorescent lights, and you almost asked something of me; your face dropped and you looked as if you’d cry because you too remembered everything that happened, and I think I saw a memory, flickering behind your tired eyes, of you holding me and rolling over in our bed and just scanning me softly with a smile when the clock turned six, before you rolled over to the other side and turned your back towards me until you left; but your beautiful wife, new wife, didn’t say a word and neither could you from your beautiful mouth. You just walked away, just… just left,” she said, unfolding her arms and bending back into Harold, elbows pressed against the table and palms floating limply and uselessly in the air.
       “I miss you. I miss you, Harold. Every day I miss you. Both of you, and I… I… I wish,” she let her hands close around her hair and head that fell slowly and without power, looking down at the table, “I wish I could have started again, that I never would have even tried to make you something else, that I wouldn’t have to stare at our photos and wouldn’t have to sit at the bottom of the shower floor and still think of your feet that once touched it, that now have washed you completely down the drain. I should stop watching the water wash down the drain.” She dug her fingernails in her hair, feeling them cake up as she scratched at the thin layer of dead skin and shampoo on her scalp, “I know I should. And I should have known you could move on; you were always the stronger one, and I never was, could never seem to think of myself being able to love again. But you loved me, and I loved you, and when you love someone you’re supposed to work things out, not give up on them, and are supposed to talk because you know you can’t live, truly live, without one another, but… but that didn’t happen…” 
       “And now, now, it’s worse now. Much, much worse. It’s a thousand times worse now because I can’t get rid of you completely, never could go on without you, and Jesus, I want to, I want to so badly, but no one will take you or her because the song you’re making is still for me and not them and I can’t convince you to stop. Every song you made was for me. It kept you going, and if someone else wanted you, they would have to destroy your mind completely, would have to make a whole ’nother you.” She began to rub tufts into her hair and drag her hands across her numb face, her hands pressing tightly against the skin, her head moving as if a wounded animal in a trap in a dizzy motion, feeling a tightening pressure on her brain, the swirling of chemicals. Stopping her aching movements, she continued.
       “But… Carissa is lucky. She doesn’t even remind me of me at all. But your daughter does, has Sophie’s eyes and everything—your eyes. You still look a bit broken, like a piece will always be missing that will never be replaced. Maybe Carissa—sorry,” she put her palm flat against her forehead and let the weight pull her to the right. 
       “I’m sorry, that was rude of me. Forget I said a thing—Fuck. Fuck, I miss you. I miss creating something, making the sad but colorful covers to your albums… fuck. Fuck, fuck, Harold…,” she said, hitting her head with the skin and lines of her palm with every repeated word, peeking at him through the spaces between her fingers before resting her right hand on her cheek and looking out the window again, the breeze picking up and the windmill running in circles. Her words were muffled and slurred from her lips covered by her palm. 
       “We were supposed to grow old together. Our lives were supposed to be perfect, and we were supposed to get out of the suburbs, and I wouldn’t have to wave at Mr. Rosenfold at exactly—well shit, there he is now. Better wave to Mr. Rosenfold, Harold. Wave, wave, waves, wave…” She slurred off, almost drunkenly,  almost grabbed his hand and made a wave motion to her older neighbor who held a deep sadness in his eyes that was evident even from far away who waved every morning through the blinds, trying to get Lena outside for once, seeming to beckon sadly; but Lena was afraid her husband wouldn’t even react from grabbing his wrist; instead, she dropped her hands loosely upon the tabletop in empty cups, her back beginning to slouch, and stared at the table and its blurred pictures on the polished surface.
       “Uhm… Don’t mistake me as sad. I don’t want you to be. I can’t be sad because all those pills and chemicals make me feel nothing at all; it’s sort of ironic. Isn’t it ironic, that even when I cry, I don’t feel a thing? And yet you—HE, sorry—still worries, will always worry, but doesn’t know what to say. What to say, oh, what to say… If you were still here, maybe you could kiss me, but it’s not the same kissing those lips, doesn’t taste the same, doesn’t smell the same—isn’t the same. You’re too perfect, too imperfect, and you can’t create because whatever they put in you, did to you, won’t make you feel turmoil, misery, and you can’t create because of it, can’t do anything because of it, but at least maybe Carissa can give you the color in your life now and maybe me the misery, and the baby…” she trailed off, hands now folded limply in her lap, head cocked slightly to the side, feeling no compulsion to grasp for the table’s images cast and created by the sun, her head spinning and her speech beginning to slur.
       “I still wonder though… why couldn’t we try after she died? And did you have to leave so soon? You looked more like her, so tell me. Tell me why,” she looked back at him, anger brewing in her brown eyes, her words more confident. “WHY did you have to leave when she looked so much like HER? You said okay. I remember you saying okay, so just imagine, just IMAGINE, how terrible it was to lose you twice. TWICE. In the same year. In the same… the same MONTH, Harold. And, and 297 days later you would marry her and start again. 297 days. I even marked it on the shower wall. It’s there, carved it there with the tips of my chewed nails, and now I stopped counting because I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t…” She pursed her lips, holding back a sob, losing her voice, never gaining it. “I can’t go on like this…”
       Thirty minutes passed; Sophie was beginning to cry; in Harold’s voice, something spoke from him, out of him; his lips didn’t move; his headphones slouched and fell with a noise on the keyboard.
       Batteries low. Batteries low. Batteries low. Recharge… Me.
       Lena stared blankly at him for a moment, then reached across and put her right hand on her husband’s silicone cheek, kissed him with her flesh lips, and sat there with her eyes closed tight for a moment and, forehead against him, left a single salty tear on his head that bent downward, as if he were asleep instead of just powered down. She, without another word, scooted back, etched wood screeching against concrete tile, walked through the dark hallway into her bedroom, picked Sophie up, and rocked it without cooing, pulling it away from the light that poured through the window and into the darkness, that could be blinding to Lena but not to Sophie. Lena stared into Sophie’s blue eyes that looked just like her husband’s—her husband at the kitchen table, the thing still in her home—that reminded her of the calm, cool face of a lake from a story she once read in the papers about a girl, just fifteen months old, no foul play suspected, that drowned when her mother wasn’t watching for just thirty seconds, or so she claimed when asked repeatedly, but wasn’t ever able to cry in a cotton blanket, not even in her dreams, cry, cry—silently but felt nothing, knowing that the thing in her limp embrace would never grow up, never love, never talk, and that, though it was advertised to look just like the real thing, didn’t, and as she rocked the silent thing back and forth, swaying, she shakily and softly drummed the melody her Harold made for her, five notes from the thumb to the pinky of her wedding-ringed right hand, three descending from right to left, on the synthetic flesh of the thing that looked similar—but not exactly, never exactly, never could be—to her deceased child, and hummed to her, expressionless and hoping that it would start crying again and show any signs of breathing, some bubbles at her tiny lips, and that it maybe, just maybe, would show some sign of bearing her daughter’s soul.

Over.