The Symphony

The screams echoed into the night, playing the symphony of the dead as Edith spun the queen chess piece around her fingers, watching the bobbing members of the orchestra sink beneath the freezing waves one by one.

“My god,” the man sitting next to her breathed as the unsinkable , the once stage of the people, dipped below the water line. And like that, it was gone - vanished like a magic trick. The man next to her began to shake, and Edith knew he was crying.

She thought she should cry to, though her role as an audience member, rather than part of the band, had been granted by sex, unlike the crier she sat next to. He stole his ticket, but she had won hers. And how rude would it be to cry over the music?

He deserved to cry, she thought, for taking the seat of someone else who wasn’t supposed to be playing tonight.

The queen nearly fell from her grip and she stopped spinning the chess piece, clamping her fist closed around the wooden idol. For a moment she imagined the wooden piece flipping free from her fingers and off the side of their small sliver of hope. It would sail toward the black ink, just like George had done. Only, the queen would float - it wouldn’t be lost in the waves. It would have no reason to join in the orchestra’s symphony.

“Is your life vest on secure?” a woman was moving through the small hope, checking the other passengers as if someone had made her the new captain. The old captain presumably was dead. Perhaps he was with George. The woman stopped in front of Edith. “You don’t have a life vest on?”

Edith looked down, as if the question surprised her, as if one could have just materialized around her thin frame since leaving the unsinkable. Without answering, Edith met the woman’s eyes.

“Where is your life vest?” the woman demanded.

Edith looked to the orchestra. “We should go back,” she said. “This boat has enough room for more people.”

That did the trick. The woman moved on from her as if she hadn’t said anything at all, checking the crying man’s vest before her voice melted into the rest of the song. No one wanted to help the orchestra’s symphony, they just wanted to sit and enjoy it. Grab your opera glasses and get a better look. One by one the people without vests went under just as their mother ship had done, following her lead into the womb of the sea.

“What do you have there?” the crying man asked, his cold hand brushing hers as he pointed to the queen.

“A reminder,” Edith answered as she watched a woman who had been trying to swim toward them finally fall into the womb.

“Of what?” the man asked.

Edith turned to look at him. “If you keep crying, your tears will give you hypothermia and you’ll die.” She turned back to the orchestra, listening for a solo instrument amongst the noise. The symphony was being played too well. All the parts blended into one.

“Why did you save that piece?” The man tried again.

Edith’s finger pressed against the nick in the figure's side. Unlike the crying man, a real man had thrown it, and put the nick in it. It had hit the ship’s window after missing her head. A window never meant to be an entryway. That’s what it became though. That’s what they all became. And now she was sitting here, not with him, but with his nick in her hand. “Why do you keep trying to talk to me?” she asked.

“I’d rather hear your voice then…” the man trailed off, looking down at his lap.

“Then the symphony? Why come to the orchestra if you don’t want to hear the music?” Edith looked to where the ship once was. Unsinkable. Why did she always have to be a part of proving people wrong?

For a moment, she thought she heard the solo her ears were trained to find, but just as quickly, it vanished back into the music.