She has no voice, not that it matters. No one stops to talk, not even the cheery old man who walks up and down the bridge on Sundays and sometimes drops a coin or two into the bucket at her feet. Sometimes she wonders if she's deluding herself, if her voice will manifest again one day when she actually has something to say—but failed attempts to greet passersby remind her of the gaping hole hidden away somewhere in her throat, and her hopes fall silent.

She has no name, either, and—unlike her voice—she doesn't know where it is. It probably escaped one day from the soundless prison in her throat; as she whispered pitches to the already-resonant air, it struggled through her precious flute and mingled with the train's thick whistle chorus that drifts between here and everywhere. She regrets that she could never give it a suitable home; the air space between two pairs of lips where names sometimes live is lost to her. Sometimes she hopes it will return, but she knows that everywhere is a lot larger than here. Her name is too small to find its way back by chance.

The girl with the stolen voice and the runaway name is scenery to most, and scenery is the best thing she can see herself being. She's been in the spotlight before; she had the fame and skill of a champion, once, of a region far grander and worthier than this one; she traveled to the land of the gods, once, and touched the sky with the palm of one hand; and she fell, once, upward, through butt and stone, below, through, clinging, screaming, losing—

"That's such a pretty color for a flute," remarks the first in a century, and the girl with the stolen voice screams. Silently. Her eyes show it. But she smiles and bows her head politely, and the girl's face swims absentmindedly into the pool of her memory. It drifts deep, through the shattering blue sound of both punishment and liberation, and settles somewhere between hazy images of jeweled plates and shadows for wings.

The girl with no voice exhales a puff of nothing through the azure walls of her flute, and its holy music binds (condemns?) her to the life she stole so long ago.