# The Piano in the Basement

Nobody plays it anymore. The keys have yellowed past ivory into bone, and middle C sticks unless you press hard enough to mean it.

But it's still tuned. Every spring, a man comes with tools older than the instrument itself, and he makes it sing again for an audience of storage boxes and forgotten furniture. The family upstairs doesn't ask why. They just pay the invoice and let the tradition continue, inherited like the house, like the china they never use, like the obligations that come with being someone's descendants.

Once, the youngest daughter crept down at midnight. Played a scale, just to hear what the dark sounded like when interrupted. The notes rose through the floor, through the generations, through the accumulated silence of a family that communicates best when not speaking.

She closed the lid gently. Went back to bed. Told no one.

The piano keeps the secret. It's good at that. It's been holding the songs of dead people for a century. One more midnight scale is nothing.