I had a cracked tile by the balcony door that always clicked underfoot. You’d think I’d fix it, or slide a rug over it, but it sang like a hinge in a song I hadn’t finished. Every evening after classes at the conservatory, I stepped over it, flute case in hand, and leaned into the late sun slanting through the narrow street.

There was always music in the building, though not always mine.

The conservatory took up the ground floor and most of the second. Above that, they’d carved apartments from what once must have been offices or perhaps storage. My room had a window with a rusted balcony that opened right over Rua da Sé. I hadn’t meant to stay in that apartment long. But I didn’t leave.

The flower shop was there, across the way — not directly, but just enough to the left that I had to turn my head, which I always did. There were no signs, no glowing letters above the glass. Just flowers, packed shoulder to shoulder in mismatched pots and weathered crates. Sometimes someone chalked “blessings for the dead, half-price marigolds” on a board, and sometimes not.

I saw her the first day I moved in, bent over a row of gardenias with gloved hands. I’d already unpacked the flute. It had come in its own case, lined in blue velvet, too grand for what I could actually do with it. But I took it to the balcony that evening. I didn’t know why. Maybe I thought the sound would carry in a certain way. Maybe I just wanted someone to hear me.

She didn’t look up.

She was always there. Or nearly always. Dark curls pinned up with uneven bobby pins, sleeves rolled past her elbows, hands dipped in green buckets, tying stems with quick fingers.

Once, I said aloud — to myself — “She moves like Brigid at the hearth,” and then laughed at how ridiculous that sounded. I wasn’t a poet. I was barely a musician.

But I played for her. Every evening. Not loud — the flute doesn’t shout. I played because the quiet between buildings asked for it. Because I wanted her to look up.

And sometimes she did. Just a glance. Eyes lifting from a daisy she was pinning into cellophane. Once, when the wind caught her skirt and she steadied a vase with her hip, she caught me mid-phrase in Debussy’s Syrinx and tilted her head. Nothing more.

Then, the curtain. Always, that cursed curtain. Second floor. Right window. Just as she extended her arm toward the string to pull the awning down at closing, it would ripple—a man’s hand, drawn in one quick sweep. And then she was gone. I never saw his face.

“Maybe he’s her lover,” I muttered one night, propping my flute on the railing. “Or Hades, guarding the gate.”

I played Che farò senza Euridice that night. Too sentimental. But it felt right. I imagined her listening through closed windows—why not? It could’ve been possible. But the sound that really intrigued me wasn’t the song itself, one I’d known for far too long. It was the one passing between us, the sound of silence—the only kind possible between a musician and listener for as long as the performance lasts. The music spoke for both of us, but there was no real conversation between the two true protagonists, no words.

I didn’t know if she spoke English or Portuguese or something else entirely, but I imagined all sorts of things. That’s what silence does — it creates space, and if you’re not careful, you fill it with fictions.

I played. Always at dusk. I leaned against the balcony. The distance was too great. The sounds would scatter before they ever touched her. Yet I kept playing.

Then, Daphnis et Chloé. The composition steeped the nocturnal umbra, vested with an antediluvian saudade and the liminal, burnished fervor of the aestival air, dense with the torridity of summer’s zenith.

Each chord held its specific sonority, a poised mote against the stillness; each rapid volubility spanned the unseen interstice between us. In that shared, audient silence, I felt a bond form — an innate, tacit affinity, more potent than any words could create — with someone I had never spoken to.

Her shop was always dim, but in those moments, I could almost imagine her standing at the window, listening, her hands still in the act of arranging petals, pausing just to hear the flutter of sound that carried over the street.

Sometimes, I would close my eyes and think: maybe, just maybe, she could hear me. Maybe the music had a way of reaching her, even across the distance. I wasn’t sure what I believed anymore — whether it was the belief in her, in the music, or perhaps in the gods themselves. I thought of Orpheus, whose song could move the very stones of the underworld, or the gods of old, who held power in their hands like the air in my lungs.

Was this my own foolish hope? The music itself could feel like a prayer sometimes, like the very vibrations carried a blessing from forgotten gods, brushing against her skin like the wind.

I imagined the gods watching — Dionysus, mischievous and playful, Orpheus himself, perhaps, laughing at my audacity to hope for such a union. Or it could have been some other agency, a distant catalyst whose workings lay beyond my ken. Fate. Perhaps it didn’t matter, in the end. The act of playing — the act of calling out into the silence — was a belief in itself. And that was enough to keep me going.

On the balcony, with the wind pulling at the edges of my shirt, I played Orpheus’ Lament. The melody was full of empty spaces, a voice yearning to be heard, echoing in the dark like the cry of a lover lost in a world of shadows. “Che farò senza Euridice?” What shall I do without Eurydice? The words from the aria lingered in my mind even though I sang them silently.

I poured myself into it, my fingers moving over the keys, pushing air through the flute as if it could carry to her somehow. The music, played with such force, as if I could will the divine melody into her, carried all the sorrow of the world. I let the sound spill into the street, winding upwards toward her window.

And then, one evening, she appeared.

At first, I mistook it for a trick of the light, some idle reflection. But no, she was there. On the second floor, where I had seen her before, standing by the window with one hand resting on the sill. I could tell she was looking out at me, just as I had imagined her doing so many times.

I didn’t stop playing. The flute’s breath poured from my chest, pleading. Che farò senza Euridice again, though I wasn’t sure why. It was probably the only thing I could play that felt right. A tune meant for separation. A song meant to stretch between us.

Her form shifted slightly in the window. She had moved closer. The man who always closed the curtain—he wasn’t there tonight. It was just her, framed by the fractured light of the room, her silhouette soft against the fading sky.

I had stopped hoping for her to hear me, but it seemed that I couldn’t stop trying. I kept playing. I couldn’t help it. The music felt like a bridge.

For a long moment, she stood there. Her body swayed gently. A soft smile played across her lips. I kept playing, though now the notes were less measured. They spiraled, lifted, and spun through the air, filled with something frantic. My fingers were moving faster, eager for … a response? An answer?

But the answer never came.

I stopped, fingers resting on the keys, and watched her step back into the shop.

I stayed there, watching the flower shop. Then I turned, retreating inside, pulling the curtain across my own window.

The night passed in fragments. I sat by the frame, gazing out, waiting for the shop to open again, waiting for something to change. There might have been meaning in it after all, or it could have been nothing more than a story I’d told myself — a myth, a beautiful song without an end.

One afternoon, I made it to the shop’s door. Not to do anything dramatic — just to buy something. Peonies, I thought. But a handwritten sign hung askew in the pane:

Closed for plumbing repairs. We apologize for the inconvenience.

I stared through the glass. Boxes stacked near the till. A ladder leaned against a wall. No sign of her. A man in a navy shirt paced behind the counter, phone pressed to his jaw. I left.

Next time, a chalkboard read:

Free bouquets today only! Limit one per couple.

I don’t know what possessed me to try again. The place swarmed with people taking selfies, women holding roses while their partners clutched iced coffee. The line wrapped around the block. I didn’t even make it to the threshold.

“Maybe she saw me,” I told Leandro, as we returned late to Marcellus’s masterclass. Leandro, a colleague from the conservatory, gave me a look that said he wasn’t sure. We both shared the same late-night practice hours, but he played the violin, and I’d often find myself lost in the sound of his strings while I practiced my flute.

He didn’t look up. “She didn’t,” he said after a moment.

By the third attempt — when I spotted black ribbons tied to the shutters and funeral lilies lined across the shopfront like an offering — I stopped trying to guess.

“You’re cursed,” Leandro said, laughing lightly into his pastry. We sat outside the conservatory café, sipping lukewarm espresso. “Did you offend a minor god? Step on a crack?”

“I don’t believe in minor gods,” I muttered. “Only the good ones.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You mean the ones that favor musicians.”

I didn’t reply.

I began leaving offerings. A rose on the turned-off radiator, unmoved for months. The chill lost in the summer heat. A ribbon tied around my flute’s case. Not for her — not directly. I wasn’t that far gone. For Orpheus. For the ones who knew what it meant to sing toward silence.

Still, the shop remained off-limits. And the quiet between us never changed. It made everything feel a little haunted — like the music wasn’t just for her, but for something watching beyond her.

One night, I lit a candle by my window. The wax burned fast, shallow pool in a cracked dish. I unfolded the tiny copy of Orpheus and Eurydice I kept under my bed — the one from the used shop near the square with water damage and smudged Greek ink.

I’d always liked the myth. The first musician. The first failure. His voice opened the gates, but it couldn’t close the distance. He looked back. He lost her.

Then I whispered, “Help me find a way through. I ask not for love, but for direction.”

The dream came that night. If you can call it that.

I stood in the street, not playing. Just standing. The flower shop glowed, but not with electric light. Something golden, like dusk painted it from inside. A figure stepped out — tall, reed-thin, not entirely human. He didn’t have a face I could remember, but he had a flute, carved from something like bone. He pressed it into my hands and nodded toward the window.

Behind the glass: her. Watching.

Then the words: If you cannot cross the threshold, bring the threshold to you.

I woke with the melody from The Magic Flute already half formed in my hands. I knew what I’d do.

The street outside her shop wasn’t made for music. It was all tin drainpipes and uneven cobbles, scooters shrieking by, espresso spoons clattering on café saucers.

Two trucks had backed into the narrow road, engines grumbling under ribbons of exhaust. Crates spilled over with marigolds, poppies, wild mint, and stalks of fennel tied in bunches —solstice flowers for the festival.

A chalkboard leaned against the shop door, faintly blurred: Solstício de verão. The chalk ran just enough to suggest someone had written it in a hurry, or the sun had started to melt it back into pollen.

The men hauling the crates didn’t glance my way. I watched as they carried the color inside. The shop had vanished behind stacks of blooms and rolling trolleys. I could see her silhouette flit past the upper window, a flash of dark hair almost hidden by the festival banner that sagged across the iron balcony.

I stood there stupidly for a minute, flute case in hand, watching a man in linen set down a crate of solstice wreaths — woven circles of rosemary, oak leaves, and small pale daisies — next to the flower shop’s door.

Narcissus lined the frontage, a new addition. Persephone’s flower. I saw them. Pale and upright.

She was there, but unreachable. Again.

I stepped to the side, past the wreaths. The midsummer sun was already high, slanting just enough to catch on the brass trim of my flute case. I found a place just beside the shop, by the curb, partially in shadow. I took a breath. And waited for the silence that would make space for sound.

I murmured something under my breath — a fragment of a prayer. To Orpheus, to the moment, to whatever gods walked the streets of the city today in the scent of goldenrod, saturating the air like the promise of summer.

Let this be enough. Let her see me. Let the sound carry.

There, between two metal chairs, I stood, lifted the flute to my lips, and breathed in.

The notes shimmered.

The melody danced, slipped around ankles, caught on awnings, pulled heads from phones. Someone stopped. Then another. A child clutched their mother’s dress and pointed. A woman paused mid-step, her bouquet forgotten, tears catching on her lashes.

And then — then — the door opened.

She stepped out.

Same shirt, blue apron smudged with green. She hesitated, squinting against the sun. Looked toward the gathering. Looked at me.

For a moment, the melody nearly faltered. I pressed through the next passage — overture — not as Mozart intended, but as I could manage alone. It felt, briefly, like I had crossed the threshold, like Orpheus himself, drawing her into my world with the power of sound alone.

But then, my mood sank. The spell broke. She had come not for me, but for the music, for the fleeting beauty of the tones. Unlike me, who had come only for her, not for the crowd or the coins clinking in the street, but for a connection that seemed always just beyond reach.

She moved closer. Not like the others, who angled their phones or whispered.

And then — she signed.

Slow. Clear.

I can’t hear you.

Another pause.

But I see you.

A smile. A little unsure. She pointed toward my flute, then her own chest, then her eyes. I see you.

I lowered the flute. A breath caught in my throat. The silence after song — always the most honest part. I nodded. I didn’t know sign.

She traced her name in the air. Deliberate, looping letters.

M-E-L-I-N-A.

I shaped my own name with my lips.

“Elias.”

She nodded.

The vast conurbation thrummed at our back. Scooters still screeched. A dog barked at a pigeon. Somewhere, a church bell rang — it wasn’t neat, nor in tune, but the kind of sound that came whether you wanted it or not.

We stood in it. The sound of silence. Full, not empty.

[With a degree in economics and Japanese, Diana Parrilla creates game content on YouTube and social media under the handle buffyta17, and writes fiction published by Inkd Publishing, West Avenue, Murderous Ink Press, Black Hare Press, and others.]