It must have been hell living all those years alone in that big house, especially with her bad eyes and her crippled legs. When they found her in the kitchen, she had an old music box– a real antique, they said– on her lap. It was open and the pink dancer was spinning round and round and it was playing a song nobody really remembers the name of.

Angie Rose, the music teacher at the school, can’t even tell for sure, but she thinks it must be something like Debussy or Ravel. When the municipal people were going through her belongings to auction them off, they didn’t find a single record or record player. Nobody thought much of it at first until the autopsy reports got back. That’s when everybody realized Mrs. Evans was deaf. There were lesions, decades old, in her ears. She probably hadn’t heard anything in fifty years.

Amelia Evans died holding an old music box she couldn’t hear, staring at a ballerina she couldn’t see.