It had taken the neighborhood two years before we figured out she whistled sea shanties.

  A group of us had huddled together after the town meeting, exchanging theories. An old man, a retired sailor who recently moved in, limped to our table and wheezed, “She’s whistling away sea shanties, people. I could recognize Leave her, Johnny from a mile away.”

  Most days, she sang from an assortment of sea shanties, and the old sailor hobbled out of his home to listen. The whistler jumped from one note to the next, her pursed lips a fine-tuned instrument. She would hop and skip as she whistled, like she was five and not a young woman.

  She wasn’t always a young woman, though. I have been here long enough to remember when her songs first arrived, when her family had first moved in. The then-child would soon attend the nearby middle school, the ‘joys’ of high school only a couple of years away. From that first blistering summer day, she greeted the rising sun with a song, and bid it farewell every evening.

  On one particular scorcher, ravens mocked the songbirds’ tweets, and the girl had whistled the same mockery back. The dark birds cawed, and she whistled back again, pitch perfect. From then on, the black birds shadowed the girl, pebbles and trinkets clutched in their beaks.

  When it thundered, she followed the beat of the crashing droplets with jazz. I’m ashamed to say, as a jazz addict, it took me months to recognize Fly Me To The Moon. Christmas songs lived on our streets at the first sign of frost and did not leave until the very last patch of ice had melted.

  Neighbors complained about the ‘constant’ noise. Too loud, they said. Annoying. “Can’t that girl keep that racket inside?” an older woman had grouched at one of the town meetings. Repeated the sentiment to anyone who’d listened.

  There was nothing anyone could do, though. For all her songs, she was respectful about it. She would quiet whenever she walked near someone, and never whistled before sunrise or after sunset. Every day, like clockwork.

  Silence suffocates the neighborhood now. No longer are we greeted by a cheerful woman’s pursed lips. Only the sun reluctantly warms us. The songbirds haven’t sung in months, and the ravens made themselves scarce as soon as the conspiracies realized their whistler was gone.

  Her house’s wildflowers crunched under the heavy footsteps of her grief-stricken family and consoling neighbors. Not even her clover, which had weathered the driest summers and sharpest winters under her hand, survived the melancholy.

  The whistler had a boyfriend. Something I had no clue about, but apparently everyone else did. The eldest women, the self-appointed godmothers of our neighborhood, hated him. Locked their doors and shut their blinds whenever he rolled up in his loud wannabe-muscle car, with its obnoxious flames and all.

  The older women told her again, and again, and again that he was no good. There was no amount of support and love she could give him which would turn him into a good person, a decent partner. She refused to leave, though. The whistler’s heart had sung love ballads at a handful of affectionate stares.

  She loved him enough to tolerate his temper, his random and alarming bouts of cold viciousness, his cynicism and ego, but not enough to say yes when he proposed. Tolerate, hope, and bear, but not say yes.

  The morning after her death, a crushing sense of wrong had gripped me. I downed my second cup of coffee when I finally realized what had sweat beading on my forehead, my hair standing on end, and goosebumps crawling up my arms.

  I couldn’t hear her whistle. So used was I to her tunes that the absence of them triggered my flight-or-flight, like when you walk through the woods and realize the birds are quiet. I turned on the news and read the bold white letters say, “YOUNG WOMAN MURDERED BY LOVER, JASON CHERICE. WITNESSES IN SHOCK.”

  He strangled her to death then and there, according to the news. Right on the beach, in front of God and everyone, and three fully grown men could not pry him off before the light left her eyes. Before her song left the world.

  Senseless. Needless. The realist part of my brain could not so much as spare me the comfort of believing her end was painless. A few bad choices and too much liquid courage in my youth gave me hands-on experience.

  What she must’ve felt held me hostage as I wept that night. Her lungs burned, ribs too tight. Her heart stumbled, stuttered, strained, then stopped. Fear paralyzed her as black edged into her vision like a wiggling parasite. A little voice in the back of her mind whispered, This is where you pray. Unlike my assailant, though, who had the decency to drop me to the floor when my lips turned blue, this beast only squeezed tighter.

  The police released the boyfriend’s mugshot a few days after, and his smirking face seared itself into my brain. His inhuman smug and cracked lips. Satisfaction had leaked out of his very pores, like killing someone who trusted you, loved you too much to fight back, was some kind of brag. His eyes burned with vindication, a soul too dark and twisted to see the light. If you threw him into the sun, he’d see a black hole.

  This woman, once a girl, now a corpse, was gone because rejection stings. The beast thought himself God, and to deny God was to accept damnation.

  They didn’t even say what her name was. They gave the man who murdered her the importance of a name.

  I stare at the television in my living room, not really watching, and nurse a half-empty whiskey bottle. It hurts too much to go outside when I know she isn’t out there. Never will be. Christmas has come and gone, and my heart squeezes when I remember how quiet the cold months were. No Deck The Halls or God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen slicing through the icy air. Only the sound of bare branches scratching along frosted window panes, and a lonesome raven’s mournful, confused cry.

  The kids don’t play outside anymore. No greetings pass between neighbors. The old woman, who complained so heartily about the whistler’s ‘racket,’ hasn’t shown her face at any of the town meetings, which are now as barren as the whistler’s front yard.

  Each barbeque. Each yard sale. Each town meeting we spent complaining about the whistler and what song she spared finite air for. None of us talked to her, too miffed by her noise, yet she became such an integral part of our routine. Christmas songs in winter, jazz during storms, and sea shanties every other day of the year. How many of us wake up, still waiting for her to greet a day that will never hold her again?

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I’ve boxed since my freshman year of high school after I nearly killed a senior. He stuck a spitty wad of gum in my hair and I made him choke on that gum and the lump of air in his throat. In her office, seated on a rickety plastic chair, the principal had given me two choices: figure out how to get ‘all that excess energy out’ or find another school.

  That morning, after I saw her face on the TV screen, gold glitter dusting her cheeks and flowers in her hair, I punched my old bag so hard that the fabric tore. Its sands spilled onto my garage floor, and I wished it was the insides of another.

  I don’t know her name, and the realization had punched me in the gut. Guilt wasted no time latching its hooks into me.

  I asked if anyone knew her name. The sailor, the old woman, a couple of neighborhood children. Anyone but her family. God, anyone but her heartsick family. They all shook their heads. Shamed tugged their lips into a frown and they shook their heads again. No. No one knew her name.

  When I got home that night, I sat at the top of my dark staircase, waiting for the farewell of our neighborhood siren to haunt the night air. A pathetic ghost begging for the attention of a phantom.

  She had filled the air with music. Performed through wind and rain, hail and snow, for years, and none of us knew her name, and I could not understand how that was possible. I know she wore yellow and green on warm days, and she covered herself in denim at the first cold front, but nothing else. None of us knew her favorite sea shanty, or if she had a favorite raven. Not even her favorite color.

  My heart chokes. I can never correct such a gruesome mistake. There’s no one to ask anymore, not unless the flowers growing on her grave can act as a can-on-a-string to her drab wooden home. The butterflies which flittered around her perfumed hair probably knew more about this woman than I ever will.

  Perfume… Yes, that’s right. She wore perfume.

  My eyes widen, and I launch myself out of the chair, alcohol weighing down every step. I talked to her only once, far too briefly, when we walked past each other and a wasp darted right at her. I had rushed to warn her about the little winged devil. The whistler brushed off my concerns with a small smile and let the fire-colored bug rest on her finger.

  “They like my perfume,” she had said, voice as high as her lowest whistled note. The wasp jumped from her finger to her gilded cheek. Bitter spit pooled in my mouth at the thought of getting stung there.

  It did not unsheathe its stinger, though. Nor did it tear into the soft skin of her cheek. It simply walked past her chocolate eyes. When it reached her hairline, it wiggled its thorax at a bright red flower clip and flew away. The young woman shrugged at my slackened expression and said, “They like coffee apparently.”

  I know that now. The whispering wind around her always carried the scent of vanilla, sugar, and coffee, and I hold such precious knowledge like a gift. I want to visit her family’s home and see if they can give me a bottle.

  I slash my hand through the air, destroying the thought. Her loved ones would sooner punch me in the face and slam the door than humor the nonsensical mourning of a stranger. I can already hear her older brother ask me what her name is. The sound of knuckles hitting teeth.

  The rustling leaves and sorrowful winds call to me, and, for the first time in months, I answer.

  It’s dark, this warm spring night, our small piece of the world shaking off the last breaths of winter. Humidity sticks my shirt to my skin, and I wipe the sweat stinging my eyes with the back of my wrist. Drunkenly stumbling, I go to my favorite spot on the porch, which is not the perfectly functional and cushioned chairs, but the top step. I slump onto it with a grunt.

  I put my head between my knees and gulp the humid air. The smell of roses is so thick, I taste it in the back of my mouth. Droopy eyes stare into the once-lush front yard across from mine, and the damp taste of death joins the roses.

  She cared for that yard like it was her baby. If she wasn’t whistling along the sidewalk, she was wrist deep in soil and clover, Santiano on her lips. Honeysuckle and marigolds used to dance on my tongue with the roses, but now only skeletal stems remain.

  Every month had reaped some bounty. Garlic bulbs as big as the sailor’s meaty hand, or chamomile bouquets with a jar of honey. I never greeted her with her name, yet she’d greet me with mine, a bundle of white flowers and honey in hand. Garlic and potatoes. Yarrow, dandelions, and clover buds. All the life people never bothered with because they were not as lush as roses, nor as fussy as tulips.

  Her lawn’s twin towering southern magnolias refuse to blossom with their bulbous white flowers. No wasp, bee, dragonfly, or June bug has ventured onto the dry clover. The yarrow has long since browned, curling in on itself as its life drains back into the stagnant soil. Meters of chamomile clusters are now piles of tinder, one good spark away from setting the whole place ablaze. A flick of lightning or a carelessly flung cigarette, and up goes her house and her yard. Her family and whatever is left of the whistling woman.

  I pat my pockets for a cig on reflex, though I quit years ago. I don’t have so much as a vape to poison myself with for comfort.

  Wind carries the sound of the old sailor’s rocking chair as it creaks. His grunt when he throws his worn body into it. A dog howls, joined by the yapping of Sarah’s Scottish terriers. Still, it’s quiet to me.

  “Hey,” I shout down the street, uncaring about the hour, if the hour is even late enough to be cared for. “Sir.”

  “Eh?” the older man shouts back. “What is it, son?”

  I lick my lips. “Your name. What’s your name?”

  … “Maurice, son.” I smile at the confusion in his voice. “Just call me Maur, though.”

  I nod and shout back, “Thank you, Maur.”

  The dogs stopped barking during our chat. The hush leaves rooms for the crickets and toads. It’s a dull song, nowhere near as lively as the whistler’s, and one I’ve heard a thousand times before, yet I find a new appreciation for it. The high notes of the crickets and the low rumbles of the toads create a harmony that weighs down my eyelids.

  Maur’s voice breaks the silence. He sings a tune under his breath, and the wind delivers it to me.

  “I thought I heard the old man say, ‘Leave her, Johnny. Leave her! Tomorrow ye will get yer pay, and it’s time for us to leave her.”

  “Leave her, Johnny. Leave her,” I whisper. A tickle near my eye startles me. A wasp, the color of dying embers, buzzes right at me. Jolting, I stomp down the urge to run as fast as my half-drunken legs can carry me, knowing that these things can fly faster than I can run.

  It darts closer. Its thorax thrums as the insect lands and inspects my pinky, then my ring finger. I can feel its antenna smelling me and I force my body to still. It settles on my hand, curious, and smells me more.

  I slowly turn my hand, and it crawls into my palm. “Oh, leave her, Johnny. Leave her. For the voyage is long, and the winds don’t blow, and it’s time… for us… to leave her.” Tears slide down my cheeks. When the wasp joins them, I don’t flinch. Tiny legs tickle the soft skin. The threat of a stinger glides across my purple eye bags. I don’t move. Don’t twitch.

  The wasp decides that this pathetic human is not worth the venom and flies away. I feel the displaced air cool my tears. It flies to the abandoned garden across the street and lands on a patch of dried clover. I miss when the clover was plush and green. The sweet smell of honeysuckle bushes. Choruses of curious ravens and jovial songbirds. I miss our whistler, who God put in the wrong body. One of God’s worst mistakes, not giving that woman wings.

  A low tune leaves my pursed lips. It cracks and shudders, not half as practiced as hers. The world doesn’t mind, though, as all sound is siphoned from the air. The sailor, dogs, toads, and crickets hush. Listen. A raven caws from a tree out of sight, and it sounds… relieved. Sad, but relieved.

  Moths flutter and dance to the broken song. Spring air wraps around me, chilly and pleasant, carrying the scent of moonless nights and old memories. I let the memories of her guide me.

  The whistler’s front yard strums brittle clover and jagged flower stems. It matches me note for note, regardless.

  Bluesky and thank her for bringing this story to life!

  tipping! Please drink some water, eat a vegetable, and rest well.

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