I Have Forgotten How to Be Sad

How it begins

Anya Fen listened to the old recording and knew it should make her sad. The knowledge remained as precise and useless as a weather report from another planet.

Her mother's voice filled the kitchen. Anya was seven in the recording, laughing because someone had dropped flour on the dog. Her mother laughed too, then said something too quietly for the microphone to catch.

Before the treatment, Anya could not listen past that moment. Now she heard every second and felt the smooth satisfaction of a problem solved. It frightened her more than the crying had.

Gabriel Pell arrived to tune the piano. He found her sitting beside the recorder with her shoes still on.

'I can come back.'

'No. Please make something sound wrong.'

He considered the request, then played a chord missing its middle note. The room seemed to lean toward the gap.

Anya had researched grief for fifteen years. She understood the speculative treatment's stated effects, signed its consent forms and volunteered because she believed relief mattered. She still believed that. The missing feeling had also taken away something no form had described.

Gabriel opened the piano. A photograph fell from behind the music rest. Her mother, young, holding Anya with the awkward seriousness of a person who had not yet learned what sort of parent she would be.

'You don't have to feel anything particular,' he said.

'I know.'

'Knowing isn't always permission.'

He adjusted a string. The missing note returned, not dramatic, just enough to let the chord become itself. Anya looked at the photograph and tried to identify what her calmness had failed to include.

On the recorder, her mother's quiet sentence played again. This time Gabriel heard it.

'What did she say?' Anya asked.

He stopped with one hand above the keys.

'She asked whether you wanted her to keep the mistake in.'